The Memory Machine
 

She painted.  Constructing orders to impose rationale, an electron.  Place at any time.  Measuring instruments, potentiality : a dog, floor, neurotransmitter—"Platonic phantom zones?" He asked like a Russian novelist, thin and spidery.  Books were where she watched him, a Rimbaud cutting himself in the blue-grey light, season curled up at the start of another autumn.  He claimed responsibility for the French language.  It could yank them together.

            They woke bed-tattered, marooned.  To put out, they plied open copies for her 'education' : Baudelaire, du Bouchet.  She was en avance, if late for Romantics.  Arguing past Italian of Proust, throwing the essential that is an ancient order on a chaotic cannot-be-said-to-until-we-cause-it exist in probability waves.  Ion channels, electrocution, eyes like a fern, blues.  He looked Silver Aged, fingers fragmented.  Grew an angry community.

            She watched, in for another, the session du rattrapage.  Glassy lights at anchor, there, in the air out at sea, fixing, arranging, deepening.  Theirs was a talent for weeding from the inessential  human, longing, a world.  But just to occupy a certain distance, to collide with their states of pure dual concepts : tree, quark, time, what exists in some wire.  "Tell me," she said, "why light, as in toward night, masters emblazoned zones, enchanting theorists?  Did the singing end?  In the town?  Why did fishing boats descend, tilting, portioned on fiery poles?"  She was an artist, after all, high on wine, fine lingering over Collobert's Dire II which only she'd read.

            Poetry, preferring the brass roll-over.  Asking him about Franco-American politics, if he'd read DuBellay or wanted to throw the towel around.  He flopped over in his sleeping, in red, straight from the woven stories.  Whisky eyelids on his own in Paris, twisted, he was an unsung Apollo, bald and coming to.  Settled by the Seine, drowsing as shears, raised, clattered close by, she was on an Arabian carpet.  The role of Demeter, of Heraclitus, of Emily Dickinson, he said, was taken.