The Beginning

She came from the city. She sold flowers on the corner, from her father's garden. Her father was a preacher, and had raised her alone. Her mother had died when she was two, no lasting memories. A vague glowing, from her earliest days.

She stood on the corner. The traffic, erasing her, was like a great segmented beast, or the cars and trucks were like giant sandgrains or tumbleweeds skidding over the pale street around her and staining her dress.

A man on the train, avoiding the gendarmes -- just in case -- bumped into her as she was making her way to district 9. He had just been passing through the city on his way to where he had heard one could get the gems he knew merchants would pay attention to, for once. Empty plastic pill bottles in his leather aviator's jacket, he counted himself lucky; perfect, in fact; self-contained, no external baggage. All he had to worry him, really, was this horde of thoughts, one might say his past, like automated shopping carts wandering a snowy parking lot; like the twisting metal thighs of a great dragon, which brought to mind the stars that night above the mountain, the constellations like nothing he had ever seen before -- on this other side of the planet -- while staying in a house at the foot of the mountain above that faraway valley city; or the flickering screen of the adventures in the internet cafes -- the children calling out to one another by writing slang pejoratives while wielding swords of ice and fire and flying over magenta cloudscapes, scorning the adulthood earth; or these thoughts that brought him in his body through many corridors past men, drunk in the afternoon, ladies selling oranges, girls selling flowers -- and O, good God -- that's her -- his fountain of youth -- thoughts all suddenly present, childlike.

"Jewelette Westland" -- was her real name, but people poked fun, and anyway she always thought there were far prettier names, so she chose "Maryanne Flyship" instead, and confused or bewildered people, especially men, with it, introducing herself. However, when that man, strange man, in the flying jacket on the train, asked her for her name, she found herself saying the old name again, as if he was someone who would understand, or as if he were an old friend or member of the family. This, of course, alarmed her and caused her to immediately distance herself in turn, feeling close like this to a complete stranger, and only when he got off with her at her stop did she deem it allowable, if not necessary, to give him a second look and reconsider the possibility for openness. In the meantime, they were together regarding the passing empty fields and the houses and forests, flickering in the window -- and she half-listened, humming and nodding, to his yarn about coming halfway across this "pendulous globe" -- such was the way he talked -- jsut to grab hold of some jade, so he could get some more money, just enough, he said, to not go home.

"Where's home?" he asked, continuing the conversation of his own accord -- "Wherever the heart is, they say" -- he said -- "But sociogeographically, you could say I'm from New York." Then she had to speak (he seemed, by his tone, asking her now, sorry ahead of time for making her do so, again making it feel as if he did know her after all, and her reticent nature) and informed him of her being born in this city, though her parents had been American. Born in this city, raised in this city, living now in this city, selling flowers -- and even told him of her father's churchyard, the garden, even, hinting, by her tone, at her own boredom. She was nearly as natural and fluent in English as he, having not only her father but her books always, but still she couldn't quite follow him, as he digressed, reacting, philosophizing about the metaphysical relations between religion and gardening, but she didn't have to worry about replying, as they were already leaving the train together, an unspoken decision -- she accepting the idea that he would follow her off, even though they both knew he had much farther to travel. After all, a man with money, she mused to herself, a real man, flesh and blood, was far superior to these text-monsters she confronted in her night-work, as an internet sex-worker, in the basement, in the bedroom of her childhood.

So they joined together the flowing flood of this busy part of the city, as he kept up his useless chatter -- a tall bold man, sure of the world and of his place in it, it seemed -- though as she gave him that second look there was, if you looked closely, a kind of a hesitance, a giddy fear, even, somewhere inside or behind those dark green eyes -- like a fluttering of the wings of a startled bird at the back of a forest -- and but she didn't let the observation stay in her mind for more than a moment -- let it slide past, as she led them, with her silent, listening -- listening and yet confused body -- through a sidestreet where smoked poured from an outdoor stove where two men were making bread, down another smaller street adjoining it, to the churchyard, where in the melting snow a little chapel and a garden glowed in the streetlight, and a room glowed behind a window.

He knew he could not have been here before, but when he shook hands with her father -- at the threshold, a small stooped man with eyes blooming out of thick glasses -- and was invited inside, so boisterously, kindly, all the while being warned of the coming storm, "good thing you came here when you did," -- and sitting in his small study in armchairs by a fire -- he saw in the man something of his dear, long-departed Uncle George, a scholar and misfit, who always reminded him he didn't have to be like his father the businessman, or his grandfather the war-hero -- which is what, if not totally then certainly largely, inspired him to become a traveler in the first place, years ago. From time to time, when the preacher looked to the window, or when he got up, three different times, to refill their teacups, he looked at her -- her eyes glowing with the faint snowy light in the city, and with their interior fire.

Based on the above, ...
written excavations





Darius the Great proclaimed himself victorious in all battles during the
period of upheaval, attributing his success to the "grace of Ahura Mazda".

Experience the mirth and magic along the sweeping coastal cliffs, over
the verdant rolling hills and among the ruins of ancient castles. Come
create some family legends of your own! 




That time when the field in the corner
of the eye trembled
in the room, when your moving,
washing dishes, moved it
and you made of it a monstrous man --
coming down the hall --
that and when the city in the glass,
jutting back, and
over trees, speckled with dirty stars --
seemed a
boldened roll of shore,
of its stones -- as if the
giant with his hard
time in the beginning, lapsing
here and there into fields,
left of himself his
shoulders of stone, and allowed
that his head could
stay a sky dream, when the whole
big storied fragment,
coming bounding from the darkened
living room into the
kitchen with your quiet clatter
of the waterfall over
plates -- were you stranded on that shore
inept with fear -- as
the Proto-Roman-Germanic Washington King
came armored
in a terror of freeways, chest mail a freezer
door, his eyes a glare of ATM goggles,
hands the glowing jaws of ovens of chains
of popular restaurants -- announcing
in a garbled computer tongue the laws
to the letter, and announces his hunger
-- eats your refrigerator -- "the cow has been buried" --
then as you read in the science lounge --
when all of this shit was going down
-- you remember the water your silent
witness, a gaze in secret, gaping,
hidden multicolored strands vanishing
down the hole -- I bet you didn't know
the whole big show was tilting back to
dawn and thus self-destruction -- and that
you would open your eyes again -- "Do
you live in the North or in the South?" --
on the other side of the library windows,
perhaps the beast on the edge of night was
beyond caring about -- being a shadow.
But, being a shadow,
part of the general framework. Hills in Turkey.