Black Light by Galway Kinnell

circled it and saw that its body had fallen off and lay slain on the sand. He climbed a staircase; beside him ascended a panel of climbing men carved in relief, each wearing a different costume, each bearing a different gift, a panel depicting the entire known world coming here to render homage. At the top, where these emissaries should have laid down their gifts and knelt in fealty, was nothing now but the emptiness. Jamshid saw a great stone slab set up high in the air bearing a scene in relief: under the protection of a man carrying an umbrella and another carrying a fly swatter, the king was on his morning walk. Where his head should have been was only broken stone. Jamshid kicked at a stone or two on the ground to see if he could turn up the face. He passed through a doorway; he could as easily have passed through the wall. He reached the highest elevation of the ruined field. On stone slabs he saw writing in the square script of the foreigners. He wondered what urgent messages they had chosen to record.
    Dusk fell. Jamshid decided to sleep where he was. He did not spread out the carpet. It didn’t matter to him that he lay directly on the earth. But as he lay there he felt the strangeness of this material under his hands—an earth made of stones that had been grated, rained, blown, and burnt into a substance that was hardly earth at all, but a form of disappearance, a substance into which one of the world’s great empires had gone away. As if death had been ground up and strewn here in a thick layer. He saw thejagged, unburdened columns rising in the darkness and the great stones with their heavy, closed eyes.
    He lay a long time hearing the noise before he started listening to it. It was an eerie, anguished crying, half a scream, half a wail, as if some being in the ruins were keening for all things. It was the most anguished sound he had ever heard. As he lay listening he thought he heard in it also a kind of ecstasy.
    The sound grew nearer. Though the moon had not yet risen, he now could make out in the darkness a human figure moving among the stones and columns. The wail broke out again. It occurred to him that whoever it was staggering through the night was grieving for one particular lost thing. For anything at all perhaps, as long as it was one thing.
    â€œWhat is it, woman?” Jamshid said. “Why do you wail?”
    Continuing to stagger toward him the figure cried in response, “My son! My son! I have lost my son!” She came closer. “If you are a Moslem you will help me!” Jamshid could see her face. Her eyes were shining with tears, her mouth was large with crying.
    â€œTell me,” he said, coming up beside her and putting a hand on her arm, “what has happened to your son?” She turned and looked at him and kept on wailing.
    Was it the bad light, here in the darkness, Jamshid thought, that produced the look of sexual passion in her face? But he heard it in the wail itself. She put her arms around Jamshid. Strangers, they stood clinging to each other under the faceless king. Her own face shone ivory in the starlight, her eyes glittered. Continuing to hold each other, they sank to the ground.
    â€œWhat happened to your son?” Jamshid asked, as much to distract himself from his need for her as to find out.
    She only kept wailing, “My son! My son!”, though more calmly now. At last the wails passed into whispers; at last the whispers turned into deep-taken breaths, and the woman fell asleep in Jamshid’s arms. Jamshid himself slept little, dreaming intense sexual longings, experiencing them again whenever he woke.
    The earth on which they lay was glistening, though the moon had not yet risen. He took some in his hand and let it run through his fingers. It shone and sparkled, and seemed to have something in it of the iridescence of certain feathers.
    In the morning she was gone. There were great wings of light in the east. From far off he heard a