Wild nights in the city and a door that opens inward only. Young man on a street corner in front of a golden brazier, a crowd of masked revelers passing behind him. The sickle in his right hand is obsidian and sharp, sharp; he holds the pouch of his testicles in his left hand. His eyes are bright and god-touched; his robe flaps open, heavy with the the blood running down his thighs. A half-dressed Amazon watches from an upper balcony, her arms crossed over her scarred chest. Her face tells us nothing of what she thinks: a little stern, perhaps a little wistful. She watches through the lens of memory.

The two of them represent initiation and commitment. In their dark or reversed aspect, decisions rushed into without heed for the consequences. In either case, dedication to some higher power or cause: gods of earth and sky, military service. The sacrifice of the body and the self to the group. Undertone of selfishness, not selflessness; they have achieved their own apotheosis by severing themselves from biological history. They are gloriously sterile branches, that blossom once in riotous beauty and then are seen no more.

by Stephen Cole

Sunday.

The Lion has a great passion for women. The Lion is a bleeding heart — wrapped in thorns, pierced through, engulfed in flames. Great jaws closing on firm, succulent breasts and thighs. The Lion is a war hero, finely decorated, much respected and little loved. The Lion is a great soldier and murderer, and these his victims: taste, humility, transvestites, thieves, mothers. He tears his chest open around the flower of his sentiment and wallows in his own depravity.

Mud.

The Lion falls from grace, forever and always. He is always out of bounds. He is a convenient monster. He is the terror of the suppressed, the endless fury of the normal against the freak, the outsider, the outcast. The Lion is made to be punished, redeemed, punished again.

And his name?

A wild figure defending society. Military victory. Stone aping flesh, red as the blood that flecks his lips, red as the mulberry, red as the night.

for my mother on her birthday

It might be many things; good, bad, indifferent. On the one side, Shangri-La. On the other, Saint Mary-in-the-Woods. Between them, what? The library, the endless library. The patient, hopeless scritch-scratch of the scriptorium, monks dissolute and rowdy with their fingers in the dikes of illiteracy. A canticle for many people — Leibowitz no less than others.

Because it is not enough to collect knowledge. The monks of the library are more than librarians, and less: more, because their efforts are greater; less, because their libraries are smaller, their readers (of necessity) fewer.

Think of those monks! Think of smutty illustrations wedged into elaborate capitals, words copied at rote without comprehension (yes! for who could read?) endless glosses on a rigorous and defined canon. Thus, hopeful; each gain as lightweight as parchment, as massy as tomes.

And in despair? In despair, they blunt their pens and shatter their inkwells. They build dungeons, hoard wealth. In their corruption they stretch leathery wings against the sky, dig adamant claws into the befouled treasure of nations, become, not the canny bootleggers of culture but hoarders, hipsters, gatekeepers of a gate that swings one way only.

by Stephen Cole

We are always at a distance. Far off, past shoreline, past waves, past everything, a rocky shore; unknown, unmarked, hunkered down just over the horizon. The tower dominates. Five pennons snap and curl away from the setting sun. The tower rises, white and tapering, from colonnaded base to colonnaded top. We are hidden in the shadows of the arches.

How sharp the light! How stark these shadows. We are spies on this barren island: we watch. We listen to foreign words, dream-tongues, shutter-snap of state secrets and betrayal. They are met in the sunlight, the pair of them, oblique, unilluminated; their shadows stretch along the hard-packed dirt and their faces are obstinate and shadowed. The light is flat, harsh and unhelpful; we see nothing useful. The tower vibrates with whiteness. The red jewel of the roof mocks us. How clearly we see it, but not what we have been sent to see.

We watch, but do not approach. We are exiles, outsiders, isolates, as close to the scene as yesterday and as ineffably apart. We conspire with ourselves, against ourselves. We are at war with society. We are spies, perverts, murderers and journalists, frozen in this eternal regard.

The sun sets; night descends. We cross the courtyard, empty now, and place our foot upon the hidden stair. The tower waits for our unclosing eyes.

World girdling serpent, Jormugand is both the extent of the word and the limit of it, the envenomed paling between what is knowable and what is not.

We pass over his obscure birth, his unsightly mother, his horrendous siblings. Into the water sinks Jormugand, down past the kingdoms of the sea, past the dark cold where Llyr the Ever-Moving keeps endless patrol, down to bedrock and the massed weight of the world-river Ocean.

Moon pulls on Jormugand, now this side, now that. The belt of his body tightens on the waist of the world.

His body, his blood, his bones and his breath are rich with poison. His jaws are locked on the food of his tail; serpent without beginning, without end, the 1 and the 0 both. Thus: contradiction. Marriage of opposites. Though his life is poison, his death spells the end of all things.

This image: Brave, foolish Thor, laughing, casts the ox head over the side of his boat. Always hungry Jormugand seizes upon this rare morsel, this singular feast. Up he rises, too soon, swaying, the hooded head of the ocean rising, rising, rising, spraying poison and confusion into the sky he has seen but once.