Meadows pale an occlusive white. Stone balustrades sag, summer maintenance cheapens. Rats gnaw shortcuts through the bamboo, columns rot in sweltering leisure.
Furred prod of language, vessels’ intricate passage amid fishermen’s bright palisades, and then the sudden storm as startling as a bucket of slop perched upon the upper edge of the door, ajar then wide open, dry, then not. Cargo of many-colored liqueurs, feather boas, rattan hassocks, bookends of lingam and yoni unfreighted over the foreground, carried for a while by the half-drunk scavengers, till abandoned, dropped, tossed aside when a vampire and her cousins teased them from a stand of trees that had a promising, a naked look.
Anemic starlight, rain drifting in, storm gone but not forgotten. In an empty field examined evidence of passage. You was another. Here one was heard, seen, sucked, shitted. Signs of a denatured paradise. Animals languish and decay, without the instinct to mate.
Loren, ex cathedra: a tale of happy endings. Sweet tail of cloves and stale pastry. Upon the fourteenth syllable the defendant will rise and rehearse her injuries but for now we gather notes and pansies, a fragment of names, odors, seasons and seabirds, the deaths of little ones. The red cock of the clothmakers, one of many signals from a code cobbled together with such fear and trembling that even the encryptors found themselves mazed in lightlessness, standing still and barely breathing in a blind repeat of misunderstanding. Some innocent, passing underneath the craftsman’s shingle, never guessing that his passage is a bead upon a string, a silent insinuation for this exact moment on this exact night, never guessing he’s somebody’s notebooked nickname. ‘La Fronde’ perhaps, or ‘Grito de’ or ‘Blue Boy’. The royal childlet’s bogey-man, desire confused in every sense, solitude’s perfume gasping along the corridor. A carriage-spoke spins the chevelure of Concubine-Least-Trusted, the green lozenge of her backrest illustrative of order in time of chaos, a storm of black curlicues indenting hymns of safe devotion, as though the Almighty is easily spooked, just getting the hang of a napkin and fork.
All art small and a scattering of words. Blue, vigilant, sad. Self-referential as an angry king, raging at his daughter’s dumb beauty. (Hamilcar Barca comes to mind then sinks from view soon after.) Shattered sun, haunted by jumpstart abilities, wax museum poeticisms, the valor of deposed theory, muttering to itself in the mapless sprawl of a junkyard. An airborne coin to decide one’s fate, the roll-call of who goes first. Down into the valley, in under the awning, headfirst into pleasure or pain. An ecu, or a piaster, or an alba, reined flickeringin a toss of fingers, sun’s degrade to mere gratuity.
The resonant image, that of the shopkeeper counting his pennies. As though displacement prefigures wisdom. Or vice versa. In the event of this messenger’s untimely demise, slaughter the hostages in herds. The most recently dead remain untouchable, laid out in neutral linen. Waking sun-blind and scummed, bruised and naked in the Emperor’s grotto, foliage a riot of stifled perversion, moss drained from deepest blue by the strong smell of licence. The hour between death and dawn, the hour of pale debauch. Sand over gravel, wind over grass. A_____, naked before her sisters; B______, blinded by a child’s lighthouse jealousy; C________, pouty with indifference, suffering for the infamy of a family name; D______, commanding the sea to stand still and worshipping at the gallows where her martyred father did his comic, crowd-pleasing jig. Safe from the wash of rogue petroleum, the quarter of zealots, le vice anglais.
Can tongue catch as tongue? As eyes, protected against what they would not see, remain hermetically open, inviolately wide? Lark, from a tongue’s singular pleasure, perfumed world from which to take wing, fled with love’s translation. As though the city’s official misanthrope had forged a giddy tale of sacrifice and redemption from a single moment of nasty self-discovery, afraid of the dark and not alone.
Pendulum.
Winter.
The sea’s closed graveyard.
The minister of excess selects what next to ply, what next to cancel. A summons, stained with the juice of betel nuts, gentles face down on the desk of the compromised physician, taking his vacation among specific olive groves. He hopes to lose contact, to rest in the medicinal breezes of seaside orchards, until such time as his keepers track him down with a summons not written in ink. Tobacco smoke disfigures the fawning gestures of his caryatids. He wills himself to empty his mind of hysteria’s seasonal sex crimes, panties spattered with aspic,
bluebeards lurching in streets of pendant pussy willow.
Surrounded by noise, the febrile snort of platinum old age. And fear, riding in pride of place as the horde pools into assembly along the soccer fields and airport runways and flattened de-meadowed malls-to-be. Wild eyes widen, a rabbit pokes up its ears then disappears again to the low thunder of a thousand affectionate chuckles. A ghostly pyramid of skulls rises up like fog, as wild eyes narrow, sizing up the glory of the sleeping suburbs. A fat white body for these strange new gods to feast upon.
Sleepers eyes open, facilitate the promise of a dream, articulate red kiss of rapid lips, hinting feral in a porcelain complexion, flanked by a revolving entourage of women, immune to the feudal catcalls of would-be masters, dipping and woozy beyond the bulletproof shield.
Words pose and strut, the mosh pit cries for heartbreak. Or, perhaps not even knowing this is what is wanted, a flash of imperial fretwork that would seal the morrain with a touch of patronage, the feared and kiss-bestowing state.
Memory confuses desire, mainspring of souvenir. In diocese and canton memory is charged with the revision of mundane tasks. Windsock of privilege, the further discipline of exhaustion. A glimpse. Or revelation. Factions of the transubstantiation controversy: cramp in the Carolingian-Merovingian-Whatchamacallit abdomen. Pedestal of printed matter, religious tracts mostly, occasional histories and vergilian how-to bucolics. They’ll lift her up and solomon her with their wine-red wit. Save your neck with a striptease, and don’t be shy. Never having jumped from a moving train, a glimpse down the track the precursor of migraine.
Merged, the expectation curves, from weight, center of gravity. Flood steams to soap-white spume, removal from water of lost things. Lost things provoke a collapse of lists: a young girl’s comb, expelled from the petrus zone; progress of the ram along a deviant path; only drift and instability noted on the frayed map. On no man’s schedule and godlike, the weather’s self-discipline, coquillage of excrement flung from quarantine-windows to botanists of the Academy (the scales, Sirrah, the scales!)
Dunes creep round conceded wells, a raw greeting insinuates the air, as equestrians cavalcade the steep hill. Close to medal’s edge, slaves, chained to a wiry mooring, suck of apparent resistance where they sink into this new domain of waves, to disappear, presumed drowned, cancelled in water of few lines. Desire runs from one horizon to the next, uncharming the battlements of the besieged city. Flakes of fire fall, cold medusas of music. Crown of ice pressed upon her nacreous temples, the nattering prodigy disposed of, convent-bound. Svelte thread over matricidal seas, to be jilted on a shipwreck of sand, to alcoholic womanhood, a sot’s vendetta. Tempt me with your volatile sisters, an orthodox embarrassment, stains no scientist can unmagic, crown of snow and vitreous blood. The tablet dissolves under my tongue, germ of desire, spittle and fizz. Chic, incarnadined in neon, the mirror notorious with mastic frenzy.
Surplus profits, derogatory remarks, marking the end of time. Stallions fed from the altars. A trash heap of stockings and collars put up for sale, candelabra aflame in a private library of pornography (epic, lyric, pastoral, elegiac), and no one left to read the final mortal s.o.s. Blood and urine in alternate chalices, less an invitation to step through darkness than a challenge to show some mercy, deafened by the endless drumming of a clubfoot auto-da-fe. A bit of history to pass the time? Please. ‘With fire we eat our brothers’ then. Who said it. Stalin? Attila? Saint Jerome? Tickle the gash. Tell us what that truly means. A puppet show for the Ph.Ds, Raymond of Toulouse eavesdropping on Simon de Montfort. Respected, cruel, colloquial Montfort, dieting on a quaint blend of cheeses. Good Catholic. Possibly ambidextrous.
Ebony in pearl wash, tributary roads pilgrim the city with handmade tools, handmade weapons, instruments for telling time, for measuring all things, enclosing the dimensions of each fragment of the world, however strange, within the limits of a narrow glossary. In much the same way as the neurotic feels his body. So intimate a geography, so bizarre its mode of being. For A_____: a dust speck in the left eye ; for B_______: cramped fingers, toothache ; for C_______: disturbing scent, her own; and for D______: a bit of skin that comes away on the lip of the wine glass, faint rouge of blood beneath a fingernail.
Seabird over the bay spills starwide, capitulating to its prey. Falcon easily slides the hillside’s cushioned current, falling into a dive. Lisping lightly over tundra, foxes shy the edge of crystal steppe. Poppy music sways the surface of the deep lake, guarding its madness, the flapping tents of the archaeologists, whimpering in the coils of their dreams. Boxes fill with discoveries, planted by natives turned professional, wise to the dungareed amateur and his Neolithic eye. Scriptgirls carve orthodox spells on lambskin parchment. Illiterates crave the respected cursive stain: fig-tits, crosseyes, pimples, moustache. Salt lifts to high hills. The hick anthropology of grass skirt and stone collar.
Journey till one’s joints sunder, heartstrings unravel.