Try again, try again: all is now transparent. Foxes creep from Calypso’s tent. And hedgehogs, rumbling to the pier. Revelers, to bed by dawn, startle me as they pass. Girls’ voices that rise and laughing, fall, their beauty an allegiance of dew on skin in gathering pale light. Strictly speaking, a catalogue of such sightings should never have been compiled. And once compiled, never admitted to. And when admitted to, then only under duress and never for personal gain. Drop it, try again.
A detective, some footpad on retainer might have nipped all this in the earliest bud. But no one was looking, no one was hiring, and in the beginning so little was revealed, it was as though they were hiding from themselves. In the later photos … but it’s difficult to say. How far backwards does the poison taint? A person could go mad looking for that redemptive instance of first betrayal. A person could go mad. Open another folder. Let the innocent negatives spill across the desk. The ashtray piles high, the bottle empties not quite of its own accord but nearly. The curtains, the upholstery, the window panes, flooding morning light across the hardwood floor. The air is strung tight and tense with the threat of something loud. Laughter, perhaps. Shrieks, more likely.
What is she, was she, trying to say? That it is not laudable to have seen? And the necessary sorrow? Still dreaming of exile at the moment death clips the anchor. Calypso’s pebble, washed in the foam of countless seas. Thumb over finger over knuckle into palm, thumb over finger over knuckle into fist. Sooner Dejanira’s immolating gift, sooner Medea’s poisoned gown, than the bribes Calypso offers. A handshake, a sherried innuendo, the mewling of a cheated dream.
And the bee which dances about the brain, journeying in pursuit of epilepsy, drones the five-point-four versts to the center of the soul. Night’s blue void descends as an airplane rises through the sky’s stitchlights. Promises written on water. That what has been taken away will someday be returned to you. See how easily I am swayed, not even a pretence at hard-to-get.
Surfside ballerina, acting out silent highlights from ‘Le paysan perverti’, from ‘Titus Andronicus’. Calypso quivers with dangle and tense, teasing the sea lions to drop their ravished evidence and yelp. Green on black, green on white, the bee-dance dizzies round the humming bush. At the end of the narrow garden I pick the flower which bears her name.
Prodigal daughters slink from ism to ist, white nights bowing down before a red queen. I think of her, asleep beneath a mountain of snow. Icy skin, drained of all light. Nights spent restoring broken dreams. Days spent tagging clipped wings, in the Museum of Dead Ends.
Disguised as concussion, love tucks me in. Revived beneath an elaborate dome, stout white lines, spindly red lines, enclosing blue rhododendrons and yellow figure-eights and green pornographies and one black bowling pin, in a mosaic depicting something made-up on the spot, the filthiest inventions to the highest bidder. And where, beneath such drunken splendor, has love seen fit to lay me down? If not a temple then a brothel and if not a brothel then call it home.
Above the racket of the sea she cracks the horsehair whip, giving it some pretty name of love. The whip comes down until my back is a legible language, ‘enough’ now a ‘never’ in Calypso’s patient eyes.
From submarine blinds set up by ambushing sirens Calypso’s bee swims in search of rescue parties lapsing from hope to hope, hallucinating shallows or shipwrecks from a crow’s vantage, some manmade signage glimpsed in the strangled waves. The buzz of poisoned words will turn the pilot from confusion, to set his keel on the spikes of white coral, tipped with flame and veined with rose, hinting at the bee’s intended mist, of red brushed with water’s clean comb.
I touch my fingertips to the clear settle of this tiny, enclosed sea. My knuckles take on a broken look as I sink to the wrist, the elbow, the forearm, my other hand like a claw on the edge of pink rock. The water churns with pressure, the intoxication of resistance, of being pulled in, inch by slip by scar. The lap and curl of a wave, rushing forward but seen over such a long distance that I am not afraid. The water that will close above my head, a seamless waver of see-through silk, with its promise of sleep, the glimpse of a suspended moment when all known things take on the broken look of a strange and ancient world. Let down the bathysphere through waters jet-black and still. Submerge, to live and learn I miss the feel of something, anything, underfoot. Thin edge of shell, inked like a line of letters, the body’s weight, the damp sand, evoking the memory of nothing but itself. No other time, other place, other world.
Calypso glides the fox trot, the double-dip of a sorceress, snailed with a god’s horns. She turns the two-step of a tipsy victor into the four-step of a warhorse. Mounted naked on its saddleless back, centaur with a girl’s dewdrenched sex. The radio whispers its chrome delight, anthems the hour’s farewell with a melody so simple it cannot be repeated. Each inch of nicknamed skin worshipped with a fastidious tongue.
Dwarf rowboat, free of the nausea of unmoving sun, rolls upon the suave flamboyance of a wave. Its battered shell is empty, bladders flattened and dry, a whorl of rope lying as if asleep. The topless mermaid, faded on the wind-blond oar, winks at a once-lascivious world gone quiet as a gallery at noon. The sky flows over the beaten,
the breathless, the laurelled. Butterflies them with a sandspit kiss. Playthings of a pillow-punching god, the nightblue clouds puff and cave. The wind hurries them along.
Overboard, with a stuntgirl’s sly kick. She looks back for a sinking instant. Plunges beneath the flood. Looks back for a shimmering moment through a dark green roof of water. As if she already knows the moon won’t play, watching all things without fear of temptation, safe from Calypso’s naked spiral, her weightless tumbles and the turn that opens her like a nightflower, offering everything. Calypso knows the moon will never come down from its eternity, that neither love nor death will restore it to the paradise of her eyes.
Too close to the drowned canyons to turn back or to be afraid, other swimmers drift their own descending spirals. Coral blooms razorsharp. Dolphins foam the counterclockwise ‘o’, black over blood pink, wave under green. Scavenging manacles of copper from the wrists of those force-fed while enchanted. Anklets of tin, collars of bronze: a looter’s fungible inventory.
Narrow-hipped, arms a stretched and horizontal oval, traced with bubbles clean as light. Eyes glassy behind a veil of smear and shadow, she swims with legs tugged out long and straight behind her. No scissors, no bends. As though her ankles were bound, the snakelike undulating thrust of belly and butt.
I have dreamed exquisite oceans, memories clouding over, underwater landscape shaken with red spasms. Calypso’s eyes, lashed with fire, the light behind her, winged and caudal with monsters, the wind’s duly-noted treachery. Solo for damp guitar trembles on the oily flotsam. Swerves its return on a crest of crimson. My throat fills with pearls, mercury- quick, gnatlike tickles. The wasp which shadows from wrist to elbow, banner-planting janissary. Haloeing her silhouette with tips of blanched fire, lunar calomine. The tide strips through the net, leaves something living behind. A shadow to set things right. A shadow to cover opened mouths. This was exactly as she had heard it described. (She held onto my belt as the rainbow screamed.) Sparrows assemble punctually, throng the settling light to seamless fade. Hemorrhage dulls her bluest eyes, commands the cupids tap-dancing in surfside blood. Words burble, words betray, words french-kiss and astound, making loud astonished love to words unlike themselves. The gods keep the secrets she tells them. There is no map. There is no inkblot carbon. There never has been. Try again, try again, with open eyes. Everyone is transparent now.
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19?7, the village of S________ lies quiet behind a mountain, grapeshot sporting vacantly upon the vineyards, reinforcements drowned in a Caspian of sprung poppies. Delays, dead-ends, viral flora sprouting overnight, camp followers bowlegged with love of the homeland, bridges popular with the swell of rotting banners.
A red-breasted, red-winged songbird beats its name like rain on glass. Four notes pause four notes pause while it flits throughout the orchard, drawn by the similar call of sun on metal. Struck and hovering, off by an octave or more, musique d’ameuble for an aide-de-camp wheeling his horse through a crowd of Arcadian child-whores.
Today my mind is on something other than the procuring of a trio of these squalling, big-eyed bundles. This phase of the campaign has now entered the seventh month and yet the only bloodshed of the past weeks is that of these children, at nightly flow in the tents of their soi-disant liberators. The gross Commandant requires a minimal two to keep him quiet (a boy and a girl, the prettiest and shyest of that day’s lot). The lean Commandant is as specific in his need, the particulars of each little girl ticked on official stationery with a quartermaster’s initials forged in lilac ink. He seems to want to put his reasons into words but no one, least of all myself or the other sullen aides, cares to hear him out. Not all the girls survive their visit to his tent.
The horse wheels and stamps, bits of apple slip in the bridle’s foamfleck. In the grim saddle I tower above the swarm of perfumed monsters charged with selection. The eyes that look up at me, in a glance, in a dwell, a dozen furtive or dreamy pairs at any one time. I read nothing in them, not fear nor desire nor rage nor complicity nor
understanding nor confusion. They look through me to a sky filled with red birds. My mind is on something other than the rubberstamp of formal rape.
I remember an apartment half a world away, manmade yellows of plaster and wallpaper, stiff white pillowcase beneath my true love’s head, her laughter like a local delicacy, her hair still pinned up, not yet tousled free, not yet but soon. My dreams of barbarism impressed her and she was sad so as to antidote my happiness.
Her books were the worlds I was excluded from, no adventures that might befall me could hope to rival the scenes therein. A life of Cranach the Elder: his pitted whitroots, a vaginal blue. Bulbs & Seedlings, pre-dynastic, hymen preserved intact, undiscolored even after decades in the museum’s 3rd-floor storeroom. What other things? Unpalliated ruins, out of doors light. And two other books: Ural Dazzlers, lyrics of M. Tsveyekova, (nee Marina Bely). Pink wrappers, mocha lettering, gold binding, as yet unsupplanted by the considerably cheaper red and black paperback, complete with a Kleber charcoal wash of M.T., girlish in the Caucasus. Wildflowers of Britain the second book, a gift from my true love’s most secret admirer, the designs of Ruddel, Besler and Junot, with pressings that stain 2 pages deep: milkwort / poppy / orange pansy
A go-between from the panderer’s camp, a man much like myself, approaches through the break-up of these thoughts. His mouth is fluid with smiles and compliments, his eyes are those of a wise old rabbit, rising from the stirruped boot to the hand impatient on the pommel to my eyes and our exchange is a ‘never quite’ of understatement, horseman to shadow. The pimp’s lieutenant extends his left hand, offering me the leashes of the collared children. The right hand follows on the pause of a respectful nudge, palm open for the bag full of silver in its turdlike drop.
There was a time when mixing snow with wine gave back fresh life to the adventure. When not knowing the words to a song was cause for something other than alarm. When a shout of ‘put your back into it’ meant simply bayonet the quilted bastards, before the leanest soul had tasted that deep ethereal fear, steeped in the glamour of what was new and horrible. Before the orgy of orphans had turned our eyes to icy stones.
They crossed the mountains with bitter love in their hearts. On the slow troopships and galloping trains they argued through the party-line pamphlets and stepped off at designated intervals into a fog bereft of the expected catcalls, their shoulders hunched for punishment and only a light rain falling.
Reality had become a simple mode of imperception. When in dispute, the officers were muffled fireworks, damping their more dazzling doubts when the politicals entered the room, the lenses of the commissars’ eyeglasses twin discs of apprehensive light, swiveling in silence. Suspicion, in its elephantiasis, demanding the diminishment of their youth, whispering that power was theirs for the taking, for who was there to stop them?
Some of them (myself included) felt lessened by the garlands of the collaborators. Each situation had been anticipated, it was a mere matter of looking it up in the index. The glossary, though out of date, would ease us through this strange new world. Words, gestures, sex, and idolatries. The gentle claudication of the burning babe. And where, exactly, is the enemy? The bearer of flowers offers his theories with smiling certainty. In the next village, in the next province, round the next bend in the river, in his neighbor’s house.
The sheer irrelevance of the erudite palate, loaded like a donkey with the premeditated technique of recording an oral history. Languish in silence? Languish in anything but.
Calypso wrinkles her nose at the blue tone of these wartime memories. She has a fondness for collaborators, has plucked many a thorn from the paws of deserters, armed to the teeth and heading the wrong way. The aide de camp lies drugged and naked in a cool and darkened room. Her girls attend him on the hour.
In the courtyard Calypso makes a neat pile of his uniform and his papers, douses the lot with lighter fluid, lights a cigarette and drops it, poking the flames clockwise with a lacquered cane. When he emerges from his dream he will be shaved, the color of his eyes will be different, the timbre of his voice will reawaken no memories of sin. Her words will enter him and he will open, yielding like a fig into ripening love. He will be me.
The hidden glitter of a girl’s wet arms delineates the beach, lilacs retrieved by breath of selvedge. Sinwarm swimmer, the chatterbox ‘moi’, fins tapestried on Nowhere’s whitewashed walls, the thickening flesh of Balbec. I can’t have read about it, it hasn’t been written yet.
Calypso anticipates each dream of escape, offers me her white body like a vampire’s coffin. Complex, that’s what she is. A complicated type, wishing me well on terms decisively her own. Yellow sun, yellow hair, yellow light. Yellow fly, buzzing, on the sucked rim of the sugared glass. Yawning, she says:
-Give me something else.
She hides behind Herself. The eyes that follow mine, first left then right, in metronomic mute intelligence. The ‘I’ she hides behind will swiftly cook off to see-through, transparency as clear as mercy. And when that hollow structure is pierced, what lies beyond proves mere nothing, the tracerfall of wine-frisked, look-but-don’t touch. Ariel-drunk, she breathes unmetered air, a faint thin line wavering against the treetops, slipknot heat mirage with barometer dropping. And so I give her something else.
A false memory so florid with detail that the strokes of my promised punishment outnumber the giggling girls testing fresh-torn branches against each other’s thighs, in the clap and echo of the white courtyard. I am too eager to follow and she must reassess this seeming love of peril. And is it love? If trickery’s the bondage she prefers then surely my lies must please her. I’ve told her how I propelled the children with my knuckles soft against their unwashed little necks, turning away before I saw what swallowed them in the shadows of those tents. I tell her now Don’t look away, these are the same eyes that followed them in, this is the same body that foraged and writhed in what was left, that kissed their agony back into being, while the others watched, recuperating for a second or third play at pillage atop those tiny wastelands, those little bridges, broken-backed and gleaming through what the torches showed as tatters, as strips of clotted silk and what my nostrils and my tongue told me was blood, still in the loose stagger of its flow.
She interrupts with the cough of someone blushing, the ladylike gurgle of a strangled laugh. She says her bladder’s full and thus our audience is ended. She slips from our lawnchair and runs from venetianed sun to greater sun and out of sight, the clack of her plastic sandals allowing me to follow in her veer, diminishing down the sea-slick causeway to the silence which shows me what I can’t quite see, her sandals kicked free, dress up and over her head and off, then the muffled flush of a dive. She swims away to be alone, to trace my rancid stories on her skin.
Watched over by her attendants I am Caliban among the nymphs. They may echo my footsteps with equivalent meander, catting and mousing as they please, but where my memory takes me No Nymphs Allowed, nude or moist or otherwise.
The sea moves over my nightmares, bears away all terrible things, lulls me into believing no harm has come to those I misled, betrayed, abandoned, forgot. Like an abscess or a lover I am drained of all care by the sea and by Calypso’s nymphs. We lie with our toes towards the mountains, our heads pillowed on seaweed, watching the stars thread their way along the night’s enormous web.
A jewel for the hedgehog. Sleep maggoty with dreams. Night rolls back before a remembrance of August afternoons. The old dog dozes on the balcony, its breath stirs the dust, in the courtyard four stories down the tireless women pack palm trees in pots of rich black soil, the sun falling down the windows opposite, the chalk outline of morning’s hopscotch, half erased by light. In the room at my back a young prostitute hums before the washstand, wiping sperm from her breasts with a rough blue cloth. In those days we were young enough to impose repeated spasms on our thin frames, the operative kindness being that I took nothing on credit from her or her descending sisters. Memory robs me of the certainty of those cries, draws a shadowy screen across the moaning eyes she looked up at me with, eyes slightly crossed with the pensive anxiety of one so unwilling to come.
I loiter on the balcony as if inviting blackmail and Calypso shimmers on the roseate golden belly of a high cloud, passing to the west and a rendezvous with tenuous thunder. She leans low, lips pursed through their glaze of melon-drip, her throaty mockery strutting its affection, love’s rhythmic jangling of keys on chain.
-Illusion stales you like cheap cologne. You lost yourself in the delicate act of making her lose control. Suppose she was as good an actress as she was a whore. Leave off inventing the desperate perhaps of things you’ll never know. She earned her money and allowed you to believe that you were just tough enough for cruelty, your tenderness not so much weakness as opportunity. She ate the plates of scrambled eggs you prepared, admired the broiling of the serendipitous steak, changed the dressings on your wounds, shared drink after drink from the same chipped cup, sprawled naked, uncomplaining, when you brought the cameras out. But when you offered to escort her down to the twilight street she said that no, she had three stops to make before she quit the building. Your detachment was of a purity to make the angels marvel. You didn’t even speculate, and had she spelled it out (elocution lessons on the 3rd floor, a chat with Grandmere on the 2nd, fellatio in the laundry room) your invitation of return remained one of forever.
Calypso sets aside the tactical manual, the graybeard model of tomorrow’s siege: surround and starve. She prefers the treacherous non-sequitur of a smile dazzled in the midst of slaughter, the little finger’s stratagem of catapulted bribery, of baubles and bread. She’s done for the moment, winks the nearest nymph to move in for the kill, redirecting my attention to another song of falling stars.
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Calypso warned me what I would find. The further back you go the emptier your world. And for the future, oh you don’t even want to know.
She would have me stay, at play among the dormitory squeals of her nymphs, at rest between the tick of this moment and the tock of the next, sucking endlessly the nicknames of her body. But I’m too clever to gauge the depth of my stupidity, the world-encompassing width of my arrogance, and my pride, my folly, and my witlessness are what drive me down one page and up the next, watching helpless as the richness of my travels falls to dust beneath my touch, the rock face tumbling from tamarind terraces built by gods, or slaves, misty eons ago.
I musn’t linger now, hesitating under the lash, pausing in the pearl of Calypso’s eye, mediating some vicious need to unlock her offer. Lips better left sealed, all mum’s-the-word and no little bird come fibbing.
Her buttons brail my fingertips, our breath mingling as though the end has come at last.
Queen shrew, Calypso-wet, maintaining distance with starcrossed legs. Flesh, soft as ash or apple. Bone, hard as hammered steel.
When will she spring from the pedestal? Despondency doesn’t suit her, totting the damage done. Abandon that pouting-priestess-look and come out swinging! (Oh, how I wish she would.)
In pitchblack shelter, lined with venereal fire. Some would say that no one comes this far intending to return. Boughs bend under a man’s weight.
A winter’s morning, far from Calypso’s island.
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I lean out over the August courtyard, crotch still wet with rented friendship, fifth of five sisters and this one still modest in ways the others haven’t been for some time. The separate tiles seem to rise one by one, a trick of the eye to facilitate examination. If I close my eyes the world is simplicity restored: I’m drunk in the middle of the day and death is nearer than when I kissed her and stood aside from the welcoming door.
But I fear I take no visible interest in those who interest me. The answers I desire should arrive via monologues to which I nod politely, I can’t be troubled to ask outright. I don’t wish to pry, I tell myself, they’ll tell me when they trust me. That I am a selfish bastard, yes, that too has occurred to me. I’m interested enough when beaching the whale of my petitions: ask the one to the left of Eden to lift her petticoat just a wee slight higher higher yes. Time, opinion, wit, reserved for my equals. Names unremembered but my own a talisman, radiant, though broken.
Significant asides, to oppress with graceless friendship, the offering of. Skin so fragile, a parchment for pedestrian desires, aimless succubae biding time, voyeurs upon a solitude better left unenvied.
Pastry crumbs adorn the china mallards, graven goddess weary of this bleak design. No allusion lost, no laugh restored. Calypso has taught me to trust my blindness. She healed my wounds, but the diamond, split and blackening in my brain was beyond her magic.
The Commandants, gross and lean, leer to remind me how innocence is forever thirsty. I’ve grown callous in my forgetfulness, and now must force the moment.
Not that ‘fatal’ moment of which journalists and simpletons are so fond, but a moment which, arbitrarily picking from among the 1,003 thoughts at hand, gets dubbed the Giotto moment. With no Vasari memorized or otherwise, one invents the scene of the artist, tossing aside his chalk, turning his back on the work in progress and going out for a tavern lunch with the contract boys, followed by a sunlit stroll, paralleled by the curiosity of a shy Borzoi and then a nap in the shade of the pines … and returning and looking and seeing what he has done. And, in that moment of seeing, understanding what has been done and knowing (time stops and light freezes) the way to go on.
Early in the silence Calypso skilled me at sitting for hours without motion. Taking me beyond my limit, to where the shocked ‘no’ faltered, whispering to a small ‘ok’.
Cause and effect unknown on Calypso’s island, lone nymph sits agog the heavy stones, primed, dumbstruck, enslaved to compline and a canopy of hurled stars. My stories are spiced with the drip of sweet poison. And with them comes the leak of my ugly world, its rapes and murders, the sewage of its gods and kings. Given another two months and this nymph will take to covering herself from chin to ankle. For now I find myself still able to banish the faraway from her eyes, with the press of fingers on the small of her back, a warm slow vowel on the nape of her neck. If the damage proves past containment my goose gets roasted and my gander plucked. Calypso will have my guts for garters, my balls for bookends, one testicle at either end of her single-shelf library, diligent, pedantic reader that she is. That between a thousand printed lines she discerns the crammed multitude of a million more, voices crying from high to low, offering gutter endings to the Princess and her pastel ever afters. She quotes from memory, a vein pulsing at her throat. Whose memory? I persist, but she isn’t answering. Only the drop down and the growling of a dog with a bone. I tell you so you know and only so you know that no words, no gentle pleading begging words, nothing nothing nothing will keep me from the thing that I will do.
I will kill them all, those pretty boys. I will butcher them like swine. And your servant girls, the cunts those party boys fucked, I will string them up stripped, like shrieking tassels hung from a monstrous banner spelling out my title and my name and weeping WELCOME HOME KING RAT
And does she seek to comfort me now? Hinting at a time when her world, her lovely island of skin and wine, of sea and rain, was as ugly as mine? Not recently, and yet not misted with distance, an item from the purse I keep hidden, cold with an uncanny, an emerald glow.
The storm had raged for days, till only a belt of thin orange at the horizon’s edge of dawn, burning and yet never widening nor rising against the mountainous stormclouds and then lightning and rain and the ball-shrinking boom of perpetual night. Calypso turns to leave the room and in so doing strays between a sudden concussion of boltbright light and a glass that mirrored her naked shoulders, her hair piled lavish for a change, and there, below the needle-thin symmetrical black curls, above the sensual stretch of her white neck, Circe’s face, eyes inhuman and unseeing, yet looking back into my own. Circe, dreaming of headless torsos, heartbeats fast and interlaced as an approaching army’s drums. Shouts one could have counted out by number now rising up into a roar as solid and impenetrable as a sandstorm outpacing the dropping sun. The stout walls moaned and trembled as rain beat sideways and darkness swept in again. I fell to my knees and buried my face in the skirtless thighs of the nearest available nymph.
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Execution-day brings out the appetite in everyone. Even the clouds are peach-colored with nostalgia. Hooded amid professional mourners in the freshly-raked, dry-eyed courtyard, I witnessed no morganatic breaking of seals, nor eulogy, nor ejaculation (save that of severed head, sundered spine). Hosts compliment these tourists: their bowels and humors, hirsute affections, their soft-spokenness, their pale gangrene. I hear the hangman’s little cough. A cue to speed the priest along the thirteenth prayer, an apple for each pig’s mouth, a ring for every bride. The wailing of the mourners ebbs, the uncuffed shackles drop into the waiting barrel, the one who lessens the burden of the state adjusts his hood and clears his throat, my cue to snag Calypso and set sail.
Sea’s traffic girdles the river’s emerald and pearlgray midriff, emerging at its mouth in a cortege of lapped tents. Gulls fly wide circles, then narrow to a cry apiece on each successive backwards look, land rising and falling and thinning to a strip of gloss, veiled in slanting light and seaspray, the smudge of green and orderly parkland, the white or pink of buildings in their distant flare, hairbreadth golden line of sand. Petit-four-sized castle, then sugar cube, then droplet roe, then gone. And only light and sea.
The chronology of our voyage was lost in the red wine of a raid-in, raid-out, no mementoes but ten fingers still, our asses unbranded, starlight just as sweet when glimpsed through the gallop of Calypso’s hair. At dawn we listed in the island’s shadows and abandoned ship, thrilling, like dreamers in freefall, relinquishing our nets to the storm, roll of thunder diminishing as we drop towards the reef bottom. Calypso attends to what is hers alone and I am made the bully boy of the nest.
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Catsgore undid me, Calypso. It was a meaningless voyage, disinterred from the necropolis and transported to the round-eyed museums, there to sit, awaiting disfigurement, awaiting the polite arrogance of rich patrons, battling neuroses and the suave lycanthropy of science. I’m not proud, Calypso. I take no joy nor, as you would smirking have it, any hidden pleasure in the synopsis of my humiliation. Neurasthenic prince, kneeling in the Tuscan straw, neurotic as Melisande, listless among tongue-tied assailants. Had I endured with anhedonic smile desertion, shipwreck, tyrannicide, and convenient amnesia to be the plaything of white dwarves? Red giants? My hiked kilt and grass-stained goldleaf jock strap soon to be legendary from Lethe’s crystal banks to Zamzam’s brackish haze? There is enough blame to go around, Calypso, a cold cornucopia of shame al dente. Endure a while longer. There’s much that might still be seen through eyes that have seen it all. Joy that eclipses the world, pincering your bones with fire. And the one unforgettable miracle which you had no way of knowing was before you all this time. Geyser exploding over desert, a moment is all it takes, measurable eternity of a dying sun.
The nymphs have begun to complain, to talk back when summoned with a cheerful grunt. I confess I am confounded. I never knew them capable of more than pretty chamber music: a fugue of giggles, the round-robin sigh, and that constant chittering, like monkeys in a rainstorm. Now all they ever talk about is food and sex and the endless endless singing sea. I see them now, heads cocked like dimwit students.
-What else is there?
-God. And goodness. The unknowable. All the stuff out there.
I hear myself, my preacher’s oily tone, the shallow fakeries I lay between their knees, like trinkets, buying what? All the stuff out there? Out where? Beyond Ocean? Placid in its sweltering anesthetic light? Where getting drunk is no longer a valid theological stance? They wouldn’t answer. Wouldn’t need to. I know. I have always known. They hate long goodbyes. But are deathly afraid of being forgotten.
Hovering above the baroque temple, loud with complaint, the furious angels in exodus from the city, their services no longer required, the silver comfort of their widespread wings fallen out of fickle fashion. Calypso takes me aside, indicates she would gladly protect me, shelter me from the consequences of my sin.
I’ve failed every test but those of geography and love. Here my Sahara, there my Rome. To amuse me she describes the march of imbeciles round the town square. It provokes her, the credentials of memory as counterfeit as what she imagines, imagining a landscape of flat bright colors (red wall, blue door, the medlar tree’s explosive green). Turning things this way, then that, her mind pavilions over rumors unmodified by the sobriety of a slapped face. Once imagined, her fictions pylon into brutal fact. The words follow and she parrots some past lover, but it isn’t me who calls her bluff, clowning yellow in a red suede slosh, divine right of bitch, well-soused by midday, fresh-fucked and barely able to stand. Her gift is a snowladen beware. A warning of corruption even here, in the violent prism of the diamond’s heart. An awkward silence like a freshly excavated cavity, begging to be filled. And so to love. In its theme and variations (scooping the cream of the golden favorites) it shall take up daylight’s lordly remains.
The diamond comes apart with each rush of breath, the bead of beveled darkness is set adrift to fade, as salt to its snailcreep so the answer to this child’s puzzle, one we’ll solve on the wide stairway leading up from the tunnel of sleep, of dreams. At least that’s what we whisper in each other’s opened mouths, her hair heavy with our sweat, thick as rope and covering her breasts, all conclusions subject to revision or denial. Indecision will be the death of me. I’ll find my pervert’s profile stamped on medals, my middle name the password of a thug’s cult, picking its unlanterned way along the gray line of a seaside cemetery, the westernmost border of a diamond isosceles. Eroded by diet, language takes a dive, tumbles into freefall. Names call out to other names, memory telescopes and collapses, and any one could be anyone: mariette monika anisette odile gabrielle mauricette Yvette Memory lays them down like ingredients in a recipe, cutting board scored by the whiplash and body blow, technical knockouts in the roundelay of excess. Between knowledge and the printed page the chuk-chuk of hoe through weeds, guided by astral insight, just shy the golden age of bacteria. Clandestine boys, joyous girls, no love so run-of-the-mill as not to demand immediate remount.
Hunger thrives, chalk cliffs collapse and slide into the sea, tenons pierce the rude wall. The image of an age granted thirty seconds of pale description over the airwaves. Masonry imbued with nostalgic fashion, so that even in the aftermath of a suburb’s detonation, some gargoyled nose, some crescent of baby blue tile might poke free of the dust, shivering the scavenger or the mourner with reminders.
Things were not always like this. Vast memories suppressed from one day to the next and yet, random clues like fireflies in tiny escape. A lyric swells up as though stung by a hornet, till the puncturing tip, the blue pen of the naked editrix, scatters the garden with the clean disarray of skeletal language. Make it perfect, dense where tiny, plot the problem to assess. A recommendation that will trample and offend, orders being orders, step aside or drop and give me. Take your medicine, you prick. If I disagree with her definition of beauty she’ll beat me sideways, feed me dirt, fuck me up till I bubble back a bloody yes.
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Cultivate this garden. That was her hope, advice, desire? That was her hope and advice and desire. And has this cultivation yielded much in the way of wisdom? Or peace? It is the digging, the sowing, the pruning that matters. She says so, twice daily. And right she is, shadowbug, right she is.
Birds fly from Catsgore lake. Cats sing at end of day. Her skull is a scorpion’s throne room. Calypso will know her own.
Capucine, drowning in a sea of watercolor red. Delighting a lewd white scooter, she buzzes up the ramp. The gentle wind which strikes the umbrella perpetuates a daydream. Resting words, loyal words, words of tenderest warning. Arrested by livid, childlike cries, the exile turns, forgetting his alias. Over Calypso’s shoulder shoots the gold of a longhaired star.
Sail on, past the wind-choked twins to the edge of the world.
I looked for Calypso in the too-bright streets, dodging the thunderstorm of mad cyclists.
A definition of the surrealist method (hers): a brown bicycle pedaling backwards up a tree blasted free of leaves in some freak big-city sandstorm.
The fields, sandy and broken, await Calypso’s return. The black crawl of her blind call: never darken this door again! Mouth deformed in that grown-up way, in rage and impending dire silence. She mimics the snubbed bleats of her students, pleads pity with the hope of future scandal. A nasty cosmology made wolfish through good works and the corset of the ‘thing not said’. In the rainwet, blackout courtyard, Calypso desires what she cannot name, hungers for what is least expected.
In the street’s blue prison she slips her murmuring arms around me and whispers her perverse and playful need. Homesick Madonna, snowy irises approaching purity’s tadpole lisp. Carnal as love’s brazen season, pinned in her disheveled arbor. Reactive as a lobster I will pace an imagined yawning deck, anxious to free my moaning cargo on unsuspecting shores. Leap the wall and don’t look back. To where the hotel trembles in a weather of tears.
Transfixed upon the memory of recent carnage Calypso arias a divided monarchy of days and nights. She deflects attention with her tears, queen reduced to liquid parasol uselessness. The shower passes and her gloves snug, palm over tip. Fine between Arabian ribs, a tongue of pagan lavender. Between her cairene teeth a button of half-sucked mint. Banishing me at the contraceptive instant, but not before. As night to the naked, her gardens protect her.
Calypso lists my failings with black lipstick on a cracked mirror.
A hierarchy of meaningless fornications, but meaningless to who? Names I’ve forgotten, but knees, shoulders, ankles, fingers, ponytails in the grip of a cavalier fist, shards a magpie’s treasure in my dreams. She presses me for details, inventing what I hide from her, reveling in the trick by which I prised the ruby from Circe’s lips, bearing her backwards like a sapling in a storm. (No trick at all, mere self-awareness on my shameful shameless part. I spasmed outside her bedroom door, went into her with lust already shot, sperm pearling over my knuckles, immune to her, my stiff sword clean for cutting, not for love.)
–Though later, on, Calypso, winking, notes, later on you fucked the witch.
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-I like my hair pulled, she said.
And showed me how. Teeth on muscled forearm and her murmur:
-yes please.
Some morbid matchmaker’s idea of a lark: Cassandra and Actaeon, on a picnic that will not end in laughter.
-Let’s do this again sometime.
And they will, the gods being slow learners and easily bored.
In this part of the world tourists are still treated like interplanetary travelers, no such thing as an off-season fare, each museum or titty bar asterisked as though it were a state secret. Calypso thumbs her Guide for Vampires, lands in a pest-free hotel, frozen in time like a Baltic crawler. Perched beneath the canopy, the leprous design made tolerable with wine, rainflecks diamond her black mane, girl-guide shoulders now tense, now broken, victim for hire but gun-moll perfect her cosmetic show of strangled resistance. She drops her pajama bottoms beside the unmade bed, declares her mind a freefire zone. A feminine hand and the slightness of its comfort, its moisture, its pressure. Pleasure of a small breast, heavy in a cupping palm. Discretion pursued under galaxies of eyes, tongues made liars. Banality and politesse, brute rigor easily amused. Nakedness invoked, zippers uncharmed. Deliberate pubic logo, labia gleaming in subdued light. Withdraw from possession wordless. Dreamtime stops the colony’s clocks, dreamtime is the arbiter of love, now too tired to drawl its name, draw attention to itself, the ravished curl of its happiness. Blood beats down from ecstasy to a cruder, thicker roil, the vexed flow of water rumbling under ice, or is the bidet on overflow? My knowledge of Cartesian thought is limited enough to fit a matchbook cover. Weary at long long longest last of the world of the pestering dead, more desolate for being immense, I pray for peace.
Put down your book and look at me. You, yes you, whom I burn to duplicate, reduplicate, as many times as it might take to break perfection. To see our tender misunderstandings nurtured to a fine old age. Too much is never enough, in the graffito’s wild wide wisdom. Come first then. Give me my words back.
Crouched above foaming shells, surf round ankles, sea-spray her shoulder-length Pleiades, vital silhouette ribbed with shadow as she uncrouches into the surrounding reeds, twisting her wet nudity as though innocently blind. She makes her pagan sign and dazzles through breakers, gourmet girl warmed by wizened eyes.
And of that lone nymph who has haunted here and there among these deeds and ripe misdeeds, and been made mention of at hourly intervals I was not conscious of till now, of her I would lay claim to nothing, that word so absolute it broke my heart to think it, although the rapid writing of it soothes the pain somewhat. Time ploughs past and the heart beats fast as new illusions take their glasses off and let their fair hair down.
Memory whines in a cavernous room, rank old ape weighed down in sheets of cloth-of-gold.
Phallus of silk, lifted above indignant zeroes, neither imperial in its purple nor peasant in its red.
-Your eyes are very fair, the nightclerk preens.
-your lips, your breasts, your hips, all of an excellence that I would be remiss in not remarking. So tell me, Lady, who are you?
Her would-be lover waits for treachery to undress itself. All atremble, aswoon with wanton descriptors. He shelves his filthy magazine.
-What have you got in the way of something upstairs and cheap?
She’ll be paying for the experience then, an alibi perhaps, it’s not the comfort or the view that brought her dainty ankles over his damp threshold. Her passport tells him nothing, no sexy flea to hang a lurid fairy tale on. Silk and zero coo his inward, pigeon-warm dilemma: what becomes a sadist most? The ring of keys is large enough to collar a child’s throat. Steel and copper make strange and heavy music, although lousy weather and rotten wood detract somewhat his acoustic processional. She barely registers the sound of retching in the street outside, a breaking bottle like a splattery cough of glass, starchild among the rowdies. She maintains a neutrality of expression, midway Jean Fouquet and John Singer Sargent, as though it were perfectly natural that some unapologized-for-lapse might spoil the fun, the party boys, hooliganed from Guadalupe to Lourdes to Chateau D’Oex, shimmering through the hotel lobby, their cocteau slippers spattered with mud. Joy manifests itself in obscenity, the unbefuckinglievable of cunt snarl prick and these the mere coasters for the drunkards’ wider lexicon of froth and brine. Neither sadness and apology (his) nor politesse and dignity (hers) might blanket the fall-out paroxysm of these words, a grand mal as salutation, and the landscape of death itself cannot put them back at ease. They’ve seen too much between them to pretend offended innocence. Mighty Pombal and his gob-bedewed Mohawks have passed on to the bar. Calypso and the nightclerk climb the aching ancient stairs alone. Elsewhere, fantasia. Checkered sunlight in an empty room, dust trapped delicate in smoke’s transparent drift, a cello’s aural honey drowns bee-drone, silence sometimes winning over the breezy music of the clothesline, strung from tenement window to Bohemia’s counterpart. Memory favors a comatose design, slackpawed, cruel, ecstatic … jims, johns, toms, dancing around the kitchen table as the Birchwood Penitentiary Orchestra blares from the radio with the sweet brassy comedy of ‘March of the Toreadors’. It is not the blouse she doelike sheds, nor the fine-tuned metallic urgency as she turns aside to reach behind and undo her brassiere, nor the slippery condom of the departed student, nor the skittish pederast’s misplaced address book. Snail of wood, Calypso’s beautiful decollated rose, the hidden geometries in the supple, finger-length mystery, her colonization (claimed, and prematurely so) in a fusillade of inconsolable loss, giftbox tumped of amber, signet-ring and velvet mask, a memorial wishbone with which to choke the jackbooted boys who fancy themselves gods, fancy her on their arm, strutting into every swank dive they’ve ever been bounced out of. Both lean and luxury should queer the spin of her cry, the latest tarantulaic dance craze, a septic frieze fanged with blunt stelae, her noise a stitchwhite net only a fool could love. Menstrual dynamics stroke the terraced crowd, a sway that moves it first this way then that, a pavane of nerves laid out on glass. Morphine nightshirt fattens the redhead’s nipples, sisterly hypnosis bathed in technopop’s migraine light, sleep less than one smoky sin away. If Calypso were to say. If Calypso were to look away from the grim carriage of her ghostly escort, stiff as love and set to hair-trigger. If she were to probe, with toe, and foot, and heel, and ankle, and shin, the shallows where the garden concedes, the deeper end licking at her waist with its slur and promise of still wetter orgies. If Calypso were to try that again, larky as a luscious sump, gummed with chloral triumph. If Calypso were to kiss his scars, both recent and forgotten, would he kneel and believe, give it all up for the cooling linen of her pretty lies? Bridle of velvet, clawstruck claim of initials, no mysteries so unexplored as these, locked away for safekeeping in the archives of love. Their destruction would be a mere matter of shattered chain, the slop of gasoline and the casual cigarette. Think no more of it, mercifully closeted behind the cross-bone stenciled door of Calypso’s white palace. Skin blurs in the center of flawed mirrors, a pose held by female puppets, to mime fellatio in jaded lefthanded silence, in a hushed, all-bills-paid bedroom. From the crown of obese Sade to the butt, for a fatal hour madness rubberstamps each animal cry. Mine, hers, ours, the worship of a bloodfat phoenix, galleried to the mirrored ceiling. Both ecstasy and brutishness coverlet the fairy-hump of lovelorn runners-up, the spark of weeping eyes, and the daily inscape of charity barely able to glove its paws. Consider every clue. It is not the cat at its toilette, nor the wine bottle’s tremor, nor the empty boots of the fallen postillion, nor the nude provocative throat of swan. As we let down our constant guard, never considering what might follow. From one end of narrow paradise to the other, for that brief instant happiness seemed within my grasp, and in Calypso’s. Think, if you will, of Justine, clothed for a change and on the lip of redemption, the power of her sacrifice a kiss away from heavenly pay-off, those last three pages of her life. The French doors opening onto the garden, the quick rush of shadows over the ground. And behind , the fatal bolt, the white light. The exposed and strapless patterns with which she negligeed our nights, denying and shushing away any obsession with revolving doors, the cache-sexe and trapeze, the flaming collar of a Pasolini daydream, the shameful thoughts nursed in humble salons. She red-penciled every phrase I wrote, glancing up to smile her whisper of forgive me. Just few enough words to form a double negative from off the tip of Calypso’s tongue to mine. Backdropped by sunset’s rolling acid, slipping like metal under twinned ribbons of sweat, the phoenix cameo caught in her hair, chain delicately snapped. How often was love delayed? Not nearly often enough, according to the wheezing footpad, thumbs blackened with the ink of the invoice’s carbon. Write it all down why don’t you? Onomastic indices, detail piled on endless detail. And something as banal as a remark about the weather echoed like a ringing assault on Calypso’s right to dissolve her heart in rain, alone and graveyard quiet. Commendations make shine the roughest cheek, and no vein of temporal glory, once tapped, dries up when good manners bid it do so. It is rarely the circling dog that digs, rarer still the wordless valet, and I myself, how often was I the flunky trailing circumspect, the better to retrieve the cast-off sandals of an hysterical girl, fleeing through flattened glass with outraged eyes. The names of her raped companions were thick within the flowers, pressed between the pages of every book she mocked me with. Truth breeds watchful silence among those shorn of a voice. So it was hardly to be supposed that some quivering of conscience might interpose when the working girls, driven from Birese to Catsgore, stood shivering at the city gates, their napes glimpsed through the feathery strands of hair made limp and heavy with the buffeting rain, the barred gates shutting them outside, the white temple appearing to recede with each sob and wail, its columns gleaming with cleansing rain. The seep of the sunbleached garden, red opacity creamed with ribbons of hairline black, trapped swim of insect skirmishers, revealed in the skimmed light, buzz of ambush, peat-daubed centaurs. The secret and parochial system by which I embroider my hours reflects the pattern of one-way streets, and gates, and walls, and stairwells. The settled order of a Potemkin fantasy, where nothing is dismantled once the royal sleigh slides tinkling under the hill, where no one is made to queue, awaiting their faithful doglike turn to strip their finery into heaps. The shadow of the abandoned nest, the transparency of wings powdered to gold, the book of this bee’s songs, hidden away in the shirt pocket of a vaporous bee-keeper. Just before the Catsgore Central Station the train passes beneath a Fascist-Era bridge where a crowd of young boys gathers each day to wag their whimsical tulips at the oblivious passengers, speeding on below. Or so the preening nightclerk would have her believe.
– See, he says, I was not always a petty pervert reduced to lugging the bad decisions of princesses decidedly down at heel.
Her yawn-and-stretch appears as invitation. The fawning nightclerk dares and double-dares. Uncross your eyes, your legs, come sprinkle my tea with honey. And she.
-Sing me another.
Cat eyes blinking like clocktick.
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Tinsel-eyed nightingale, an obscene pen stroke, the slow, blue, crippled night. A winter’s evening in Catsgore. The words whose loyalty was most in question are measuring up at last. Perhaps it’s pity that drives them down the page, hustling their complications to the right-hand margin. I’m allowed at least to ask whose side they’re on. Their motives remain their own.
Cruel Catsgore, your many accidental terrors. I gave you everything I had (well, not quite, not hardly) and look how you repay me (not so poorly, were I, oh, an honest man). Perhaps my pension’s troubling me. Or perhaps that stolen photograph of the shattered copse, lifted from the heirloom album, the accusation of those four yellow triangles that once held it in place. The album is random and far too much is missing, but on happy days the album tells the tale whole. From dawn to darkest hour, from squalling birth to sullen death, from wild nuts to mushroom soup. The captions are my favorites: Calypso’s daintily idiomatic letters, odd errors in spelling the immigrant’s lifelong talisman. When looked at from upside down her fetchy lines of script slide sideways to mid-page, then tilt diagonally down, blackbird consonants homing back through silver luciferic air. All the names are there, the forgotten ones at times the sweetest. I tap them with a dirty fingernail and marvel. What prodigious feats I’ve notched, Old Lecher sifting through the bones of my conquest. Sunless light, moonless light, ponds frogged with mist.
Condensation on the iron railing marks Calypso’s absence. The steps leading down from the illicit pocket-garden to the alley have caved beneath the weight of floodwaters. Last year or year before that. The movement of this old man’s walk is what’s quotidian, not the route, however much he claims to prefer this to that. From garden, down alley, across park, past post office. To pause and scratch my cheek, wondering why I’ve stopped. Scrabble in the coat pocket and, discounting lint and coins, come up with: Calypso’s initials on an overdue postal slip, payment waived. By only walking out when both rush hours have died past, I evade the lumpen proletariat of dusk and dawn. They pity me my weariness, envy me my freedom, and if they guess some fangled curiosity by which to nickname me it’s likely that it’s not in keeping with the secret lives of a ghost. The lost and found discomfort of my hopes, sobbing down rusted drains. Will they have riddled that one? Hell’s fornicating goats, the devalued dowries of molested girls, a pig’s dinner. Will any of those have made the cut? Stepping down and into (mind your hat, Senor, the lintel’s low) that den of remembered sexless faces, the brain retreats in herd, reacts to this summons, this out-of-the-blue remembrance of free-floating pain by changing the subject, by rhyming pain to shame: yes, it’s working and the orgy fades and is replaced by something dim that happened yesterday. Some old twin spinning on the gravel by the iced-over pond in a graceful avoidance of me, myself, and I. I watched him shuffle through the opened iron gates and it was sometime further on when I understood that merciful snub of his daughter’s imagined seducer. Beyond the screen the priest coughs a startling penance. A baker’s dozen, 7 Our Fathers, 7 Hail Marys. Sure, Father, I’m up to it, though it might as well be seven times the palsied circuit round the walls of Jericho. Shadow hidden behind the heart, promise carried like a wedding ring. An x-ray of a brutally engorged polyp, the doctor’s stiff impatience. ‘I’d tell you Listen up, if I thought you’d half a chance in Hell.’ Well, the guarded city is the bricked and smoky proof of God’s temper. That’s no riposte, or none I’d use to start a quarrel, but it’s the best I can manage, beached whale shivering in a paper gown. He asks the usual foolishness: love life, sleeplessness, would I care for a pill to keep the blues away? The answer’s no, the answer’s always no. A moment of what might be kindness hovers in his eyes but I’m stubborn and anyway, Time’s Up. Worms of daylight reveal a fox’s carcass, quick with coiling convulsive life. Aurora’s curling sheepwhite train, tinged at its selvedge with freckled fool’s gold. Redundant dawnlight, moon lingering as tallied oddity well into lunchtime. Today I’ll interrupt myself and ride the bus. I’m hopeless with the driver’s repetitive gargle till finally we both just give up and smile and, blind leading the crippled, I collapse towards a hard plastic bench and we’re away, rattling past Needle Park and Blowjob Hill, towards the properly-deserted beachfront. Two seats behind me a child’s tuneless song, over and over and over till the hairs on my neck rise up like pins and I pray for a bump in the road that’ll bite his little tongue in two. The stop I get off at may well be the one intended, though how would I know? Snow filths razor wire: trespassers quite at home, eyes on the grinning gate. Royalist hedgehog, waddle and splodge, tumbles down the gentle slope, nosing familiar dunes. I stand on the beach, carelessly aware of what I must look like. Coat collar around my ears, shoulders padded and immense with sweater, shirt, tee-shirt, crimson scarf circling my throat and spilling out and over my heaving chest like a moment of ruin at Culloden. I close my eyes and swim, illuminated with hope, dreaming upon the unrealness of holidays long-forgotten.
There is, on afternoons patronized by malign spirits, a genre of gossip especially sweet and cultivated. One is asked to believe that Armageddon, when it arrives, will be a backstage affair, a mid-channel bight, sucking down all comers, but quietly so, the merest frisk of cream upon the gentle waves. Starstruck men will take pathetic risks, shy in death’s ossiary, thrilling as they go under, white light shining in their eyes. Those who scorn the uplift to be found in squalor will be caught napping, their kits plundered for what isn’t paste or plastic, for whatever will twitch the fence to an almost-smile, instinctive in his reach for his green eye-shade, his little black book of undesirables. A doctor’s scrip, forged with pincers; the addict’s inventive use of sleep. Some gratuity for the bagman?
Ha ha to that fond hope. Dip quill in inkpot and begin. A journal of excuses made, and the verso, topsy-turvy glyphs, of what really happened. Lovers come and go. The sea is constant, calling forever. Awaiting the cold wave, prefigured in this, the moment before its rise and curl and downfall. The harsh rocking, the distant surgical sway of a giant’s galleon, slave to the breathlessness of dying light. Light as far as the horizon, the sky lowering upon the waves, chest to chest, knee to knee. I’ll anchor here, waiting for the first shiver of what Calypso fancifully predicted would be candleflamed in the angel’s eye. What had been said, the all or nothing of diving through shadows, of spreading one’s arms to float, oil upon water, passive beneath the sun’s chameleon burn. Awash in the grim suck of the harbor, the peace with which she accepted my predicted death by drowning (all holidays must end) was a terrible freedom to behold. Stone bench beneath the white moon. Bird with folded wings, nightflowers frozen in their cruel colors. With the half-smile and armor of cautious indifference the voyeur is unseduced by this still life (with red violin). A shout of panicked laughter on the wide stairway of snow and the jean-jacket prey explodes into view, youth so loudly in love with itself that it is blinded by music, deafened by the sudden hand upon its sleeve. Who watches the voyeur and well might you wonder. Listen as the fever whispers lies, punishing you with roses, with honey, with all the great host of sinning words. The image of a buckling bridge torments the enchanted. Rampant beneath a gravid moon a fluke of horses thundering down the widening fracture, hooves hammering sparks that dance along the edge of corkscrew steel, crumbled stone. Anything, anyone, child or beast, caught in the midnight crossfire forfeits the toe-tag of ‘innocent’. And the bridge was only the beginning.
Even the most virtuous and righteous of hired killers, even Calypso goes naked tip-toe in these shadows, bowels turning to water. The words of the liturgy fill the riverbeds at dawn, mouth of irreligious gold frigged by a lonesome finger. Beneath the droning of the sky, she bends to read the strips of writing, the blank verse of fallen barbarians. Begun as an exercise then running squirrel-mad till doomsday. A palace, a garden, a shack.
I see symbols of pride before a fall. I see the dizzy dance of sex without remorse. I see a tumbledown hut where Death lays birdseed with a lazy hand, white king cornered by a rook, a pawn, and a faraway queen, the black distance of her smile as old as Tut. If Calypso sees the same she keeps it to herself, wondering aloud how much the rent would set us back. Dawn in the garden of ladylike unmentionables, ghostly with memories of starving horses, hobbling alongside flowerbeds. A pale palace, where life has devalued to a children’s game, ‘ages 4 to 6’.
I couldn’t sleep and the rain was falling lightly. In the bell tower’s reflection on the slow-moving river one can almost see the perfection the architect dreamed of. The bell sounds three haunted chimes, each one booming with a tone as dead as doom. Heroic bedrooms grown tatty, the world grown huge, plumed with silence broken on the hour. Tourists roam in packs, looking about with sallow disappointment, as though they’ve been dropped on a sidestreet of dozing Purgatory. One eye forever open, the implacable sphinx sleeps upon the bridge of memory. The mischievous resolve of the aged, the pure lines of their slow movement from stoop to fumble, barrels cottoned and dumb. Watch your virgins. What curls at naptime may be awake. I’ve decided not to wait. Neither for the film festival (The Tempest in a cigar factory ; Carmen on an island suspiciously like Calypso’s) nor the cantata of born-again prostitutes. I’m in need of a bumpkin’s therapy. Clues plumped for tourists, videos and children on sale, dangling in the gilded cages ten feet up from the sidewalk. I make my way from one combat zone to the next, posters of beautiful cyborgs emerging from the surf, sexy in a shift’s wet cling, giving way to posters of commissars at play, the color red as constant as the smell of dirty money and poverty, forgotten on some stranger’s temporary mattress. Calypso interrogates dark possibilities, probes my biography’s fertile gaps, seaside cityscape swollen with tongue-tied desire. Like Pulcinella I answer the simplest questions first, reserving judgment as to motive. Bright and early I’ll be up, leaving five bills upon the pillow and setting out to entrain aboard the ‘Coastal’.
Never were early hours so slutloud with dewdrop virgins, a species of fibbers tantrumed in naked vitro. Will there be time for an embrace, a coffeed whisper, the howling of a wounded heart? Domestics, beating the rush hour, will jostle me as they pass. Insomniac sinners rise early, responsible citizens hug the safety margins. I note that intended sigh in her shoulders, getting ahead of myself. For now, however, I’m here with someone whose company I’ve paid for. This chatty when she undresses, too dark to pass for recent widow. As mute as she is naked, as bright as she is chaste. Raptured in the tapestry of alcohol, lovers detach towards the last goodbye. She turns towards me in her sleep, with a soft, moist cough. Epileptic shadows, in rainy cascade, dance down the hotel room wall. Cock-a-doodle.
In the toy barnyard the rooster rang its tin-tin shrill. Thieves delayed, holy arrogance of the aimless, leprous with tiny instincts. Elite vestment this contempt. Ruins templed, mocked familiars. Dialogue as repetition, sadder withholdings burning holes in mittens, across palms and Hanseatic floes. Wide world shrunk to onion-skin in a decade of ‘come on in, the water’s fine.’ Portrait of the young maggot who hopes among the laughter. Reprobate who shies from the stalking burgess of discipline, under stars that youth misreads. Voices call Carabosse, her wingspread gross with fashion above the beardless young. Travel so far to find oneself still slave. Live to regret and forgive. Ask for no more.
Foxy quill, dropped among the pillows of the hothouse. Whisper and glide, pocket pins stabbing the clue-drenched map. The church roof collapses under a violet rainstorm. A mantilla snatched and soiled, the shouts unanswered. Am I going in the right direction? Which is the smoking car, as if I might not be able to tell. It is a local characteristic to shrug, although it says this nowhere in my blue, rainproof, mini-guide. Poseidippus speaks of the marble’s lovely buttocks. It does say that. I’ll fixate on what I missed in the museums till we are free of the city, relaxing into the map’s meandering surprise. That and the conductress, who moves in her uniform as though nude in her mind. The tracks slide and click beneath us, snickering: Count your blessings, old fool. Bamboos creak above the sunwashed valley. A newsreel of floodwaters like the bulls of Perigueux. Castrati study budgy’s solo swoop. Figuratively, if not in fact. A winter’s afternoon in Catsgore. A goldfinch’s eyes? Wrong one again. Come clean, sweet Ulysses. Choose your poison like a lady’s man.