1.
The Man of Pearl rides nightly down the Issa Valley, where the children hide from him behind hedges or by closing their eyes and standing very still.
2.
The Man of Pearl reigns within his frame of English wood, his dominance exceeding
even the length of the hallway at the end of which he hangs. A child might be justifiably terror-stricken to learn those opal eyes can see round corners, observing both what approaches and following what runs away.
The canvas is troughed diagonally with a narrow stripe, an indentation not much more than two centimeters deep, and sunlight hides there in the later hours and cannot be coaxed to give the shadow its turn.
3.
The hired driver, the damaged girl, the legend of a haunted painting;
given a long summer’s day, more than half of it in full light;
a journey handled in a thumbswish of blurred postcards.
If not innumerable, than many references to films: the new the brand new, the sad classics fed to them in local retrospectives.
The money (half now, the balance upon completion) defines the relationship, indicates also where best to probe the fence for weakness. Distrust is rendered less rude by formality. Chain mail tunic, visor lowered, no proper names till late afternoon.
This is already entering cinematic territory, clichés on general flirt, the pick-me-up eye alert for the one true twist.
4.
She tells him the legend of the painting, which hangs in the house she may one day inherit. And I will tell you more, she says, not as promise but as simple conversational bridge, while they exchange vital statistics, driving at a downhill slant that may take half a day’s journey,
from crags
scattershot
with snow
to parched plains
of trembling
gold.
And she will tell him more.
He stumbles over what he hears as a trumpet trill of Slavic idiom, phrase hovering in the clear cold air as though underlined with a draughtman’s silver ink.
5.
Those words she learned
in study’s infancy,
words which she’ll not relinquish,
come hell or high water.
The bepearled 16th-c. cavalier
of snowy plains,
whom she says was a real strong guy, knuckles packing for illustration against her ungloved palm. Strong the duller word for cromwellian, ivanesque, the much-adored and beatific ruthlessness.
6.
His hands grip the light tension of the steering wheel, and all is to her advantage,
up to and including the gentle savagery of the epithets she provides them: Prettiest Pirate On The Seven Seas, Saddest Girl In The Universe. Their silences compete and mingle, a double-sourced skein of light, a battle in a snowy field patched with bloodspots and sudden shards and instant disappearance of shine on metal.
7.
Lay-me-down-in-the-doubter’s-ditch
the engine murmurs, pampered by breezes
that never give up beckoning,
however far behind they gust.
Arterial in its winding,
the road rides spinal
down the length of the narrowing continent,
a peacekeeping blue in the airsick
veer-and-pin/stab-and-slide
of the hawk’s eye.
8.
What pleasure in the plucking of a Tuscan rose!
And what relief in making a fool of oneself in the sculpture gardens of Prague, of Dresden, of Cracow, amid the unmonumental fabrications, the squeals of a passing children’s parade, the file and skip and nervous disorder celebrating who knows what.
Had they met before, the hired driver and the damaged girl? In the days before her recapture, off her medication perhaps. An explanation of sorts, a parochial checklist which ultimately led nowhere.
The sensation of rupture. A tale involving poisoned violets, a farce of darkened rooms and nobility made moronic by its entourage.
A television in the travelers’ lounge, fruit juices and shot glasses lined up all along the spotless bar, a cloudless sky pouring wintry light on the tinted windows. Onscreen a not-much-to-look-at is bundled about in shackles, flanked by third-world uniforms severe in their outrage, globe-spanning predator nabbed at last. The bartender’s gentle voice recommends castration.
Where was that? When was that?
9.
The legend hinges on the coffin lid ajar,
the ossuary’s too-specific absences,
the sightings which spin time sideways
and shrink space as though it were a peeled beet
in a flame-skirted sauce pan.
The fogbound folderol of the gallivanting undead,
less the nightmare Baroquiad
of his vampire cousins to the south
but filigreed and byzantined enough
for garlic chastity belts and holy water sparkling
at the threshold.
10.
Their silence lets itself be broken by jokes and exclamations too obvious to be left
unsaid, although these are present tense only, as though it were a rule, the future and its flat unending individual joy a topic they wouldn’t touch with an eighteen-inch knitting needle, though in their separate minds it looks the same, archaic as now, and doubled to a playlet for actor, actress, pouty goat and absent audience.
He suspects, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that her inheritance is freighted with fine strong chains,
a mesh to vest and garter her
and hold her close to the northern sea.
Collateral will have been named as perhaps no more than a handful of regrets, an occasional jig for the Devil’s delight, desire quenched and punishment delayed.
11.
Handsome as Prince Rupert,
a near-smile of impertinence made magnificent,
turning in his ceremonial saddle
to face the present’s representative,
embodied in the time-squander of the court painter.
Who, in turn and hostile love,
depicts a slender carnivore,
in cuirass black as snailshell,
constellated with milky points.
Smooth-browed youth: serene, girl-pretty and cruel,
as comfortable with discomfort as Carolus Magnus
closing the ring of iron round the incinerated Saxons.
Lesser charleses come also easily to mind.
The English ones, the trophy-loving Spaniard.
This is the Man in splendid darkness,
Catholic prince, drenched to the nines in his enemies’ scarlet.
Uxorious twilight curtaining the flying kingdom,
alkaloid sheen on tyrant and tyrannized alike.
12.
Emerging from a tunnel into light, they glance up through the windshield in time to catch the completion of an airborne paso doble, a triple murder of crows flung from one stand of trees to a lookalike next, the caw and cry like pebbles spluttering the roof. She leafs the guidebook for an answer and reads him nonsense and make believe involving hermits hidden in the hollows of trees, of unicorn blood staunched with linen aprons and still bright this many warped centuries along. Something she says sets him on a tale of his own, of a ruby, shaped like a human skull and as large,
found buried in a field, ploughed up chipped and shrieking by a farmer and his boy.
And of the many unhappy consequences flowing on from its discovery, hard lessons taught and learned. She’s heard this story before only in her version the field was in China rather than Texas. Never mind that neither of them believes it to begin with.
13.
He’s tired and on the verge of sneezing and her constant suspicions, her ricochet
from insult to flirtation have queered the spin of his intent, but there’s no shoulder to pull over onto, not on this stretch of road, maybe not in what remains of this red-bordered country, relief shown by contours and shading and the cartographer’s
deadpan,
submasonic erotica
of a be-ringed nipple,
plump on the bull of an aureole
only slightly smaller
than an anarchist’s monocle.
14.
Might they have had a re-do, a day for clarification and the unkedging of fleck and cobweb from their twin and oversaturated brains? And with it, the willful amnesia which successful role-play requires? The scene remains, the hooting laughter and the seductive snarl, the blasphemous comparison of her dancing tights with Saint Ursula’s overeager you-know-what. The stifle, the tea out of the nostrils, the general break-up of the servant-master equation, the ramshackle grown-up hue and cry of what’s been going on here?
15.
He’d come up the drive, the rain at a slant as though birthed in the backyard and leapfrogging gable and turret on a mission of pure personal malice.
With the umbrella down like a black sun, that watery shine that uncheapens even imitation leather, the stride that was unhurried in its purpose, a man with a job and the planning and time to do it, and the coat, a quilted pink affair (a touch of fur at the cuffs?).
She quite simply couldn’t tell.
At the threshold, as she held the door wide and then stepped back to watch him lower, half close and shake the umbrella off the side of the porch she couldn’t stop, couldn’t help herself.
What’s the story with the chick’s coat?
Even now he wasn’t certain of her age. 29? 12? Somewhere in between those two slim pillars of fire, one more tempting than the other but both gouged with off-limits markers.
16.
The engine brightens its song.
17.
No Gilles de Rais child-killer,
no Baba Yaga baglady,
no Mister Charlie floating like mist
beside the bayou’s opportunistic darkness.
A harvester of souls,
recruiting demi-warriors
to his ghostly children’s crusade.
Striking from the registry
the name of every mother’s son,
the many apples of a father’s eye.
The crowblack legend
delights in its nutshell.
The horror in the tale-teller’s diction,
hush and speed as though eavesdropped upon.
18.
Some barnacled wind-me-up of a night watchman
made devious by ambition and led astray
by a fault-line veined from lobe to lobe.
He shows up in the 3rd verse of a bloodsucker’s ballad,
an excuse for the fiddler to bow the singer’s frock,
hem to navel as she arches into the key change.
Some farmer’s daughter press-ganged
for the entertainment of the troops,
who cries atop the haggard windmill,
full moon spilling its flood of pearls
to linger elegiac on her wreckage.
19.
If and where the evidence is accidental than its neutrality must appear certain. A pleasing theory, if theory is what this is, abstract terminology like the much sought-after lodger, coaxed by promises that her identity shall be respected.
One notes the handwringing gesture caught on the margin of the group photo but with neither the before or after frames to provide reasonable context, one notes as well the ambiguity. And in the pause which separates the glance back to the margin
from the wild, first, tentative guess, the bell sounds its dull electronic ring and the surrounding pack is breaking up for lunch and the evaluative trip to the bar.
Not every plot yields its conspiracy. Too often the risk is entirely contained within a germ of vanity. Who, knowing what, had refused to alter a facial expression so bland it might be casually mistaken as a mini-stroke, a distracted glimpse as the betting sheet columned down to Delphic zero. The heart ached its bribe but found no takers, corruption’s purring sidecar sitting empty.
20.
They pass a trotter’s meadow, fringes stained with wildflowers, and smile when a fat shaggy pony rears and holds, pummeling the air with its white hooves.
Later there will be a forest, and a hungry clearing, a stream gliding over a submerged bicycle, the red tassels on the handlebars reaching out with stiff plastic exuberance.
21.
She is sympathetic to his phenomenological distress, but stern to the shimmering point that the fraud is in himself, not this rushing world of things, where the rented car might be a viral cell escaping under the blushing sky. The asphalt ribbon grows black, then gray, then black again, the yellow divider stripes a pang of comfort with each instructive toggle, curve, and straightaway. As though set on auto-ominous a swirl of crows dances a princess spiral parallel to and inches from a barbed wire strand stretched between white-barked trees, the trunk of each new one leaning further over the road, a chorus of the put-upon and passed over.
22.
His imaginings are enriched with the anticipation of her scorn, the sea flows outwards
like a skirt of tin
made to seem liquid
by the piano dance
of light on motionlessness.
They speed towards farewell, the scripted separation that has one of them turn back
in afterthought, but not perhaps the one expected.
23.
The driver daydreams her
in crinoline and black brassiere.
That Berliner Macbeth
where Lady sleepwalked the stage
in jean jacket and leg warmers,
bottles of Pilsner twinkling on a card table.
Requited in the hallway of a b&b,
and to a basement led, where,
five, six to a mattress,
satiation anonymously effected
in an Anschluss of weird sisters
and bisexual Birnham extras.
He’d stood in line as the sledgehammer swung,
a drizzle playing off the radio towers,
and nearby, a weeping throng of men and women,
laid low and presently undone by the false rumor
of the death of Keith Richards.
24.
From mountaintop to flatland
the highway unspools in seashell striations,
the claustrophobic sexual velocity
as sunlight enters and exits the interior of the small automobile,
dashboard crawling with lights and lights-out.
Low walls of alpine stone forever on the right,
not designed to break the plummet when suicide
ramps its technique like a sail vanishing on the open sea.
The woods rising on the left and descending on the right
purr and boom in the colorless chill, diesel and fir
and an unspoken hysterical thought
that tempts Death in one of its many Lincoln-green personifications,
a lone rider perhaps,
flickering in steady parallel beyond the nearest branches.
25.
What sad mentors, the jumbled limbs of puppets unremembered, out of sight in their straw-lined cradles. Children vanished, pursued by a common language of grief.
A spider web flutters in daylight, the brook’s constant music guiding the search party on an empty circle, racing against sun and lazy shadow.
The scouts hope and are disappointed, not so much as a torn ribbon, hair strand, blood fleck.
As though they never were.
26.
Cigarette smoke is snatched away in the clear cold air,
a cloud dazzles as light drops through it,
miles away but as recognizable as the spire of Cologne cathedral,
shaft of gold pocked with green glass and ice crystals.
Temptation flutes at every rest stop driven past.
Love without responsibility offers itself
as souvenir, as gift,
the final encore in some timeless Monaco
of pleated skirts bunched up on carefree leather,
casinos tolling the rolling hour,
endless plenitude flushing the Augustan gutters,
chatterbox sun and wallflower moon,
avoiding each other’s eyes and picking the other’s pocket.
And all in the white-fleshed, round-bottomed name of Love.
27.
The Man of Pearl rides a tractor through an orchard of red and orange, a shadow thrown by a pursuing cloud hides him again, the driver keeps his eyes on the road ahead, desire burning a hole in his shirt pocket, last chances lining up with carry-ons and eyeshades, whispering their last known address for the benefit of the abnormally nervous undercovers, the pocket-pooling plainclothes, the hologram at the ticket counter with eyes as blue as Finland and a smile as red as that of La Reine Margot.
28.
Any word, any patch of color, once noticed, lingers in the mind like a nag demanding time, time in which to plead itself, sort little from big, state the unconvincing: that blue is peasant as much as it is prince. Evil deeds beget the impulse, geography dictates the method. The thundering plain, the bowl-rimmed mountains, a hut reduced to kindling, a fortress ground down to dust, turret-top settling to its dungeoned base. Each breath emerges white and drifts its brief career
across the blackened face of the world. The Man of Pearl hangs like a chandelier, suspended from a velvet cloud, lightening only the most distant corners of the chamber, leaving all the rest in simmering darkness.
He gathers up the souls of the weak
and feeds them back into the world,
new-fanged and toxic with memories of ancient risings,
glaciers pulled tight as a sheet
from Roman wall to Tunisia’s silicate glare.