when the leopard hid in the hellish green

AJW

BECAUSE WE ARE ALL ATTRACTED to a certain local atrocity, 

his mother looking down at something still and something falling, 

at something moving and then stilled, 

the old woman with the bandaged elbow who picks up tickets on the rampart telling the gargoyle what we should never forget up here four seconds above the cobbles, 

where the landscape is most spectacular and least plastic, 

where we lose ourselves on remodeled steps and grids and towers and gates and loopholes and spotlights and all the lying furniture, 

tourists turning to concrete, feeling the brain of their guts in their sweat and spit and the machine of the ear fraying from his mother’s scream, 

the last laugh holding his held delight and useful fools whispering to microphones, 

oh the pain in my head, 

and me watching because I am here to and because I start from the outside and move you to the centre. 

Moving past a child yelling at her grandmother as if her grandmother is to blame. Past a man kissing his wife on her chin as if kissing will help, as their baby arches her spine, insisting there is nothing to see. Past a teenage anorexic dissecting her fringe in the Picasso reflection of a stain-glazed gun loop. Away from the mother, away towards the man pinned to the ground, while people frame self-portraits and edit the spectacular unbreakable edges and quarrel about space, 

about time, 

and someone laughs because they know they should not, and a woman kisses the flag on her lapel and crosses herself twice, strolling to the spiral staircase as if what just happened did not, as if it has just started to hardly rain and she does not want her good shoes dampened nor her new blown-out billboard hairdo flattened, and there is something calmly pessimistic about her reaction. 

But most of you in this gory new evacuation have the optimistic crowd-glare of citizens in an accidental route march of innocents who never had to pay a spiv or psychopath to get on a holy rib with a loved one and a fly-paper passport, only to float too slowly away from a mob or a tale or a war or a book or a clockwork nagging terror, and most of you did not pretend to intervene either, 

to stop him doing that, 

and I understand, I do. 

Some of you will pretend you tried to intervene, now the chance to intervene is rain evaporating off a hot concrete playground. And some of you did intervene, you did. 

But the old sailor who could not see what was going on, although he tried to, now does not look back at the mother as he says it’s a cliché itjusthappenedtoofast. 

And I move him away from me too, old sailor in a white tracksuit with dirty feet and the odour of boiled eggs and library reading rooms. Nice, a young man jokes, tapping focus, 

zoom. 

And the Romans too must have been throwing future out over these waves of orange tile, tracing horizons like that with a finger.

And the Romans too, I think, like that young man, squeezed their European mountains between a thumb and a finger and then left dusty homesick fingerprints, fossil signatures, on all these rusting fig-tree leaves. The man pinned to the ground is neither moving nor speaking. I wait to make sure he gets arrested without being killed. My presence is enough.

Some of you stop to look down through the shitting-stone, down to the cobbles many human heights below.

We all looked down on ourselves in the mirror heaven and we all travelled the same idle road a moment before the man,

now unable to move,

tapped the mother on her right shoulder and then grabbed her left wrist with such professional agility.

Now in one of the remade courtyards down there a graduate with an acidic face and a Spanish guitar is singing a heartbreak tune. He can sing, but there is no suffering. With no strategic emotion, no plot to slay, he is merely putting the pieces where the pieces can go.

And the killer is silent about his innocence but there is no spirit,

there is only arrangement,

and accuracy,

and maybe all deliberate arrangements are heart-breaking like this, and maybe all walls are heart-breaking like that.

I saw the child in the moment she had to free the child as the universe sent them to different ends of,

I suppose,

itself.

Almost, he was,

moving and still,

not quite the blank page of future covered in bloody language, growing fingers here and then there, the sweat on his fingers ticklish and then dried, his eyes blinking and his wrapped legs kicking as someone jokes and someone laughs and the chimpanzee grabs for the branch which might save him from the cold forest ground, from the snake and the fox, and our eyes opened and closed as the child went and took with him the gentle correcting surprise we have when we see a new face, because he knew this was a game, and now witnesses are stepping like goats down the spiral stairs past the tourist information panels and I too will go down to the street. 

Our crowd, this crowd, has gyroscope hearts and new sweat on excited skin and asks itself how many seconds it took. Maybe four or maybe five and who knows unless you count and nobody knows how long it takes and nobody 

can take 

how long 

it 

takes. 

We congest ramparts and spiral stairs, counting time and children with numbers, with the reek of speed, the taste of material, the pace of distance, and there is something lusting about the pleasure some of you take from this, and maybe it comes from long ago, your pleasure. Maybe it comes from when you were moving and then still long ago before we had stories and walls like this. Maybe it comes from before we framed the view, before microchips and cables and satellites and corporations and parliaments and armies, when the leopard hid in the hellish green. Yes, when we were the same but different, with four chambers in our heart, 

and gravity in our blood, 

and the leopard hid in our hellish green 

Head erupts, spine unthreads, organs are invisibly amazed. 

Nothing was brittle about him until now, now stars are radiating and we are fixed in this, fixed in him as he fell, as he did not know what and he will not, 

yes, 

but his body knew 

it should not 

have been 

falling. 

His body 

understood

the rush of cooling air and the too-quick passing of objects and their odd movement, but he comprehensively did not watch the blurring we watched, the time we stilled.

He experienced the fall like a quick starvation but he did not know he was leaving any body behind. He did not feel what human ballast was failing him, does not know tomorrow afternoon, and his death is not complete, leaving too much behind. Waiting with you all in a crowd, I am careful to not appear to be careful, to look like you. We smell of peach-scented hair-conditioner, and inhaler tongues with mint, and lemon hotel laundry, and cafes blinded like chapels. The ordinary old men who do not use deodorant smell of ordinary old men who work in ordinary old vegetable gardens. Embarrassed lovers act as if what happened in their rented bed this morning did not happen. A suburban tour group keeps talking in an escalating plume of crossfire conversation which cannot conclude, whose argument stirred from its corner more than a thousand years ago. Then a bright woman fakes a selfie as if this moment is any fragile contest and the blue clotting labyrinth below in the humming shade of human centuries simply is not enough to just be in or not. Down the spiral stairs like a tourist I go, obeying gargoyle demands, going to the street to get the child before the stallholders or shoppers interfere too much.

Through the bars I see the old woman’s twig fingers scrabbling on the ground for unused tickets.

It is a day for souvenirs, for refunds.

It is a day for celebration, so the brass bands are horning out somewhere off on a breeze, warping that rasp until trumpets and snares are cannon smoke again, until all the extinct promises are resurrected. Until love is hidden in gifts and crammed into cakes and shown to us in a billion glassy icons, as we gasp and shout and argue and shove and skitter down the stairs, ignoring last year’s pomegranates detonated in the gutters, hoping that some comforting emotional antidote will catch our eye.

But there are only all these

strangers,

and the people you came here with, and the spiral staircase, and the rumour. 

The gargoyles have kept most of the crowd away from the child. 

He is warm when I pick him up. 

Warm and still. 

His eyes are closed. The wind moves his eyelashes. His fists are full of rosemary. His sandals are blue and scuffed. He smells of washing detergent and his mother’s cologne and chocolate and blood. The wind moves the hair on my head. 

His mother has her child’s distant and fading uric smell, his distant and fading salt skin and sugar milk, heavier than gravity, always on her and always fading, always there and always 

going. 

The gargoyles keep the mob off me with their batons and promises and then I am carrying the child. 

I shiver and then I do not. 

Looking down the road hill to the dock and beyond that to the clouded bay and the smeared mountains and the summer-dust on café table legs and the chain-sawed trees and the flagstone weeds and the gargoyles ordered to leave me alone, I think you all were born to be the pilgrims and martyrs and disciples and priests you have just become. 

I think you were waiting to unfurl from those medieval glass doorways, masked and coddled, actors born to record the fallen, the certain local atrocity, to hear the jangling fiddle of the festival final, to see but not see the smartly-dressed and familiar young man who carried the child away under a white blanket. 

And I think, carrying the child, I know music is children, but then music grows and weakens and falls away just like that looming noise, that looming music in dreams and the complaints of tourists still trapped on the wall up there, his mother still trapped up there, forever, even in the past before she existed, trapped, and moving and still and locked in recordable space. And yes, 

you were there when it happened, 

when that man tapped the mother on her right shoulder and then moved to her left side and grabbed the boy.

You were there when a long-held muscle released itself and clicked in the house of bones where you live and told you that what is happening cannot and you will be there when the ice-lake frowns,

and suffers,

and when sinuses unlock and you have to cry.

You will be there when the lens is a jigsaw of broken blood in the human eye and the orbits are out of line and the sky is grave.

When I carry the child to the hospital,

thinking,

off and on, here and there, almost, almost: he is not my child, he was.

Look:

down the hills you can see the city’s noontide filth is hoar frost glowing like wood glows.

Today I have to write my report and tomorrow I do not want to hear about the paid-off doubters, the generous despairing, the lonely leaders, the lost following soldiers, the excuse-sellers, the moral parasites, the smell of irises, the mercenaries who see a side to choose and the opportunists who see a cause; yes, this is how you go when you go in the dark for the window latch when you can’t find your breath in the morning. This is the beat wing in your dusk nostalgic. Because especially if it expands our suffering horizon, we are all attracted to a certain local atrocity.

And when I look at him now, in my arms, I see the child in his mother’s expressions, I do.

I see the amused tolerance, the generous amusement, the impatient humour, the stubborn tolerance, the noisy covered page of next week.

Here in my arms is the love of generosity and the loneliness of love happening in a universe of to and fro. Here it is:

look.

Moments before, moments before. Look,

look.

His muscles at her breast this morning in our room and his forehead on her forehead and he can still move then and look at her sideways, his laugh on the in-breath, conquering our world, he knows he is. 

Look, today is the first morning of October in my village and you can hear the punctuation of gunfire because the brave ones are in the fields, shooting songbirds.