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Superbia: A Triumph with No Train
They've loosed the Opposites who throng the middle air, and Antichrist. He phoned last night, pretending to be you. He begged to know, How much I wanted him? What I wanted (or wanted him) to do? What could I say except, Thy Will? What promise but, Time's Fealty? He claimed to have been dreaming of me, his whisper private, registers awry. I counselled him to run from dreams that made our yearning's truitless outcomes false, the pain therein too true. We spoke for hours in the snowy light of four o'clock. Come hither, love, I moaned, to me. Were you asleep, he asked, in bed, my dear? Oh did I waken you? I said, disconsolate, Can it be you, my real, my mythical gold magus, rugged knight? If true, why call in secret of a sudden? Why, lounging in a public room with grey pianos? . . . what is wrong with you?- although I knew that I was wrong with him, the love was missing me anew- but with the sagesse of the centuries he told me, For each act there is an onset, for each sin, the first descent. I faltered: I believed in adoration not in evil exercise, the cloudy lark. This tone was weird, he hadn't breathed my given name, nor said a simple thing particular to what we lug around in memory for years (venetian blinds, wistaria, the sparrow on the sill) without which we are fluent but unreal. But he remembered nothing wholly trivial. When out of character he launched into another aching round of tenderness which sounded read from some bad deed- because at last his droning voice, the sexual monotony, was unsavory, unchoice-I cried, Who are you finally? He paused, Dear, how drunk and stupid do you think I am? and disappeared. It was, I fear, an excellent wrong number. He marked it in his book.