Wax cascades down the slender contours of dusk while the flicker of the solar-candle shudders erratically against the breeze of wayward time snaking its desolating tendrils through the arrowslit spaces between castled months, weeks, days — teasing warm torch-tongues into voluminous billows of steam, condensation, smoke, and subtle implications of cooling plasma in elusive firefly-glows snuffed — more than phosphene hallucination yet less than visible light flicks about the edges of the celebrants' sight. Night is an acolyte for the passions of wakefulness, and cicadas resonate along the columns of her solemn sanctuary with brazen praise of her rites of extinguishment.

From the relative safety of his exhaustion José attends to this and other metaphors. On the cusp of recognizable awareness his fingers loosen and slip from the grained arms of an oaken chair. His head nods, an adagio metronome. The tropical air diffuses his hovel with the scent of lime leaves, overripe papaya, and summer's slow egress. A lonely hearth dwindles into coals with occasional tired spurts of light that send plumes of greenwood smoke up the winding chimney. Somewhere in the walls lingers the aromas of the same foods cooked day after day multiplied — walls the color of rice. All this he sees without seeing with the immovable eyes of the habitual, laser-pressed into his conscience.

In the sphere of his half-asleep vision a young woman appears. She is facing sideways from José's perspective and gazes into a regal mirror whose handle is embellished by multicolored gems and turns this way and that in silent assesment. Her black-opal hair glints along with eyes of petrified mahogany and obsidian from some unseen source of luminance. The mirror is perpendicular to José's sight such that his spirit cranes its neck in curiosity. A ringing of celestial chimes is implied rather than heard outright — sonic apparitions dancing about the dream's periphery like dark tines of winged crystal — comets orbiting a black hole and burning out with quiet aquamarine glory.

She turns with a swish of beige garments to face away from him and the mirror's face becomes visible. In the place of her own reflection, perhaps flanked by his own, he sees but two aspects of himself — as an infant, and in elder decrepitude beyond his present years. The plane of the mirror expands to swallow him and his own countenance looms massive; hydracious with ever-increasing proliferation of self in sepia array. He sighs heavily and stirs in his chair, which banishes the scene and replaces it with murmuring darkness. It is late evening. The day's work is done. She is gone. Years have erased her. His mind registers staccato these obvious truths — haggard truths, austere as desert crags stretching into the yawning abyss of an unreachable sky. Day's candle is spent.

Shadowy figures can be heard to rustle in the distance with clink of ceramics and soapsmell and quiet singing or perhaps musical whispering that harmonizes with the tones of the cicada's plaintive cries. A sudden light gust of evening wind couriers conflicting aromas of decay and greenery and comestibles from the kitchen, gossiping about the movements of folksong to follow. In a moment of feverish dualistic lucidity José believes himself to be the source of the music as well as the expectant audience rapt with gleeful and temporary escapism. The environmental sounds of his dwelling and beyond are as the mutterings of so many envious loiterers assembled outside the stately halls of his performance. As the eye dulls, so sharpens the ear is thought and sung in emphatic aria.

With appreciative whistles and smattering of lowpassed applause life pours its scalding paraffin into his dimming portals at the conclusion of the concert and seals them hermetically, the excess running down and down and down, dripping from his earlobes yet cooling too rapidly to entirely fall to the straw-strewn floor, sculpting stalactites and wild fingers of wax frozen into caricatures of yearning, as if reaching out for the embrace of some lasting beauty capable of consoling and brightening and redeeming a heartbeat grown timid and cold.

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words and images by @d-pend
created for HIVE on August 5, 2020.

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