just north of the Pillar of Yunus, the three hundred and thirty-third year before the Incarnation, as related by the raven Pytho, to Apollo
I.
Orgulous is the voice of Wind, unheard by the air of Apellaiios, invulnerable to His voiced blows, as is the air everywhere. Rarefied by blood, inured to the barren cold and fallow mud. He bawls through the tall grasses of the rolling coastal plain, closeted by the eastern mountains and a western sea. He enunciates slowly, this Zephyrus, with increased volume, as if mocking the localized air as a foreigner, tickling the dumb verdure into hapless loquacity, countless blades slithering in an ecstasy of trembling restless motion… His voice, illuminated only by movement, shrouds itself from Helios retreating, invisible to the willy-nilly dreamless couchant. The young, old mortals who wakened in the small hours, to sleep, lying together now in amorphous heaps.
Unspoken, once hieratic banter rushes the low senseless verging trees, a roiling meaningless jumble, threading the shimmering undergrowth, anchoring mumbling Pinarian stones stopt with gore darkened earth—unbleached, maladjusted, demotic, framing aphonic bones, what once was flesh…. Mouthed by breathless lips, the cheerless speech of these speechless quickens the confounded higgledy-piggledys into a fresh trembling sibilance… Nonetheless, Achlys sheds her æternal mist over stargazed eyes, hereinafter like unrequited lovers, in tryst….
II.
Lowering, murexed clouds loiter menacingly, in all directions a vast rheumy phalanx. Purpling sarissas mass beneath ranks of indistinct conical Phrygian puffs, curving towards a single glinting Boetian helmet, flashing, a waxing Argead Sun… Roughly cowering blacked-out chariots ululate in the northern distance, mirroring the abandoned Achaemenid wicker below. Wicker-like too, a nebulous piebald enrobes the eastern mountains. Westward, the small tide coos into a livid slackening sea, whilst Corvus, my sister, indifferently waters the immobile lees.
Undaunted, the fair voice of our Wind holds forth to the mountain passes, from whence came the third Darius and his masses, to wait on the young scion of a murdered king, the third Alexander… His loping sentences run on like an hemerodrome, declaiming ingenuously the blustery oxidized recollections of the fallen, haunted, homed, erstwhile foe or friendless friend, swollen virgins without number, as in the Song of Songs…. Like burnt offerings of the kine, earning Thy Father’s love—that is better than wine.
III.
Wearied by endless, tendentious, toing and froing… one time Persian late Mede bygone Bactrian ex Egyptian once Thracian and erstwhile Greek sententiously align, a kinetic compromise, indubitably, of Temenid design… Then, echoed anachronistically, their vain anamnesis accompanies our celestial breeze impulsively, in a fluent, if tuneless, a cappella, à la manière d’une frise. Numberless as the grains of circumjacent sand, vermillion heaps of phthisical sputum, scented as if by the ungulates of Midian, steaming after the demulcent rain. Whilst proximate, the swaggering ruddy disembodied stuff would fain stream down the stony Pinarus, like Amanian snow melting towards Astraeus. Eventually transfigured, indistinct coagulated quondam mortal globs ebb into the Gulf of Issus hard by, retired into concentric faceless eddies, more green than grey, fading to black in the retreating day…
Pausing at His Father’s approach, our Zephyrus, son of twilight and the dawn, sniffs at Aether, the invincible, an Inhalation. There is within Him the whelming smell of salt, sharpened and pungent, bubbling, frothy like wild emergent yeast, fed by honeyed ichor… Nearby, on the sand, rotting iodized corpses of blackened seaweed stretch forward, into the retreating distance, a festering sore, hazed over by the gusty perfume of His snuffling voiceless voice, a pheromone, indifferent to the dumb and deafened air, the thickening smell of nascent excrescence, a ferric treacle of burgeoning obsolescence.
IV.
Unabated, rampant, the impetuous voice of our wind demurs. He waits. The West Wind waits his brother Eurus, who brought the locusts into Egypt and divided the great sea… He endures the heeding counterpoint of the carrion-eaters. The inevitable call of kettle to wake, pale fire glinting over a blackening lake…
Grievously, at last, a plague of flies feasts, darkening the earth and loitering, withal the beasts, the feral surfeit of the Canidae, the Hyenae, stripping the dead, defiling…. Only now is the voice of our Zephyrus softened, an indefectible heart, unhardened, unfed. Holding His breath, He waits a turn, His turn, to speak. A whilom obbligato muted, deferential, introspective, uncommonly meek.
Sr. Simplón believes that he was born, that he lived for a time and that he will ultimately cease to live. Although in relative terms, he has already done so. He passed in virtually the same instant he was born, as did you, if there is indeed any genuine existence apart from his mind’s entirely subjective belief in it. In any case, He hopes, perhaps posthumously, that you enjoy his work, thou infinitely subjective phantom among phantoms, whomever you may be.
Academy of the Heart And Mind 