How To Read Castles
You’ll never wear a crown, he says, being so roughly shaped in your cold potential. As a container you could become a saint, if you drop this fatal rhythm of becoming while dissolving. Yield your beauty, raw stuff of the earth, with the promise that suffering is its own reward.
I watch him trying to read me like a castle. My twin-towered gateway and murder holes intrigue him, while my barbican is a provocation to test my water defences. He sees the mermaid in my herringbone masonry and suspects my geometrical plan of proportional wizardry. No kremlin can withstand what he wants to do to me in the window embrasures, my arrow loops will be turned against me until only my sinks and drains offer any hope of escape.
Battle yourself, he says, until your pennants unreel into parallel stories, threaded paths to the bright moon collapse. Indecision is only the memory of when you broke your own ribs. In my solar tower, he corners me into revealing my symmetry, my concentricity, insisting I must be ruined for him to achieve significance. He commandeers my courtyards and floods my tunnel vaults.
In the spring the peninsula was in total turmoil. He returned across swarming meadows and secretive bodies of water I shouldn’t have told him about. He spiralled upwards in my staircase until he reached my allure and, in his final assault, threw himself from my parapet to blame me for the death of dreams.
I became a city once, I destroyed that too. With my caves and catacombs I dissolved the foundations, so the city elders could escape the rot that had begun above in their minds. In the caves, the survivors believed themselves to be happy. I left them there. It’s not for me to destroy everything, only what I’m asked to. The exact moment at which a body-politic dies is impossible to determine. I took the steel brushes, dipped them in the ashes and the ground water and turned to the skin of the worm. I became the master of playing off one against the other.