Requiem for a Nun

Act Two

THE GOLDEN DOME (Beginning Was the Word)

JACKSON. Alt. 294 ft. Pop. (A.D. 1950) 201,092.

Located by an expedition of three Commissioners selected appointed and

dispatched for that single purpose, on a high bluff above Pearl River at

the approximate geographical center of the State, to be not a market nor

industrial town, nor even as a place for men to live, but to be a capital,

the Capital of a Commonwealth;

In the beginning was already decreed this rounded knob, this gilded

pustule, already before and beyond the steamy chiaroscuro, untimed

unseasoned winterless miasma not any one of water or earth or life yet all

of each, inextricable and indivisible; that one seethe one spawn one

mother-womb, one furious tumescence, father-mother-one, one vast incubant

ejaculation already fissionating in one boiling moil of litter from the

celestial experimental Work Bench; that one spawning crawl and creep

printing with three-toed mastodonic tracks the steamy-green swaddling

clothes of the coal and the oil, above which the pea-brained reptilian

heads curved the heavy leatherflapped air;

Then the ice, but still this knob, this pimple-dome, this buried

half-ball hemisphere; the earth lurched, heaving darkward the

long continental flank, dragging upward beneath the polar cap

that furious equatorial womb, the shutter-lid of cold severing

off into blank and heedless void one last sound, one cry, one

puny myriad indictment already fading and then no more, the

blind and tongueless earth spinning on, looping the long record

less astral orbit, frozen, tideless, yet still was there this tiny

gleam, this spark, this gilded crumb of man's eternal aspira

tion, this golden dome preordained and impregnable, this

minuscule foetus-glint tougher than ice and harder than freeze;

the earth lurched again, sloughing; the ice with infinitesimal

speed, scouring out the valleys, scoring the hills, and vanished;

the earth tilted further to recede the sea rim by necklace-rim

of crustacean husks in recessional contour lines like the con

centric whorls within the sawn stump telling the tree's age,

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