The Autobiography of Red Read Online Free PDF
Author: Anne Carson
listens
to the blank space where
his consciousness is, moving towards her. Lava can move as slow as
nine hours per inch.
Color and fluidity vary with its temperature from dark red and hard
(below 1,800 degrees centigrade)
to brilliant yellow and completely fluid (above 1,950 degrees centigrade).
She wonders if
he is listening too. The cruel thing is, she falls asleep listening.
XIII. SOMNAMBULA
Click here for original version
Geryon awoke too fast and felt his box contract.
————
Hot pressure morning. Houseful of tumbling humans and their languages.
Where am I?
Voices from somewhere. He made his way thickly downstairs
and through the house
to the back porch, huge and shadowy as a stage facing onto brilliant day.
Geryon squinted.
Grass swam towards him and away. Joyous small companies of insects
with double-decker wings
like fighter planes were diving about in the hot white wind. The light
unbalanced him,
he sat down quickly on the top step. Saw Herakles stretched on the grass
making sleepy talk.
My world is very slow right now,
Herakles was saying. His grandmother
sat at the picnic table
eating toast and discussing death. She told of her brother who was conscious
to the end but could not speak.
His eyes watched the tubes they were putting in and pulling out of him so
they explained each one.
Now we are inserting sap of the queen of the night you will feel a pinch
then a black flow,
said Herakles
in his sleepy voice that no one was listening to. A big red butterfly
went past riding on a little black one.
How nice,
said Geryon,
he’s helping him.
Herakles opened one eye and looked.
He’s fucking him.
Herakles!
said his grandmother. He closed his eyes.
My heart aches when I am bad.
Then he looked at Geryon and smiled.
Can I show you our volcano?
XIV. RED PATIENCE
Click here for original version
Geryon did not know why he found the photograph disturbing.
————
She had taken it herself standing on the roof of the house that afternoon in 1923
with a box camera. “Red Patience.”
A fifteen-minute exposure that recorded both the general shape of the cone
with its surroundings (best seen by day)
and the rain of incandescent bombs tossed into the air and rolling down its slopes
(visible in the dark).
Bombs had shot through the vent at velocities of more than three hundred kilometers an hour, she told him. The cone itself
rose a thousand meters above the original cornfield and erupted about a million tons
of ash, cinder, and bombs during its early months.
Lava followed for twenty-nine months. Across the bottom of the photograph
Geryon could see a row of pine skeletons
killed by falling ash. “Red Patience.” A photograph that has compressed
on its motionless surface
fifteen different moments of time, nine hundred seconds of bombs moving up
and ash moving down
and pines in the kill process. Geryon did not know why
he kept going back to it.
It was not that he found it an especially pleasing photograph.
It was not that he
did not understand how such photographs are made.
He kept going back to it.
What if you took a fifteen-minute exposure of a man in jail, let’s say the lava
has just reached his window?
he asked.
I think you are confusing subject and object,
she said.
Very likely,
said Geryon.
XV. PAIR
Click here for original version
These days Geryon was experiencing a pain not felt since childhood.
————
His wings were struggling. They tore against each other on his shoulders
like the little mindless red animals they were.
With a piece of wooden plank he’d found in the basement Geryon made a back brace
and
to the blank space where
his consciousness is, moving towards her. Lava can move as slow as
nine hours per inch.
Color and fluidity vary with its temperature from dark red and hard
(below 1,800 degrees centigrade)
to brilliant yellow and completely fluid (above 1,950 degrees centigrade).
She wonders if
he is listening too. The cruel thing is, she falls asleep listening.
XIII. SOMNAMBULA
Click here for original version
Geryon awoke too fast and felt his box contract.
————
Hot pressure morning. Houseful of tumbling humans and their languages.
Where am I?
Voices from somewhere. He made his way thickly downstairs
and through the house
to the back porch, huge and shadowy as a stage facing onto brilliant day.
Geryon squinted.
Grass swam towards him and away. Joyous small companies of insects
with double-decker wings
like fighter planes were diving about in the hot white wind. The light
unbalanced him,
he sat down quickly on the top step. Saw Herakles stretched on the grass
making sleepy talk.
My world is very slow right now,
Herakles was saying. His grandmother
sat at the picnic table
eating toast and discussing death. She told of her brother who was conscious
to the end but could not speak.
His eyes watched the tubes they were putting in and pulling out of him so
they explained each one.
Now we are inserting sap of the queen of the night you will feel a pinch
then a black flow,
said Herakles
in his sleepy voice that no one was listening to. A big red butterfly
went past riding on a little black one.
How nice,
said Geryon,
he’s helping him.
Herakles opened one eye and looked.
He’s fucking him.
Herakles!
said his grandmother. He closed his eyes.
My heart aches when I am bad.
Then he looked at Geryon and smiled.
Can I show you our volcano?
XIV. RED PATIENCE
Click here for original version
Geryon did not know why he found the photograph disturbing.
————
She had taken it herself standing on the roof of the house that afternoon in 1923
with a box camera. “Red Patience.”
A fifteen-minute exposure that recorded both the general shape of the cone
with its surroundings (best seen by day)
and the rain of incandescent bombs tossed into the air and rolling down its slopes
(visible in the dark).
Bombs had shot through the vent at velocities of more than three hundred kilometers an hour, she told him. The cone itself
rose a thousand meters above the original cornfield and erupted about a million tons
of ash, cinder, and bombs during its early months.
Lava followed for twenty-nine months. Across the bottom of the photograph
Geryon could see a row of pine skeletons
killed by falling ash. “Red Patience.” A photograph that has compressed
on its motionless surface
fifteen different moments of time, nine hundred seconds of bombs moving up
and ash moving down
and pines in the kill process. Geryon did not know why
he kept going back to it.
It was not that he found it an especially pleasing photograph.
It was not that he
did not understand how such photographs are made.
He kept going back to it.
What if you took a fifteen-minute exposure of a man in jail, let’s say the lava
has just reached his window?
he asked.
I think you are confusing subject and object,
she said.
Very likely,
said Geryon.
XV. PAIR
Click here for original version
These days Geryon was experiencing a pain not felt since childhood.
————
His wings were struggling. They tore against each other on his shoulders
like the little mindless red animals they were.
With a piece of wooden plank he’d found in the basement Geryon made a back brace
and
Similar Books
AJ's Salvation
Sam Destiny
Death Marks (The Symbolist)
Katy Walters
What Katy Did at School
Susan Coolidge
Citizen Insane (A Barbara Marr Murder Mystery #2)
Karen Cantwell
White Crow
Marcus Sedgwick
Invisible Girl
Mary Hanlon Stone
Chloe Doe
Suzanne Phillips
The Undead That Saved Christmas Vol. 2
ed. Lyle Perez-Tinics
A Bad Boy for Christmas
Kelly Hunter
Butterfly Hunter 01
Julie Bozza