ARIZONA

A desert-scape; unbroken sand; sand lifeless; skin creeping
up to knees
Chest backsides shoulders; headless though, hence
uncommunicative
Just like the world – a part, part of the whole; sand open to
an undivided sky,
By tree or fowl unshaded, but for a human shadow a frame
wide enough . . .  

Suddenly, something I related to before my eyes; two snakes,
entangled figures of eight,
Both creatures after all with heads, and therefore somewhat
more communicative than sand;
Like a mirage of animates they looked in the impassive
oneness of the desert
Dying they too like me against eternity as it were and
incorruption.

Longer the one and more robust and faster, surely the
master of the other
That passively endured a prolonged martyrdom by teeth and
tail
Just like a slave shrivelling up under his master’s whip,
Just like a Jew resigned to the savagery of a vibrant glittering
Nazi.

Equally glittering, that snake exuded too some sense of
racial superiority
Over a subjugated being, writhing, bereft of will, unable to
resist
Or even to escape, left to the mercy of a bully with old
scores to settle
Or simply exploiting his strength for domination and
enjoyment.

The brood of different mother-snakes, and from afar
dispatched as if by them
To this convergence, to this spot on earth, to re-enact once
more the supreme drama
With both sharing the leads – wrong-doer and wronged, killer
and victim –  
Under the rules of tragedy, their disentanglement was now
no longer possible.  

And in the lifeless sand, they were to me flesh of my flesh,
and I felt torn
In two, convict as well as hangman, equally hating both, and
with such loathing
For any living flesh on earth that eats grows propagates and
dies
That gradually I was led away from pulsing life into this
desert here.  

I scanned the unbroken sand around with urgency,
yet failed to find
One single stone to hit the common foe and target
they embodied
Wreak vengeance on that flesh as it profaned for me
the pure infinite field of Nothingness
– By representing something – thus yet again degrading it
to theatre of life.

And ever since, I have been left on ecstasy, (hallucinating
rather
From my prolonged exposure to this desert here), eyes fixed
in dismay on that scene
That loomed larger and larger with time, and was growing
already dreamlike unassailable,
Whereas I stay small in my thwarted aggression,
– without even a stone in my hand.

ARIZONA