Geisblatt

The sun came up, the birds whistled, the honeysuckle bloomed – the honeysuckle bloomed with such unbounded fervor it obliterated the far-off cries . . . but maybe we should have paid heed to how the swarming gold brought on a kind of delirium, as if the gold were not innumerable blooms commingling, but clouds of those  long-legged needling insects, which are, it is true, indescribably beautiful, but deadly nonetheless, and more deadly en masse, inducing a kind of sleeping sickness, a kind of wasting sickness that renders one incapable of rising from bed, or rising clearly into a single thought . . . maybe we should have noticed that the honeysuckle blossoms taken one by one are not the same as the blossoms yoked together, yoked, the blooms are gold as bouillon, gold as the sun, while the single blossom, on the bush or on the vine – bush or vine, or even small tree, the honeysuckle being, as it were, a creature of multiple natures, as if possessed by many demons, sometimes mounding, sometimes swooning, sometimes thrusting its arms straight up – the single blossom is a stringy affair, a piece of pronged flesh, of ruinous color, fermented yellow, and inverted like a divining rod, pointing straight down, yes, a beneficent instrument nailing the exact watery spot, this spot, and this spot, and this – but less like that, like a tool of divination, than like a man forcibly turned upside down, his arms splayed, as Peter’s arms were splayed, his feet bound, the bush snagged all over with little Peters, a bush of shrunken martyrs, a gaseous lit ball turning in the air like a Catherine Wheel, a thing I have never seen, and therefore should not speak of, some gold confounding horror or blessing, made now, in this time, this fateful place, into no more than a party favor, a tree of poppets, the crowning curiosity of some flamboyant festival, designed – while the city burns – to distract the king.