|
Having sent the lethal contract to avenge his ward’s
betrayal, her own computer used to issue the fierce reprisal (power henceforth
cut, generators demolished, battery packs confiscated), Sheik Hadithah haunts the
abandoned Palace like a dispossessed phantom. His authority, overthrown by
forces loyal to the Prince, resounds through empty rooms and unattended corridors, echoing
ineffectually, un-abetted by support-staff disbanded and gone with his enemies.
Left alone in the Himalayan outpost’s utter isolation, winter’s early onset a
harbinger of despair, the Royal Family’s Head accepts his downfall stoically.
It is time.
Snow, behaving
much like hail, its tiny flakes hard pellets that accumulate on the pathways,
plazas, and porticos
The body signals
what consciousness would deny;
is swept into hoary shadows by a pitiless wind,
that We are
mortal.
numbing to the
senses, chilling to the marrow, insidious to the welfare of every warm-blooded
creature
Notwithstanding
notions to the contrary,
be it antelope goat or bharal, be it yak or hispid hare;
bodies old like
mine are obliged to decompose.
the Palace
loses heat as a
corpse gives up its ghost.
Life brooks no
remedy.
While the
Sheik, in search of shelter, braves the out-of-doors
again, trails his white burnoose from Nana’s to the Prince’s private quarters,
Life, in point
of fact, abjures all cures save one.
shuffling toward his nephew’s hidebound den.
Knowing this,
resisting faith and fakirs, myths and old wives’ tales,
is the single greatest
source of Mankind’s power;
Once there, fumbling with a
match to ignite pine-needle kindling, laying on some logs in the
gaping hearth,
which few
exert.
he settles into
the throne-like chair in which Nana curled of late
Pursuing whims,
the madding crowd diverts, distracts, deludes its raw intelligence
and gazes at the flames as
might some Seer...
thereby
abdicating that which is Our right—
under the
corresponding scrutiny of his
brother-in-two-dimension,
the few of Us who see,
whose portrait,
dimly lit by the crackling fire below, flickers with unsettling if irregular
definition...
the Brotherhood
Eye not blinded by belief in Souls Everlasting.
watching, it
would seem, for a symptom of
remorse...
Death, as
punctuation, is not a colon; it is a period.
detecting, it
would appear, no such mawkish sentiment...
Every sentence
lived is a sentence framed to die—exceptions none—conclusions come to,
rueing less his
brother’s than his son’s
assorted crimes; the Prince un-shepherded, parentless, his uncle a corrupting influence, banished to licentiousness in a
decadent far-flung setting,
if unburdened
by ridiculous expectations,
unrestrained by
scruples, morally out of touch, discipline non-compulsory,
will not
mystify, justify, or terrify.
allowed to let libido conspire with a
grisly urge
Each man’s end,
met Eye to Eye, is simply each man's ceasing,
inherited,
truth to tell, from
his epicurean father,
sight with
insight vanished,
whose obsession
was his love for all things
bound by skin,
in an
existential blink.
a collector, unlike the
Sheik—who slumps in the leather seat, and undisturbed by his silent sibling, dies.
|
