I want to lean against a tree (a willow, bright and pale, and a boy with the sun in his hair?) and wait for madness and death, pretty sleek hounds worrying my meaty bones between them, gnawing the marrow and howling at the tree-roots. I care for Nothing. Indeed I tend it like a favored rose, nuzzled and cupped a motherly hand around its dark petals, breathed the sharp incense of its exhalations and coaxed them skyward with the ministrations of a patient monk, gardening into eternity with a luminous rake. I pulled out the green shoots of Purpose and Center, held off the marauding winds and ate their fruits, juice dripping from my chin. And now I have lost my charming grail, the woolen Nothingness that warmed me so well.

Am I green now, malachite and woven leaves over rounded shoulders and unpierced heels because of life or death? Because tendrils of red-fruit vines loved my skin, because the wide, furry leaves of violets and spears of rosemary are infatuated with my hair and my knee-caps? Or because mold and decay have dressed me in their ball gown with its plunging neckline, clad my feet in algae-slippers and circled my neck in grave-grass like a string of pearls? I could not say, I could not say. I am so tired, I do not care. And he cannot make me, the golden Beast with stiletto eyes, this little homunculus dogging my steps, snapping at my heels, vomiting words from his long-toothed mouth, vomiting truisms and riddles like tubercular phlegm-blood. He cannot make me, he cannot make me. I am too full of the fat black-palmed baby of my Death to allow him within me, I am too near the coughing morning of its birth. Its teeth join the needles of the Compass, snagging on my womb.

I am within my verdant body as it is within the Labyrinth. We find our Way. The sylph that is "I" is vanishing slowly, a daguerreotype dissolving under a spill of phosphor, image of eyes like stone wells seeping from the page. My body will remain, and the Compass within, magnetized, aborted daughter, but I will be eaten at last by the Labyrinth in a triumphant swallow-I will be a high Wall or a fair-thighed fountain. I will be remade into the flat expanse of the Road, my pointing arm extending into geometric perfection towards the horizon.

And the golden golem Monkey will keep swinging and hooing with his iconic smile, as content to preside over my dissolution as my baptism. As long as he can anoint my colored forehead with oil and announce me to the invisible multitude, corpse or Queen, it matters not. He hates a poor, doomed toy in the desert because it showed me what he would not, because it did not incline its head humbly toward his paw. I hurl my bitterness at his chest like a pistol shot at dawn. Pace off ten steps and fire true.

Ezekiel, Ezekiel, what do you see in the sky? A burning woman, a bullet fired from the mouth of a star, streaming green fire into the sucking earth.

"Darlinggreen," came his rasping voice like a silver spade in the soil, "You don't mean that. Hoo."

22.

Oh, I don't mean anything.

Whether you are here or not matters less than nothing to me. Sun-creature, I never asked you to come. You attach to my flank like a lamprey and want me to love the slow drain of my blood from the wound. Leave me to the copper bit and the foaming mouth, the pulverized teeth and the jaw of frayed wire. Leave me to drown in the rice-fields, when I have become blue again they will eat pearly slivers from the delicate dish of my mouth. Leave me to go mad alone. It is such a private thing.

"I know you are glad of me, it matters nothing what you say," The Monkey patted my bent head and I simply breathed. There was nothing else my body could manage. Under the curtain of my agate hair I could smell a strangeness growing like a bladed weed, sharp and thick, sweat and smoking bones. Ezekiel tugged on my glowing limbs.

"Visitor," he murmured.

Through strands and curls like living vines, through my heaving breaths ragged and strangled, I saw now a massive Bear, thickly-furred and broad-headed, lying on his side with a great sucking wound in his flank. He whimpered and bellowed at turns, black blood seeping onto the papery earth. The Monkey scampered up onto the mountain of his hip, examining the gash.

"It has always been like that," the Bear moaned. "It never heals. I have tried poultices of laurel and banana, honeybees' wings and birch bark, bird-marrow and Wall-dust. Nothing helps. It laughs at me, with it bloody lips. But I have come to love it, now. It is warm and bright and pretty. It never fails me. Would you like to come and touch it?"

I said nothing, moved not an inch. The Monkey looked at me expectantly.

"If I put my hands on him," I whispered, "he will only die like the rest."

"You touch me, beloved Darlinggreen, and I am not dead," Ezekiel crowed softly.

"Yes, see? Perhaps not, perhaps not, girl," the mournful Bear brightened hopefully. "Come closer. I am very beautiful reflected in your skin." His wound did reflect black and red on my thighs, pulsing like a womb, open and quivering as if to speak. He stared at himself reflected and refracted in me, preening. I did not move, frozen by a manic disgust.

"Don't be afraid. If you are very, very good, you could have a wound, too. I would even administer it myself. My teeth are the color of the stars, aesthetically perfect. Orthodontia is so expensive. But see the results! Wouldn't you like to have them in your nice green flesh? Be sweet to me and I will make you beautiful, paint your belly with blood." He struggled to rise and come near me, but I backed away as best as my weak leafbody could manage, bile rising in me like the tide. The Monkey had also clambered off, and returned to me, protective and proprietary, grimacing at the beast. It kept on its imploring way: "Don't run away. You haven't seen the pointillist masterpieces of my intestinal tract, the glory of my bruises, the majesty of my swollen tongue! You are very ugly now, girl, with no breaks in your body. All revolting solidity. Come, come, I will make you splendid, seraphic, gloriana in the highest! I will make you the Queen of Capillaries, Empress of Bones! Don't you want to be beautiful? I will love you forever, I will write masterpieces on your flesh!" I began to cry through my suffocation, drawing dagger-breath, loathing his nearness, the warmth of his mewling breath.

"Come closer, I cannot see myself in your mirrorbody any longer. You are too far off. I am being very generous. It is not polite to refuse."

I broke and ran, stumbling and weeping. The Monkey sprinted after me, trying to keep up.

"Come back! It is useless to run, the Door is on your heels! One way or another, you will be like me, and bleed! We will all be beautiful before dawn!" His howls echoed after us, choking my poor neck.

But he was right, I could hear it now, clanging copper pots in my skull- (-nam vos mutastis et illas-) Latinate clams clattering in the water, their vulgate symphony of clicking nails and meaningless morse code, which translated reads as a meaningless clam-tongue, pink and meaty. The Door-tongue, the Hinge-dialect.

I cannot run far enough, ever and ever.

The sea takes back its stones. My limbs crumble. There is black mud under my nails, secret and ashamed. Such a private place I inhabit, with no Rosetta Stone to help you make sense of it, of my ceilings and windows. I never asked for comprehension.

Mask yourself, Ezekiel, with that knowing look, and pretend you can read the scroll. Pretend you know what we are doing. What do you see in the sky? You cannot say because you do not see. I with my irisless eyes swallow the vaulted air under an eyelid. You see nothing. You would sell my bones for katana hilts in some furtive bazaar, my eyes for jewels in heraldic shields, my ears for pincushions, ninepence each. you would hawk my green brocade skin for upholstery, my knees for inkwells, my hair for quills, my lips for slide rules, my breasts for goblets. Abandon me to a thousand hungry Beasts, partitioned and packaged, given away like a bride, devoured and burrowed-within, until I am no more.

(-In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora-) But the language of the Doors clangs in my swollen head like a busy dockside, I can feel it behind us, the black circle, divining our tracks with a velvet nose. Is it past the Board in the desert now? Has it come past the coffin-body of the Queen? Its strange trilled consonants move over me like diamondback snakes, the rhythmic phrases like the charmer's straw basket in the musky market, sidewinding somewhere in our shadow. With each pianowire strangle of sentence, a new lacerating chord is strummed in my thick-pooled brain, with each bevelled vowel, brightened under a glass cutter's knife, finds its mark and pierces me like a gold-fletched arrow, and the Door turns towards the church-bell tone of word striking flesh. In this way I can feel it drawing closer, the heat of its black body like a secret sun.

(-torpor gravis occupat artus: mollia cinguntur tenui praecordia libro-) Oh, it bears down like a woman giving birth, the pressing, all those massive hands on me, pushing down into the swallowing earth! And among those thousandthousand hands can I not detect a bull's solid amber hooves? Can I not see ivory horns tossing above me, tips gilded with hemlock? The Minotaur at last, the monstrum lurking, the monster-that-is-not, hunting with powerful thighs my steps like crocus shoots in the spring, the Center of the Labyrinth that I know cannot be stealing along the Road, stalking me as though that Center were I. We circle each other, a fleshy yinyang covered in blood and dust and sapphires crushed like blueberries, seeking each other, spiraling like sumo wrestlers, stamping our fat feet in the sacred salt. And when one of us is perished, gored through like a potter's wet vase, will not that crusted salt be found on our howling mouth?

(-pes modo tam velox pigris radicibus haeret-) Black eyed Bull behind me, lowing at the moon, fatal light flickering on his gold nose-ring, his blood shouting with the nearness of our meeting. As though that Center were I, as though I were what he sought, my presence in his belly the very completion of his bovine existence. As though it were not I that sought him, sought the terrible Center of death, as though I were not the Seeker-After, as though I were not aware of his breath smelling of sour mash and clay kilns, as though I were fleeing the inky ripple of muscle and not waiting for his milky teeth on my breast.

(-in frondem crines, in ramos bracchia crescunt-) And still this hypnotic chanting in the confessional of my ear, the hissing syllables wreathed in smoky incense, the intimacy of his rust-red tongue lapping at my calves, a lover's searching fingers grasping for me in the dark. These savage incantations meant to bind me still as nightwater or to warn? He is so close now, the wild smell of his mouth is so near. Perhaps I will lay down on this Road, covered in soft leaves how like a bed, perhaps I will lay down and let him slam shut over me, his Bull's mouth clamp down at last on my emerald humanflesh. Perhaps I will not fight. Perhaps I would be more beautiful Devoured. Perhaps victory means collapsing in mid-stride, knowing the precise moment to give in. It is the fight which comes at the end of a Quest, is it not? Even a Quest-which-is-not. If I do not fight, there is no Quest. Perhaps then I will not. The Compass beats a steady time, a sparrow-waltz, ticking towards the north of my glacial eyes. It wants us Devoured, within that meaty belly; Compass-child Within me Within the Bull-Door, all of us together like a Russian doll.

(-ora cacumen habet; remanet nitor unus in illa-) Come then, poor Beast, I am not afraid. You must admit I was a challenge; I have eluded you for such a long time. You do not need to ensorcell me with these murmured verses, black and red. I am still already, soft and quiet as a hedgerow in infinite fields like skies, dotted with lambs as with stars. I will sit and wait, draped in green, cypress-candle, palms resting on my knees in fertile quiescence. If I am yours, you are mine, wheelswithinwheels, and we will gobble each other up as though we were hook-nosed witches feasting on the plump calves of naughty children, gleefully sucking delicate bones and our long, greasy fingers.

I collapsed and knew nothing but a long expanse of blackness.

23.

Fat raindrops like children's hands slap my face.

I rose cork-like into watchfulness. I could hear the slip-slush-thud of his hooves, of his sliding threshold still gritty with desert sand. He is just behind us, close now, our faithful and patient hunter never daring to disappoint. The Monkey tastes the rain with a long, cicada-seeking tongue.

"It's coming. It's here. Did the Door and swifter than I. Are you wakeful? Will you keep running?"

"He. He is coming," I murmured, swaying slightly.

"He, then. I am sorry for what I have not told you. Hoo, Darlinggreen, I am sorry. Get up, now, my dear, there is further to go. He is coming." Ezekiel stroked my olive hand and coaxed gently.

"Sooner or later, there must be a Door, there must be a Minotaur, even if there is not. I choose this Door, and no other. So I win. I will lay down at his threshold. What is eaten also eats. If I choose him, I will never be caught. I will win the Game. It will stop."

The Monkey shook his coppery head. "I will go with you, you know. I will always go with you, at your side, my Darlinggreen. Hoo." His gaze was loving and soft and forgiving as a glove sewn of feathers.

We sat for a time, listening for his approach and combing each other, my fingers twined in his fur and his rubbing my cypress-skin like oiled cloth.

"I do not know," he admitted, "what it will lead to. This is our first capture, the gaining of a Third. It is something new, for the first time in alltime, something new. But it is also older than all. It may take us to the Angel and her white lips, but it may not."

"I know."

"I am quite sure you do not. Hoo."

Silence. The sky overhead was a profound blue, blue as once I was, the cobalt flesh of longago, perhaps not so longago, but I could not say. I was melting, and I cannot say anything. I have come to this, I accept.

And then he comes over the horizon like a black moon, simply, soundlessly, dark as a pupil, gliding gracefully towards our little tableau, knowing that he no longer needs to conceal his movements. It is an elegant entrance, without trumpets or heraldry. The silver Bull's head knocker, a tarnished and terrible sky-gray, leers, diamonds dripping like saliva from his great teeth. He is so beautiful, coming towards me, coming towards us, slightly ajar as though his mouth were open in anticipation, the eyes of the Minotaur as blank and irisless as mine. My handsome Death, gargantuan, profound, and I am proud of it. I am its green-veiled bride, reclined and waiting.

The Monkey looks at me with warm eyes, squeezing my hand. But I am not afraid. It is leaning over us now, a devouring eclipse, breathing heavily and watching to see if we will run. I laugh softly, a glutted and velveteen chuckle. I am stretched beneath him, body curved into a crescent moon, with the Monkey nestled in the swerve of my waist like a glinting jewel. I can feel the Minotaur's mouth on me, his muscled arms gathering me towards his inevitable throat/threshold, the beaten earth littered with bones at the Center-which-is-a-lie, the dry fires of his digestion, furnace leaping towards me, to conflagrate and Devour my limbs in a rush of fire and slamming wood. How tender Death and the Monster can be, if you do not fight. I hold open my arms in second position, remembered from some mirrored room impossibly longago, to take him in and tear into his flesh as he tears into mine.

As the great black Door slams shut, he breaths a sigh of relief and release, a hot rush of that fermentfire air as he rasps his words in a rush, orgasmic larynx shredded by my jade nails as we fall, downdowndowndowndown.

" -hanc quoque Phoebus amat. Carissima! Ederis!"

24.

Rain of rice-clouds as we pass through him.

The thick throat full of bats and chewed rope flies by, and it is not so much down as through. Through the twisted body of the Minotaur, skating on bulbous intestines and pancreatic oil-paints, slicing his flesh with katana-limbs as I go, Devouring what flanks and flesh-handfuls I can seize, savoring the smoky meat, full of fennel and scorched crow's wings, his black blood dripping from my willow-chin as mine did from the Angel's. I enjoy now the biting and tasting as she did, the cello-bow slide of flesh into my belly. It is Power. With each sink of my teeth into him, his teeth into me, I hear him hiss like a kettle, the low comfort-hoo of the Monkey at my side, and my own triumphant wolf-cub yelps. What a lovely little concerto we make, the three of us in the dark. But as it is begun I can see that I was mistaken.

This is not the important thing, the passingthrough, the Devouring. My white-armed Death is not comprised of this sooty bullbody. There are many Detours. After all, something lies ever on the far side of any Door. And I could see it as soon as (it snapped at her, did the Door, and she fell in. Downdowndowndowndown-) we were inside, lying like a hearth and waiting. What lies inside a Door? What do you see in the sky? Only Another and Another and Another, a Door toleading within the Door fromleading. Doorswithindoors unto the end of the world, the disappointing climax of entrance, knowing that there is always one more, always another Wall, another step, another bridge across the doom of ages.

The second Door glows red as from a forge, a dull and angry light illuminating the muscled walls like a manuscript. It beats inevitable like a deer-hide drum in the distance. Thuhthumpthuhthumpthuhthump. We might as well be patient. Thump.

25.

Such a simple thing, opening a Door.

And stepping through, such an accustomed sequence of muscles and fingerbowl-joints; habitual, thoughtless, even. As though from a lustral basin, I sprinkle sacred drops of the Minotaur's spinal fluid on my brow as we exit his Doorbody. (Have I done this before? Am I doing it right?) Anointed one am I. Dark to light we move, from the museum-arches of black bone to a dusty cloud of subtle gold, as though the wind had swallowed the last possible ray of saffron sun from a dying sky and choked on its beams, coughing out a cigar-puff of topaz-kindling into the little room where we stood suddenly, having stepped through a dilapidated closet Door, draped in rags.

The Monkey climbed cheerfully up my treebody and perched like a parrot on my shoulder, looping the long noose of his tail around my neck, a pretty tableau of gold against green. It took some time for our eyes to adjust, like waking up, peering and hazing. If I had had pupils they would have been struggling valiantly for just the right aperture to take in the little hut where we found ourselves safe.

It was her scream that brought me into focus, instantly aware of the new Walls, knotted shelves sagging with thick-bound books, the forked red of the fire in her hearth, flames feasting on the crisp pages of still other volumes, inexplicably interdicted and condemned to the stake. Tall, slender jars like sentinel herons, bundles of dried branches and herbs hanging like a tangle of roots from the ceiling, scenting the room with an unpleasant odor of rotted wood and rosemary. Thick brown pelts covered the floor, and in the corner nearest the fire sat a woman curled into a rough-hewn oak chair far too large for her frail frame, dwarfed by the high warped back, feeding another book to the fire. All this I took in like a breath, lined with the ragged razor of her voice screaming high, tearing, hawk-like.

The scream penetrated my body, coiling like an eel around the Compass within, spinning the needles, a twisting ribbon of tongue roiling through my ravaged flesh. Her so-human voice scored me like a whip, this realwoman, the first I had seen, without wings, without glass skin, just an old woman crumpled into her last chair, wrinkled and dog-eared, her house full of strange beasts.

Of course, it was not the same for her. I was not human any longer, my lithe serpentbody green as grave-grass, long arms like birch saplings, lips like anemones. And my terrible eyes, almond-shaped emptiness, plain green stones set in my chameleon-face. How awful I must have seemed to her, how grotesque, with my smooth-furred macaque brushing his tail over my collarbone. I emerge Monstrous from the Monster, my skin the dragon-flesh of nightmares.

And so she screamed. "Stay Away, Away! Don't touch me!" She fox-howled and spat, shaking as though possessed. Her long white hair trembled like an avalanche, black eyes deep as river-rocks. I reached out a hand to calm her, and she scrambled backwards in her huge chair, screeching louder than before.

"No! Don't come near me, you can't!" I recoiled from her, and whispered when I spoke. "I won't hurt you, I promise. I'm not anything bad."

"No, no, girl, I am," she hissed like the pop of a black book-spine on the fire. "Very bad, indeed. I'm sick, infected. If you touch me, you'll be sick, too, and then what will you do, hmm? Don't breathe near me, don't touch anything, just leave before you swallow my infection like a frosted cake. This is a plague house. Didn't you see the black curtains, the sign on the Door? Please go." She seemed to shrink into her chair, nearly weeping. I was stunned, transfixed by her hate and fear like sour black bread crumbling on my tongue. The Monkey picked at a knot in his fur.

"You're fine. I would smell it if you were really ill. Hoo. Sick smells awful," he said matter-of-factly. "No, no, I am Deathly Ill, I am Afflicted, I know it," she cried quickly, her piccolo voice. The wretched woman was shaking as though her bones were rattlesnakes' tails. Her breath came in great, tattered rasps, thin chest heaving. I walked across the small room and knelt beside the poor crone, leaning my emerald head on her knee, gazing up at her weathered face.

"Please don't," she whimpered, "you'll die, I swear."

"It's alright, grandmother, it's alright. I'm sick, too. Mad and Dying." She flinched at the contact of my cheek and her bony knee.

"Is that why you're green?" The woman seemed interested by the possibility of a new disease.

"I think so." I answered softly. The fire crackled behind us as she considered us. "Well, if you're dying anyway, I suppose it doesn't matter," she brightened, "But keep your pretty pet away, he'll catch it for sure." The Monkey hopped gracefully up onto the lid of one of the oblong jars and proceeded to groom himself contentedly.

"I shall keep my distance if you like. But you're not sick at all." He paused in mid-comb. "Darlinggreen, she isn't, I'm sure. But I can smell something else here, like mint in a rose garden-" He trailed off cryptically, smirking as he returned to his glossy pelt.

The crone chose another fat book off her shelves and began to rip the pages into long strips, stuffing them into her mouth until her eyes watered and her cheeks bulged. Painfully, methodically, she chewed and chewed, until she could swallow the pulpy mass of parchment. Black ink stained her lips and fingers. When she had eaten all she could, she threw the book-carcass onto the fire and reached up to seize another.

"What are you doing?" My serpentmouth hung open in confusion.

"I'm dying. Why should they live? I'm hungry. Why should they be full? Now they are inside me, and I can store up words like a camel stores water. I shall never run out." She patted her stomach, which was indeed swollen to motherly proportions. "Whereas you, my green-skinned dear, I think will be entirely spent before the end. Dry as a sand-beetle." She chortled throatily and returned to her books.

"Why do you think you are dying? You have lived a long time," I asked sleepily, warmed by the fire.

"I do not think, child. I know." She ignored Ezekiel's loud, derisive hoo and continued. "I have already killed a boy, already infected him and he is dead, moldering in the ground."

With this, the old woman began her story, told in a familiar sing-song rhythm, for she had told this tale to herself a thousand times before in her small dark hours, like a rosary. I reclined against her, my back to the rosy heat, listening to the vibrations of her reedy voice through the skin of her leg.

26.

"I came of age during the plague years.

Every night I would stand in front of my great carved mirror and raise my arm over my head, grip my shoulder lightly. I pressed oystershell fingernails into my skin, feeling for the embryonic lumps, the soon-to-be purple buboes I was certain were seething just beneath the vanilla smoothness, a smoothness waiting to play me false and erupt. I turned my head, feeling the night wind on my neck, blowing in through the frosted window. In those days the night sky seemed to me to be the great raised arm of some dark woman, her armpit and the first curve of her black breast, and the stars glowered, punctured lesions of plague ruining her perfect flesh, the great red autumn moon a blood-filled contusion.

I used to sit on the fountain-rim with a young boy in the Square, under the pale-cheeked fountain-statue of a beautiful selkie-woman with water flowing over her classical face, half born from her shimmering seal skin, her long hair like the very kelp-braided sea, her hands peeling the length of grey sheathing from her marble thighs. Her eyes stared blank and unblinking, (just like yours, my girl,) perfect eyebrows carved delicately. I sat on the rim of her fountain with a boy with orange-blossom eyes, a willowy creature without a name, and his skin smelled like a wheatfield strewn with the sweetness of fallen apples. He was blonde like the silken wheat and blonde like the yellow apples and blonde like the ocean sand. The boy had slender legs and a fine, aquiline nose, and all in all recalled a deer paused below a cypress tree, tensed in the moment just before bounding away.

When no one was looking I would lift my thin blouse, exposing in a blush-inducing flash the light brown of my girlish nipple, and ask him with a quavering voice whether he saw anything. His dark eyes flickered over me, appraising. Sometimes he pushed his fingers into my flesh painfully, sometimes he would just glance and assure me I was not sick. But every time he would smile and softly say, just as your pet says: "You are fine. You will live forever."

I used to run away to a wide field full of long grass and dense hedgerows. Around my pale toes the soil was black and wet, sodden with March rain, rich and velvety, oozing under my heels, swelling beneath my arches. I was transported by the chocolate soil, its sinuous sheen. Crocuses pointed upwards all around like candles with young green leaves, unopened purples and whites. I would run far from the willow-framed square and its sorrowing fountain, far from myself, and pause there in the mud and silver-green grasses like Eve below the Tree.

I ran to expel the scream that roiled and churned inside me, the cry that threatened to rip out of my larynx and tear my bones. In those days I was a scream embodied, saliva and tears pouring from my shaking mouth into the earth. I did not yet know the color of apples or Indian serpents, only the tightness of quavering pink lungs, uninfected lungs, plump and blushing organs clear of any blemish in their polished interior.

Against a great gnarled oak tree, feeling the texture of its trunk like a second spine, I sat cross-legged in the late afternoons, roots extending down into rain-soaked deepnesses. Into the sky-mosaics of pearl and dove and dusky ash and cream-tipped waves of pussy willow softness I stared, tremulous with the fear that the color would never change, never shift or contort, searching for the black line of a bird to break the endless expanse, as though the breath of my soul depended on the shattering of the sky. I waited in my own incubatory warmth no less than the crocuses and dormant tulips, thick with the desire for change, restless beneath the unvaried veil of cloud, trying to move the long strands of cirrus-mist with the sheer kinetic force of my need.

The boy sat beside me, clasping my small hand in his small hand. His face was half-lit by the clouds, gentleness of elephant skin light playing on his cheekbones, so high and noble, the arches of medieval buttresses. I remember him always in profile, a dark-browed angel, the glint of quartz deposits in his marble skin, gazing steadily at the horizon as though the line of his olive-eyed gaze could penetrate the secrets that lay along the linear flow of sky.

I suppose I loved him, though he never asked me to search his body for lesions. I cannot even recall how many days we spent under the water-shadows of the fountain, in the grass-pillows of the field, though they seemed then and still seem innumerable. The coughing and retching of the world dissolved into the wind. But the examinations of flesh and sinew continued separate from the taut-skinned drums of pounding plague.