"The Road" List 1

It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

The road was empty. Below in the little valley the still gray serpentine of a river. Motionless and precise.

Then they sat in the floor decanting them of their dregs one by one, leaving the bottles to stand upside down draining into a pan until at the end they had almost a half quart of motor oil.

The lamp in the rocks on the side of the hill was little more than a mote of light and after a while they walked back.

The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void.

They bore on south in the days and weeks to follow. Solitary and dogged.

They were days fording that cauterized terrain.

Lying there in the dark with the uncanny taste of a peach from some phantom orchard fading in his mouth.

People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides.

People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides.

They stood side by side calling to each other over the din.

Old stories of courage and justice as he remembered them until the boy was asleep in his blankets and then he stoked the fire and lay down warm and full and listened to the low thunder of the falls beyond them in that dark and threadbare wood.

The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose.

They crossed a river by a concrete bridge where skeins of ash and slurry moved slowly in the current.

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself.

All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain.

He woke coughing and walked out so as not to wake the child. Following a stone wall in the dark, wrapped in his blanket, kneeling in the ashes like a penitent.

Always so deliberate, hardly surprised by the most outlandish advents.

He sat there cowled in the blanket.

The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves.

Shapes of dried blood in the stubble grass and gray coils of viscera where the slain had been field-dressed and hauled away.

Runic slogans, creeds misspelled.

The phalanx following carried spears or lances tasseled with ribbons, the long blades hammered out of trucksprings in some crude forge up-country.

Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each.

He held the boy and told him it would be all right and that it would stop soon and after a while it did. The dull bedlam dying in the distance.

The chary dawn, the cold illucid world.

Down there in the darkness was a cistern filled with water so sweet that he could smell it.

Then they set out upon the road again, slumped and cowled and shivering in their rags like mendicant friars sent forth to find their keep.

The billboards had been whited out with thin coats of paint in order to write on them and through the paint could be seen a pale palimpsest of advertisements for goods which no longer existed.

They scrabbled through the charred ruins of houses they would not have entered before.

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable.

He pulled the wick out of the bottle and poured the bottle about half full, old straight weight oil thick and gelid with the cold and a long time pouring.

He took a piece of flint from his pocket and got the pair of pliers and struck the flint against the serrated jaw.

The primers would probably fit if he could get them out without ruining them.

They ate a sumptuous meal by candlelight.

He thought that they’d been crouching by the side of his cot as he slept and then had skulked away on his awakening.

Sketched upon the pall of soot downstream the outline of a burnt city like a black paper scrim.

They bivouacked in the woods much nearer to the road than he would have liked.

They were crossing the broad coastal plain where the secular winds drove them in howling clouds of ash to find shelter where they could.

Dark water in the roadside ditch. Sucking out of an iron culvert into a pool.