STEVEN SEIDENBERG
from Situ

But that’s not all. This seat, his seat, has never been another’s, has always only been dispensed to find his occupancy near. To suit his nearing occupation, if not the present circumstance of being thereby occupied, of being set upon by only him, by him alone. This is to say that as he turns his gaze back to his harbor, no matter what corrosive goad provoked him to dethrone, the cardinal intimation that his pulp should find no lading on that ramshackle recliner leaves him hardly an existence—hardly corrigibly extant—a manifold of carrion both drifting past and soon to come, and soon to spoil here…

~

Surely it has happened before, he thinks, he has left his bench before, many times, countless times, which does nothing to prevent him from attempting such a count, an assay that’s near equal to the feint of its achievement, at least when it’s considered from the outside, or…the outside of the outside, nearly the inside, but not quite—not yet—he still knows the difference…knows the difference is all difference, every difference held in state both in and out, in state and kind…

~

There was that one occasion, just the other day, he can almost feel the weight of the sun on his back…It was the last sun, the last time there was a sun, that the weight of the back of the sun was…He can almost taste it, that’s what they say—that’s what they say they say, he thinks—that one can almost taste it, when one thinks that one can taste it…But that’s not right…not quite his right, if nothing less obscure…He thinks that if he manages to disregard all other sense—the less of it, the more of it, he thinks it could be all—then he can almost cast himself back into that last phoebus, perhaps the brightest double yet to drift across the burnished vault, the vaulting bar…