The haggard sun dragged across the cerulean. The ancients called it a chariot wheel. Helios, all-seeing and fiery. The spectrographists say it is an engine running on gas. Noble. Fused atomic. The bright thumbprint of some power dropped upon a dark futile envelope, center of an anonymous circus. This day, it was spiteful and long with the hours and decrying man his comfort. A manifest heat, felt and seen and heard.
Into this hot approximant came the father. He was among others and his own but between them could no difference be scrutinized. Such was as true for the cosmetic of their garments as was for their bleak unknowable hearts.
The father carried with him his station and served out his patience as if to belie his terrible ecstasy. And when the father stood before the coach, he delivered unto him the babe and muttered, Deus vult. Deus vult. Low and jolting. Deus vult.
The coach smiled. He placed his upturned hands beneath the babe, and the great man examined it as if to put down its likeness in some journal prepared for extinction. The babe’s puss was an apricot of folds. Its twitches attuned, as all youths, to some agitator unobserved in nature and its hipbones and shoulders seemed belonging to unlike bodies entire. Its toes little more than imagined, so small were their circumferences. The babe’s fingers the meat of spider legs.
What dispensation obtainable, the coach said, is relative to desire. And none present could tell if the coach meant this as directive or question. Nor if the words were said for his own hearing.
Into each man, the coach continued, yes, even myself, yes, even the largest of you, is but a needle of violence. The elevated, the lucky few, may believe this hard metallic precision drawn out of them but it remains. Truth cannot be separated from the earth no more than stone. One by its scarcity. The other, plentitude. Both necessary.
The coach looked over his charges and the babe was aloft. Look with what sacrament even this archimandrite must begin. Origins cannot define. What do we know of the Anasazi that is not drawn from their earth, loosed like the ribbons of a bow? To the man who can match his authority to his yearning awaits the obeisance of all the universe. I will never sleep, said the coach, and I will never die.
With this the coach uncapped his black Sharpie Fine Point and upon the babe he placed his mark.
Roll Tide.
