Dies: A Sentence by Teresa Carmody

Dies: A Sentence

Vanessa Place

TRENCHART : The Material Series

â&#x2C6;Ž Les Figues Press Los Angeles

Dies: A Sentence

Vanessa Place

with an Introduction by Susan McCabe

TRENCHART : The Material Series

â&#x2C6;Ž Les Figues Press Los Angeles

Dies: A Sentence © 2005 Vanessa Place Introduction © 2005 Susan McCabe Cleaning Technique © 2005 Stephanie Taylor All rights reserved. Back cover art by Stephanie Taylor, Cleaning Technique, (See Millay’s Second Fig.) Designed and edited by Les Figues Press. Printed and bound by Hignell Book Printing, Winnipeg, Canada. Dies: A Sentence SECOND EDITION 07 ISBN 10: 0-9766371-1-1 ISBN 13: 978-0-9766371-1-0 Library of Congress Number: 2005926367 Les Figues Press thanks its subscribers for their support and readership. The Press would like to acknowledge the following individuals for their generosity: David Arata, Tracy Bachman, Nancy BauerKing, Sissy Boyd, Diane Calkins, Terry Castle, Kate Chandler, Sarah deHeras, Deborah Harrington, Jennifer Mayer, Carolyn K. Place, Toni Rabinowitz, Stanley Sheinbaum, Mary Swanson, Julie Wilhoit, Heather Wilson, and Susan Wolfe. The author would like to thank Susan McCabe, Stephanie Taylor, Pam Ore, Jennifer Calkins, Sara LaBorde, Tracy Bachman, Maude Place, Fergus Lee Place, and Mrs. Porter. The author is also grateful to the Northridge Review for previously publishing a section of the sentence. The poem that appears on page 18 is taken from The Bonnie Broukit Bairn by Hugh MacDairmid. For Teresa Carmody, all thanks. Les Figues Press specializes in novella-sized books of literary prose and poetry. Les Figues books are available in select independent bookstores and online at www.lesfigues.com. Distributed by Small Books Distribution: www.spdbooks.org TrenchArt 1/1 Book 2 of 5 in the TRENCHART Material Series.

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Les Figues Press

Post Office Box 35628 Los Angeles, CA 90035 323.934.5898 / info@lesfigues.com www.lesfigues.com

for Carolyn K. Place

Introduction

“Never place a period where God has placed a comma.” – Gracie Allen

“Sentences make one sigh.” – Gertrude Stein

Dies withholds the period. Suspends us over a precipice, pulls us into the center of a great labyrinth (106). Vanessa Place’s sentence, the length of her tour de force novella, is not a sigh, but a concentric breath, an exhalation, buoyed upon the airy cushion of a poet’s comma (62). Stein has schematized: “A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.” Yet like Stein’s project to reinvent all aspects of predication, Place breaks the limit of the sentence, making the form the sentient expression of an elaborate subjective correlative (77). This revision of Eliot’s famous phrase is only one example of how Place inserts herself in literary tradition and reconstructs it inside and out. The preliminary reference or correlative for this text is World War I—including the poignant traditions of war literature Place draws upon. I am not suggesting that Dies merely constellates allusions; its urgent, hysterical speaker compels us to think this sentence as intensely emotional, confronting as it does, annihilation, walking carefully through the rubble and around the landmines (3), hyper-alert for every sound and movement, its syntax a mechanism of vigilant horror and dread, sentiment and irony. Dies circuits the high and the low, taking on the apocryphal tone of the postwar fable: we are the noble cockroach, brown-shelled priests (124). Place’s avant-gardism is avant terror, and thus this text cannot be reduced to its dazzling linguistic pyrotechnics and flares, its puns, refurbished clichés, syntactic inversions, stupendous catalogues bursting the seams, its gallows humor, its

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grotesqueries, its philosophical and spiritual quandaries; nevertheless the plot of the sentence is the twin of its form, so that, as Pam Ore has said about Dies, it is “one long bloody trench.”1 The writing, indeed, folds and furrows, winds and implodes, scissions and closes. The soldiers, sentenced, parade to the front, in a circuitous march, recollected as a matter of both chance and inevitability: I remember on the boat over, before that, when I woke this morning, there, I left for the train to catch the boat to bring me to the trucks to cart me to where I began walking, before that, well, I recall with a woodcut’s grave precision that before I woke the morning I left for the train to catch the boat to bring me to the trucks, etcetera, I was walking with some purpose and greater determination, there, it was light in that thin brown way one reads about in liberal magazines, clouds appended overhead and sun smeared everywhere, there, the road I was on was tactile, reasonably pebbled (17-18) It is difficult to quote from Dies because its writing is so hinged and stitched, one unit depends upon the next one, like the traversal over large landscapes to come to the western front, which, as war historians have observed, moved but minimally forward and backward, an epitome of traumatic immobility. Here in this snippet we have of deictic pointing there within a indeterminate map without center (the center is everywhere and nowhere in this rhizomatic structure); there is etched and magazined and tactile; walking, or rather marching, becomes memory, recursive and blotted, only tenuously solid. There is no turning back from the unit’s march into the maw of destruction, machine guns on both sides, cut into quarters therefore, the boy in front of me died with a sigh, his head fell to one side (26), with parts and bodies all, dying (129). The long shot of the sentence sighs and funnels us into an early close 1

In her introduction of Place at the TrenchArt gala reading, 2005.

INTRODUCTION

up of the dying comrade’s body, pivot of the text’s dissociating, felt sentiment: his head fell to one side and his cheek rested on another man’s shoulder, and the other man, used to comforting his own children, put his arm around the lad and kissed the top of his head, there, he said, there, and he died, and one man dragged himself from the circle, blood was coursing down his legs and the bones of his hips were showing, an awful sheer white unpeeled from shanks of purple meat, still he inched himself along, quiet, towards us, trying to get back, his fingers dug at the dirt while his feet squirmed like fish at the bottom of a boat, he got close, I could see it in his eyes, he looked right at me, Johnny, right at me with a look I’ll never forget, a look that was the full measure of the man (26-27) What is the incommensurable measure, the dustbin quintessence (16) of Dies? It lies in such powerful dissections of embodied trauma as well as in its attempt to find that perfect combination of the mythic and the contemporary (12). The speaker, waxing and waning, at times resembles Djuna Barnes’s Irish quack, Dr. Mathew O’Connor, whose interrogation of the night (and the perversions it cloaks and reveals), stuns his audience with brooding flight and baseness, with his mythic contemporaneous register. We are indeed unmoored from time as we conventionally think we know it. This time sense depends upon the spatial mechanics of Place’s commas; rather than the end-stop, she prefers the rocking caesura, the likes of Ezra Pound’s “Seafarer” poet, who in his rendition of Middle English, presents the bitter-sweet exile faring unevenly and alliteratively on an oral adventure; in this text’s like tones, it was bitter cold and worse warm (53); there is a babe in the basket and one on the bone (54). Indeed, the architectonics of Dies calls upon the aural touchstones, not only of Pound, but of Dante, Rabelais (beware of a scato-

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logical extravaganza), Eliot, Whitman, Stein, the Bible, Beckett, Joyce, Remarque, even the ghost of mark twain (105)—a babbling horde that makes this sentence both humbling and beyond paraphrase, both mythic and contemporary. The logic of Place’s grammar is not outside of time though it feels as though it is out of time, gripping the sun-shorn present, the untamed cadence of ten thousand feet (121), for there’s nothing to do but keep breathing (24), in right left right left (24) lockstep, nothing but the necessity of a movement forward: we would have wept but we had to keep breathing, so we beggared our breath and snuck sips of sorrow on the side (25). Language detours even as it forges a limited future tense (traversing from this to our next this [54]), or perhaps, creates what the text calls the ablative sublime (118). (We might consider this a term of Latin grammar as much as a philosophical trope of evaporation.) Yet, as already intimated, the future lies curled in the already dissipated, where it is impossible to rest on having been, compossibly affixed like a cancelled stamp (90). In effect, Dies struggles to attain a present (if we could have a moment longer [56]), which refuses to materialize. In counterpoint to the forward march of the text (if you stop you are dead) then is the knowledge (formally realized) that time is curved, folded, not linear: you have to start somewhere, and often it’s at the end (104). Let me step back a moment. Dies takes on the largest of questions about time (much like Place’s modernist predecessors). To put it most reductively, the text revolves around the skewed relationship between the contingent and the eternal, or rather the abyss that divides them in the very moment of death. Or put another way: what does it mean to be alive, and how do we know we are alive at all? War narratives, of course, put such questions in stark relief (a bit more on this later). I return for now to the problem of movement and stasis. The rush of life (and breath) is antithetical to a mourner’s desire to stand still. This sentence stretches between these dual forces. Grimly jocund, the speaker babbles onward, pressing ahead, in the midst of his dying and dead

INTRODUCTION

comrades. He simply cannot reconcile the fact that one can have been alive one moment and then dead the next (for how can one have been and then not have been 128). In part, the deferral of mourning, the delay of cognition and the denial of finality fuels this protracted sentence. The plot, or narrative trajectory of Dies, emerges in the first fifth of the whole as if in miniature. Throughout we learn of the stratagems surrounding the donjon—taking it, being taken by it, and then departing from it. Near the beginning we approached the donjon with renewed purpose [. . .] the tall unsightly tower and then I woke, but briefly, I woke and wondered where I was and why, there were cockle shells under my shirt and the smell of baked walnuts tangled in my hair, I woke and wondered what had become of my friends and how were my enemies, I wept for such wondering (25) In the midst of this weeping and wondering, waking and sleeping, the speaker has his first wound (27), the boy beside him sighing and dying, the boy looking at him piercingly and him still standing (27). The rest of Dies elongates this premiere wounding until we are seeing it both differently, and as the same (another way of calling the text uncanny). We’ve been here before, so much so that there is no proof our resurrections weren’t mere reruns (115). Place strays from a starting-point until the very principles of language as an ordering system break down. Let me briefly anatomize this breakdown. There are several ways (at least) that the text moves forward while it does not, or rather it moves both horizontally (as plots do) and vertically (there is a long sequence of spiraling downward—I was demobbed, falling [111]): 1) First, its structure can be visualized as a Chinese box, read as serried stories; in other words, one story transfers to another, or is within another, until the primary one is lost (some brilliant examples of this are the story of one Simon

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Fitzgerald [. . .] who dared the vast gray gulf lease its antique patience [41], of the poet who became a lawyer, of Freiburger who’d had the luck of landing sideways and so was not immediately shot on the spot [23], who goes home and turns blind and who probably reappears much later). One of my favorite divagations is the story of the Committee for the erection of monumentals (12) and one of my favorite tactics of Dies is its multiple cast of characters so that Emily Otis is also on the committee and she insisted on netted beauty (14). The monument diversion serves the anti-monumental confusion of time/space boundaries, for the committee determined and decreed that hereafter all authorized memorials were to be distinctly oversized, [. . .] staring off into some indeterminate horizon [. . .] the figure, not the horizon (15). 2) Complementing the circumnavigating structural/ plot device is the use of Whitmanian catalogues and lists—there are so many fine examples of this, it is hard to select. See for instance this surprising, absorbent exfoliation (alphabetized no less and more particulate than Leaves of Grass, crossed with a Rabelaisian feast-day and a dash of Lewis Carroll), tough to rein in: the Lord God has seen fit in His Infinite to keep a steady supply of bricks and bracks on Hand, to create, one can copiously presume, aqueducts and arcades, bridges and barricades, cook’s chambers and campanile, Darby & Joan, egesta and elevators, family trees and fantasies, geoducks and geographies, hibachis and high persuaded reliefs, incandescent lamps, the impresa of great gentlemen, jets, jerkins and joss houses, all ajumble, Kremlins and Kulturkamfs, languid lance corporals, major league Mahdi, the vertical spread of Mrs. Murphy’s bed, nabobs, netherworlds, Oregon and onanistic

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ontology, pater’s noster and the queen’s quandrangle, riverrun with steelhead rocketships, sarcophagi and sarsaparilla, sugar-free soda water, suitable for silksoaks, tin tabernacles and throbbing temples, the salted substitution of you for me and visa versa, wonder and winsome exultation, the reptilian wisdom of Yankeedom and everfêted zymosis, though let us not omit His marketplaces, department stores, all floors, and their pomped coteries, barbarous butchers, decant bankers, evangels who strap feathers to fish, commanding flies, blind beggars beggaring all written prescription, a slack-bellied dancer, canvassing for sonnet crowns, and genuine cowboys with mirrored eyes, there’s brass bistoury and scarlet barrooms, there’s where they make wigs from plaits of brunet hair and minds from yellow paper, there’s a peripatetic baker but no candlestick maker (7-8) Roll over, dear Whitman. Here’s our new original. There are also the myriad culinary lists (see 10), the fun of crisis jubilee (12). The very exclamation—I hurl myself into the viscera (128)—has, I might add, a distinctly Whitmanic exuberance. 3) Referencing her own style, Place acknowledges no pattern to it whatsoever (21-22). Of course this is not entirely true. Rather, there is no privileged point of entry; a hierarchy between clauses cannot be maintained in the ever-present pressure of existing; thus grammar calls not for subordinating clauses but instead the phrasal unit, which Whitman so refined. As Angus Fletcher has written: “Whitman uses the chopping, discontinuous rhythm of asyndeton, of which Longinus, writing in late antiquity, speaks in chapters 19 to 22 of the famed treatise, On the

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Sublime. Here are some examples: He came . .. he saw… he conquered; I am the man . . . I suffered … I was there. These jagged bits of asyndeton force the listener to imagine hidden meanings and connections lying between, which in turn lead the reader to imagine a cohesion and coherence which is all the more powerful as it is merely suggested by ellipsis, by the whole having been perpetually cut into pieces.” 2 Place’s asyndeton, of a piece with her phrasings, levels transcendence: he groaned then, and coughed, and died (27). Later men were dropped, tossed and buried (126). Fletcher defines the phrase as such: “A cadenced thought, coming through inflected cadenced melody. Most important of all, in grammar, it is any group of two or more words that form a sense-unit, either expressing a thought fragmentarily or as a sentence element not containing a predication but having the force of a single part of speech . . . The key idea here is that without predication the phrase expresses a thought, with the effect of the thought always being a fragment or part of a larger union.” (105) Of course it is the “larger union” or “reuning” that this book both desires and forestalls. The emphasis upon the phrase, however, befits the philosophical preference for the contingent, the nodal point within conflux, and the transitive. Place’s phrasal cumulations do not reach final crescendo—they fall and rise and dip again into the dark wood. 4) Another key feature of this work is its pleasure in language (for I stand accused, John, of circumnavigation [19])—pure play (I’m aware torts are as tarts [80]), puns (I’m chockful of 2

Angus Fletcher, A New Theory For American Poetry: Democra-

cy, the Environment, and the Future of the Imagination (Harvard, 2005), 159.

INTRODUCTION

aimless optimism [53]), grim ironies (the waste of perfectly good violence [81]); paradox (there’s none so quick as the dead [122]), archaisms, catachresis (in the narrator’s ode to his lost boots, more mourned than his lost legs, he describes them lavishly: beautiful as a lady’s bare bottom, those skins stitched together with the care of a surgeon, one of the good ones, a set of silver pens in his breast pocket, and a cat’s unsleeved touch [7]), metaphors that stretch the boundaries of comparison—and the stew that all these constitute. Place has tapped into the great riverbed of linguistic history, and there doesn’t seem a second of lax prose. Her facility in revamping the cliché thrills; a few shall suffice for now, and let the reader detect the many other tired truisms made alive: therein lies the nub (10); from candle to cave (14); mud in your aye (16); best let covered mirrors lie (54) or nothing is as nothing does (63). 5) The text also has extended passages of allegory (also displacing the relationship between ground and background). The most notable ones animate Time (in fact, Time was running out on very tall shoes [48], and was not impressed, he already bore a heavy string of annexed riches noosed round the neck [47]) and Fame (cf. 70). 6) The language of Dies is perforce extreme—considering its depiction of war violence: the reality of the images are so intense they seem exaggerated. A young recruit’s hands are cut off on the wire, they are supplicate hands (126); and then, reminiscent of other war narratives, a man is blown clean out of his clothes and part of his carcass (127); yet another must hold his artery between his teeth to keep from bleeding to death. One wound is figured as unhitching the face (120); yet another depicts a leg tucked under his arm (123). Then there is the plain face of complicity in the tumult: I put a grenade in the crook of a passerby’s arm (124).

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7) The above characteristics contribute to what might be most conveniently identified as a “baroque” style. In his book on Leibnitz: The Fold, Gilles Deleuze provides a working definition of the texture of the baroque: “As a general rule the way a material is folded is what constitutes its texture. It is defined less by its heterogenous and really distinct parts than by the style by which they become inseparable by virtue of particular folds. [. . .] The new status of the object, the objectile, is inseparable from the different layers that are dilating, like so many occasions for meanders and detours. In relation to the many folds that it is capable of becoming, matter becomes a matter of expression.”3 Clearly, as the anatomy above suggests, I am caught up in Place’s detours and folds, interpretation becoming avenues radiating and “dilating” at “different layers.” Perhaps most significantly, the baroque provides a psychological staining—often to nightmarish effect. Thus we always inhabit a consciousness, even in its dissociations. Ariadne has offered a thread to move us through the labyrinth, and the reader will no doubt tug on it with some desperation. This strand, amid the textual maneuvering, enfolds us in a situation that might be bluntly summarized: one man (the narrator), legless (or stumped), addresses another man, armless. There is no end of jokes made on this score: the narrator obsessively puns upon both the loss of his own footing (losing one leg is stuffed with significance [6]) and upon this disarmament (you can wave bye-bye to your intestine, if you still had arms [5]; for an armless man, you have a habit of pointing things out [10]; you’re very handy [58]). The addressee is apparently making a stew; the setting is late evening (or early morning), when it is still dark and obscure in some encampment. The fear of attack hovers (I’d light a candle and pray, if I weren’t afraid of snipers [4]) over the 3

Gilles Deleuze, 36-7.

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already dismembered. What makes this wondrous is that this “frame” can recede, becoming a “fold” with little effort; in the baroque, “‘this fluidity or viscosity that carries everything along an imperceptible slope’” (one can’t have end-stops and viscosity); in contrast to the Gothic, the “‘[b]aroque underlines matter: either the frame disappears totally, or else it remains, but, despite the rough sketch, it does not suffice to contain the mass that spills over and passes up above.’”4 Yet the stew-side scene is our homing ground, the voice pulling us in through his address to the other, but the narration behaves as if this frame has already happened or is about to happen, or that it exists in some impossible “ablative” present. I have already alluded to the elaborate time mechanics of the text but I want to add how it seamlessly mixes up the tenses: the narrator runs, ran, and is running from fire, as if simultaneously. For, in fact, all things being the undoing the very thing they constitute (50). We may resist the undoing, especially at bayonet point. With all this philosophizing, I do nevertheless think that the frame reassures us, is cozy—the kind of coziness at the brink we recognize from Beckett. After all, ingenious to the death, it’s lovely to be brewing a bit of tea, even if you have to cut off your eyelids and use them for cups (9). The scene of address dilates outward to the story of coming to the donjon; we’ve been here before, at its door proper, and in fine mythic form, going through the grotesquerie of a corridor strung with cages [. . .] jangled and wind-whipped (73). Donjon is a trigger word (Dungeon, Don Juan, the John, the lowest tier in hell, and so on); it registers as medieval thrusting with dragons and the like and also fits into Place’s phantasmagoria; moreover, the text recreates Dante’s underworld: I saw before me a pasture not imagined but envisioned [. . .] wandering in a dark wood (85); throughout (and especially here) the peritactic cadences are such that I am inclined to scan them as separate lines, lay them out like a poem; one of my reconstructions will have to do:

Gilles Deleuze quoting Wolffliln, 123.

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the captain barked at us to just keep marching for it was Friday and we were tramping still upwards, and it was mostly dark, as noted, though a dark less variable than the black of night, which, like the ocean it discolors, reveals itself to be of changeable depth, abated by a passing cloud and finding star-lit augment in a sudden clearing, the sea is taffeta to the sky who waves more violent in its too-gentle unending, this was an absolute dark, one that precedes terror (86) This parsing of course begs the question of poetry versus prose (I haven’t even mentioned all of this text’s internal rhymes, consonance and assonance); lineation even with enjambment allows us to catch our breath. And this Place resists. As we descend, we meet the guide of the underground (i.e. trench as cut into the underworld), an old man who drew deep on the unlit cigarette (103); he has mentholate and pond-smell breath (105); he offers one-way and round-trip tickets, but the latter he rips up. At this juncture, we may be asking: is the narrator dead or alive? The seer tells the narrator: if you are mainly blameless, there’s nothing to be done (105). (This is a bit like Eliot’s praise of Baudelaire, who in writing the poetry of the damned, makes room for possible expiation.) There’s profound futility in an ascent where stairs take the speaker up to a circle before us larger than the circle we had just completed, and the next circle larger than that one, and again, each circumambulaton taking forty minutes longer than the round before (73). Circumambulation defines both hell and the pleasure of language, being lost in it. The speaker falls (or remembers falling) through many tiers, all of them skeleton and corpse-lined: as I turned away from the dying, a cavern grew beneath my feet, I fell, as we all fall [. . .] cavern’s sides’re

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coated in skeletons [. . .] as we fell, the skeletons become increasingly fleshed (95). This sequence literalizes the vertical push of the text so that we fall (and fell) through a layered decay, until our narrator recounts a dead body beneath him, a woman, hacked and overturned [. . .] then two women, conjoined by skull, heart, [. . .] named Rosenrot (96). This figure of the dead multiplying woman builds upon Place’s reaming the form of the Elizabethan blazon (swarm of insects [. . .] perfect shape of a perfect woman [88]). In Place’s underworld, we are both in the charnel house and contiguous with a death goddess, witnessing the awful mouths of screaming men and the empty houses of their appalled eyes (129). There is a startling hallucinatory quality to these passages in Dies, and indeed, we find ourselves wandering in a wood where we can’t see the wood for the trees. And this rivets and satisfies—the going between clarity and density: I saw the world through a microscope or not at all, [. . .] suddenly I understood everything, or not at all (88). The proverbial “I” of this text, slipping between seeing and blindness, hooks us through his insistent address to a you, as I have said. This you accrues multiple names of endearment (my tacket-soled darling [114]) and cognates throughout: John, Johnny, Jose, Jenny, Jack, Jan, Ivan, Sean, Jenkins, Jesse, Jon, Jonnel, Johann, Johnson, Johansen, Jean (not in order of appearance). (John the disciple found the Word and eternal life in Christ; here no such luck.) The narrator wants to pinpoint and identify the “other” (as reflexive of the self’s reality): this is the desperate gambit of a landscape of persons becoming persons (127), the green garden of decay. Dies then is a Prufrockian (“let us go then you and I”) address to the dead, a love song of sorts—sad, angry, convulsive, hysteric you, you, good for nothing but stew (58). Hanging over it all is the despondency of the future conditional (48). Throughout, the speaker imagines some time to come where the duo might picnic (they’ll be a parade, and a goddamn picnic [128]), they might still dance: Oh, dance with me, Janny, just dance [. . .] before we pass through rose and ash and

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enter the great donjon (63). “I” joins with “thou” only in the stacking up of anguish: my dear, and in our charred and homely paradise I sing to you, Johann, my Jean’s aubade, ‘tis of thee, me Johnny, my enemy, mine Agnus Dei, I sing and dedicate my denial of the morning (129). We come across such pitched moments and sequences in many documents of war literature and film. I am thinking here of the famous Wilfred Owen poem, “Strange Meeting,” where the poet/soldier, in the underworld of the trenches or perhaps in a posthumous hell, addresses another man, who eventually rejoins: “I am the enemy you killed.” Ally and enemy, lover and killer—these roles shapeshift and twine. Pabst’s Westfront 1918 (1930) ends with a Frenchman, lying prone and dying next to a German (also near death), whom he caresses and addresses: “mon enemie, mon amie.” These are the dialectics that play out within Place’s borders. In the end, the other is both enemy and beloved— silent as the tomb, dumb with a blackened tongue, and the staring eyes of a corpse. This is a silence as maddening as Prophyria was to her lover: still you shall speak, for surely you’re aware of the rule of corpus delecti (129). What remains is, however, poignant sentiment, the other’s ear is a darling shell, that wax cup into which I’ve poured my consolation (130). The evidence, moreover, lies in the reader, drawn into what Whitman calls “adhesive love,” what W.C. Williams dubs the “fraternal embrace” of reader and writer. Place’s taut suspense accompanies us into the abyssal dawn light, Bunyan’s “Slough of Despond,” but all the while we must bear up our end in this intimate, lively exchange. Dies hypothesizes: there is no difference between moments of life and moments of death, save sentiment (81). Such serious distinctions come with Place’s coruscate, playful humor: all unhappy families are identical as apricots (49). Laughter shakes us. Where we unite is in our yeasty need for immortality, that common hunger for the forevermore (55). Of the writer (parsing it into a poem form), we might say:

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helpless she is in her occludation, beauteous she is in our peregrination (55) Put another way, Place is the mother of the disjuncture: Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;se de constant conditional, de dead belly laugh (101). Welcome to Inverness; welcome to Dies. This is a delightfully quotable text, but I have to stop someway, somehow: you have to start somewhere, especially to finish (6).

Halifax 2005

Susan McCabe

Dies: A Sentence

he maw that rends without tearing, the maggoty claw that serves you, what, my baby buttercup, prunes stewed softly in their own juices or a good slap in the face, there’s no accounting for history in any event, even such a one as this one, O, we’re knee-deep in this one, you and me, we’re practically puppets, making all sorts of fingers dance above us, what do you say, shall we give it another whirl, we can go naked, I suppose, there’s nothing to stop us and everything points in that direction, do you think there will be much music later and of what variety, we’ve that, at least, now that there’s nothing left, though there’s plenty of pieces to be gathered by the wool-coated orphans and their musty mums, they’ll put us in warm wicker baskets, cover us with a cozy blanket of snow, and carry us home, walking carefully through the rubble and around the landmines, or visa versa, poor little laddy’s lost his daddy, pauvre unminted lamb, you’d give him a chuck on the chin if you still had arms, sure as I’d pitch myself into a highland fling for the sake of the neighbors, but they say or at least said once and if we’re very quiet we might hear them again, that all of us will reune with all of us when the time comes, our bits and pieces will cling-a-ling to our cores like fillings rag a magnet, think how big we’ll be then, we’ll spread from sea to see, sky’s the limit for philomel and firmament, and there will be Indians and buffalo and a hero’s welcome, I’ve always wanted a hero’s welcome, it’s due, said the capitulate archduke, doubtless they’ll put us in long black cars and someone’s sure to have a picnic, that’s the beauty of it, someone’s always sure to have a picnic, and we’ll laugh when they salt and pepper their hard eggs and be glad to lend our long bones for rude goalposts,

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what’s that, that sound, nothing, you say, right again, nothing walks heavily, nothing stomps about, the big turd, carding its beard with a baleen comb, and lovingly licking the mirror in the eggcup, it fixes red-hot ingots to its ears and pirouettes in a pineneedle shawl, showing itself off to one and all, it’s a braggart and a pimp, this nothing, ups the short hairs nonetheless, doesn’t it, but that’s all right, continue making your stew, sun’s swallowed and we’ve plenty of hours to morn, assuming there’s to be another dawn, I’m keeping the faith on that one, my friend, my comrade, my comparison, why I’d light a candle and pray, if I weren’t afraid of snipers, still, a campfire seems safe enough, at least for cooking, no one’d be so mean as to shoot a man before his supper, what’s the sport in that, better to let a body leisure and sup, knowing there’s no time to digest, for it’s utter contempt you’re after, that and the absolute beauty of wasted sweet butter, it was important that the last bite taste better, though saltless, we’ve St. Maladroit to clap for that, the silvertongued one, he who proved birds traitors for singing what must be sung, thoughtless, dolce, thoughtless, still, perhaps the next one will use a beer batter, make a nice soda bread, slather it with the whitest spread, that’s good shooting, my darling, right between hiccoughs, speaking of which, how’s your arm, you complained earlier, though quietly, you didn’t want to disturb my concentration, I was squeezing oranges into cans and setting up camp, there’s so much to do before a battle, don’t you agree, put shoes into trees and try our hair in different styles, I thoughtfully chalked some names and addresses on our backs to facilitate false identification of our remains, unfortunately it makes us better targets, but this sort of thing can’t be helped, still, I heard you, for a cold moment I thought you were saying your morning prayers, till I remembered our night had fallen and tomorrow was a holiday, or will be, certainly they’ll take time off to commemorate our exhausted sacrifice and someone else’s dry valor with a parade and a picnic, someone will cook a chicken before or after as they always do, the cowards, but I’m looking forward to the little boy eating watermelon and the girl who

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sucks a spoonful of Nutella while twisting her hair in rings around her forefinger, no, of course you don’t, you lost your arms, I remember, wasn’t I just asking you about that as well, you think I don’t pay attention, but I do, you’ve no idea how much I care, why I cried when you lost your right arm, though I confess I was a bit annoyed about the left, it seemed careless at that point, and what was the point of that, surely you were signaling something, everyone’s known for some time now there’s meaning to be evacuated from everything, lined up and airlifted, not unlike Saigon, years from now, it was, we’ll be so proud then, we’ll see the world with the eyes of dead men, don’t get technical, the thing is then we’ll understand the raw fruit of our labors as if we’d set up a stand and sold them by the side of the road, and maybe we will, hang a white sign saying something and display them in green plastic baskets, like summer strawberries, or stack them in Euclidean pyramids, like melons or mangos or even apples, something with its seeds safely inside, that’s the problem with history, you once said, spitting into the fire, it treats itself vegetable, or oak, you altered and opined, awkward it is, too, boasting of its spread and shade when you and I both know it’s got nothing to go on about, and they’d see it too, in the next millennium, this time slouching to Brigadoon, but not in Jerusalem, watch it, now, laugh like that and you’re sure to attract shooters, I’m telling you, next to picking off a man with a snootful of cerises aux chocolat, or a brandy Alexander, they like nothing better than to go gunning for the grinning, the sorry bastard busting a gut, there it goes, you can wave bye-bye to your intestine, if you still had arms, that is, again, but why are you complaining, you’ve got your legs, more than I can say, I’ve come permanently seated, lost them both at the knee in one fell bloody swoop, must have been a cannonball or missile or maybe a villanelle, I wasn’t paying attention, leaving me my itemless list, unpinned as an unfoundling, with the same untoward prospects, and I loved those legs as well, especially the left, he followed the right so unthinkingly, he was a good soldier, if I can be so bold, he swung in a rhythm not his own,

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quite contented, he was enormously attuned to the beat of the street and the sound of the violin, though he didn’t care much for opera or what passes these days as poetry, he was a simpler sort, purer of heart, his mind unarticulated and most refined, why most evenings you’d find him propped on an Ottoman, one of the real ones, Oriental, with a pointed red hat and a furious mustache, most ornamental, though still and all a good Christian, couched in fickle malice, but the leg didn’t mind, he was a good egg, name was Bob, he laughed at that one, said it suited him consonant, being nothing fancy, not like that other leg, Warrington, Warrington E. Wanderlick, or Augenblich, no, that’s not it, he had no agnomination, didn’t think he needed it, he was egg-proud, independent, struck out on his own each morning and never looked forward or back, I suppose in his own way he was decent enough, though somewhat stand-offish to good old Bob, now they’re both gone and I’m not sure why, losing one leg is stuffed with significance, but to have both devested like a couple of breadcrumbs, what’s the point of that, I’m not certain, I’m stumped, that’s the truth of it, sure as I’m squatting poolside, though there’s still the fire, and that’s nice, given the dark, do you think the wolves’re out yet, they ought be, the air’s suffuse with the stench of brave young muscle, which by tomorrow’ll be jugged meat, but no matter, the great beasts will slather the pale unwed flanks with spittle and savory barbeque, lick their lips, thickly purpled and caked at the corners with wet white foam, their eyes’re Maundy Thursday moons and the heat from their beating tongues’d melt any man’s mold and when’s the last time you got eaten by a bit player in a fairy tale, sure it’s an honor, it’s an honor to be such a goner, if I had a hat, I’d doff it, lend me yours for a moment, that’s a good man, there, there’s a tip of the lid to what’ll make a meal out of me and you, to the time-honored tradition of finding the creature inside whose potted stomach we might nestle safe and round, though you and I are hardly twins and Rome wasn’t built in a day, not like today, but you have to start somewhere, especially to finish, and a dog’s gut is as good as it gets for a sonovabitch

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such as myself, I’m being modest, mostly, but you have to admit there’s a striking resemblance between the halves of us, and if I still had my legs, you’d allow how we’re about equal height in our stocking feet, I miss my legs, did I mention that, and my boots, beautiful in their very addition, beautiful as a lady’s bare bottom, those skins stitched together with the care of a surgeon, one of the good ones, a set of silver pens in his breast pocket, and a cat’s unsleeved touch, why those boots were alive, they breathed easy as kittens and stayed dog-faithful at the feet, they had the soles of a saint, ignorant of stones, slings and arrows, though not, I would qualify, impervious to the odd nail, they were long-suffering and lucky, lucky as a pair of sevens or a single eleven, lucky as four-leaf clovers and four-eyed Irishmen, not for me, naturally, but certainly for the one who got me, a tall blond man, I imagine, strapping, if that can still be said without blinking, big, in any event, a man with hands like hams and thighs the size of roast pigs, a happy man, content in his apple-scented way, a man who wipes his mouth with the back of a broad palm and keeps a dark pint running through the veins, a stout-hearted man in the days when there were such fellows, and ever shall be, if I’m any judge of the Almighty, the Lord God has seen fit in His Infinite to keep a steady supply of bricks and bracks on Hand, to create, one can copiously presume, aqueducts and arcades, bridges and barricades, cook’s chambers and campanile, Darby & Joan, egesta and elevators, family trees and fantasies, geoducks and geographies, hibachis and high persuaded reliefs, incandescent lamps, the impresa of great gentlemen, jets, jerkins and joss houses, all ajumble, Kremlins and Kulturkamfs, languid lance corporals, major league Mahdi, the vertical spread of Mrs. Murphy’s bed, nabobs, netherworlds, Oregon and onanistic ontology, pater’s noster and the queen’s quadrangle, riverrun with steelhead rocketships, sarcophagi and sarsaparilla, sugar-free soda water, suitable for silksoaks, tin tabernacles and throbbing temples, the salted substitution of you for me and visa versa, wonder and winsome exultation, the reptilian wisdom of Yankeedom and the ever-fêted

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zymosis, though let us not omit His marketplaces, department stores, all floors, and their pomped coteries, barbarous butchers, decant bankers, evangels who strap feathers to fish, commanding flies, blind beggars beggaring all written prescription, a slackbellied dancer, canvassing for sonnet crowns, and genuine cowboys with mirrored eyes, there’s brass bistoury and scarlet barrooms, there’s where they make wigs from plaits of brunet hair and minds from yellow paper, there’s a peripatetic baker but no candlestick maker, He’s finished fashioning light, been there, done that, as the newer testaments will affix, His huts to and for, His homemade ironworks, steelworks, plasticworks, rubber and siliconworks, sites of pomp deconstruction and the blackberry patch, resigned office buildings, antiquated granaries, granny’s drywall hatchery, the steady tick of His whitewashed chicken roosts and plain pine stalls, horseless pens for pigs, cattle, and men, the tippy T of a real red Indian, my brother’s leaking mausoleum and the poet’s drunken pink and blue adobe, penny-ante apartment buildings and tall women’s flats, in short, all such compound crematoria, dust bunnying dust, ash jug, jug jug, ash, all erected from such rabbit-fingered coptics such as him who shot my legs out from under me, the lucky sod, out there singing the ballad of the bandoleer, no doubt, and me here, without, nonetheless I’ll dance by his figged moonlight and genuflect to the bend sinister across his breast, he’s a good man and a better shot, I’m proof of that, sure as the pudding I’m standing in, do you wonder whether the dawn will come, knowing there’s to be a battle, perhaps it will forego the day, after all, it’s seen plenty of tanks and tons of artillery, witnessed men struck like matchsticks and horses shatter like November leaves, the day’s got no more need of numbers, and might just stay, hidden behind night’s day, or owlish prey, moon to moon, replete once one poor slob catches a masher whilst simmering a bit of tea, thighdeep in muck, he was, his rank indistinct, the shoulders having been stripped of insigne to thwart said snipers, or having gotten nowhere fast in this man’s army, this army of ein, he had a fine freckled face and

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cheeks broadly aspired as a carpenter’s thumbs, an honest boy, anyone could see that, even caught such as he was, curled around the lick of flame by which he was slowly heating his tin cup, content as if he were standing in stocking feet in a wood-floored kitchen, complete, blue-flowered curtains unflapping in the frosted double window, the stove’s aglow and there’s a faint smell of potato and the promise of sausage, someone’s filled a pitcher with yellow onions and set it out like a bowlful of chrysanthemums, and as the black wind wrassles its walrus, it’s lovely to be brewing a bit of tea, even if you have to cut off your eyelids and use them for cups, but it’s all a clutch of bird calls now, now that the youngster’s gone up in a fluff of smoke, spattering the sides of the slit with slip turned stick then too-solid stuck, it’s better than cement, more direct, in any case, than even slavery, which, when the final account’s tallied, and we’re all standing around with one finger up our bums, thoughtfully supplied by the quartermaster, one bum per person, no matter how ill-suited to the task, you’ll get your cap-clutcher, your unshaven greasy hollow-eyed rotten-toothed fortuneless fuck to palm out whilst you insert a digit deep in his aching behind, even then slavery will be seen as a system of applied labor, it’s abstract, to a certain extent, dependant on composition rather than representation, quite theosophic, when you get right down to it, you see what I mean, it’s the difference between either and or all over again, don’t roll your tongue at me, you know it’s true, when the final note’s sounded, and we’re gathered by the barren banks of the unvexed brown water, Suellen, Scarlett and me, it’s the Wishka that’ll take the cake, that and a silver-plated set of unpenned sorrows, for there’s nothing worse than a paper cut, given the algebra of universal sets and the principle of absolute complements, did I mention I missed my boots, good boots they were, to boot, they waltzed every evening last April, with or without me, they danced in Paris, before it was Paris, you know, back when it was just a hole in the ground and a foregone conclusion, as this will be, not Paris, I mean, but the other thing, a matter of fact, Paris, city of lights and apostrophes,

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how I miss those boots, I know they’re of no use to me, that’s not the point to sentiment, is it, after all, we’re way past having deeds hinged to feelings, that was the day before tomorrow, the twelfth, if it will be, but do you think there will be a morrow, I’ve asked repeatedly, you’re right again, for an armless man, you have a habit of pointing things out, therein lies the nub, and have I congratulated you on your fine fire, it takes a real man to rub sticks together and come up with something, I tried it once and found myself with a small basket, large enough for a smallish picnic or largish infant, but oddly resistant to flame, flame-retardant, if you want to know the honest truth, and why shouldn’t you, why can’t we speak frankly, especially now, especially me, though if you like, I’ll affect a German accent and you can sound American, it’s all the same to me, squatting before such a fine fire, did you notice how the picnic crept in back there, like ants sneaking on black wire feet, you could spend all day swatting or stamping, or someone could, not us, we couldn’t stamp or swat if our lives depended on it, and they will, you can be sure of that, one’s life always depends on the one thing one can’t possibly do, such as be two, why, it’s a test of faith, and why shouldn’t it be, after all, no one’s handing out rounds of fresh buttered bread and terra cotta pots of pink salt, it’s sink or swim, draw or drink, and I can’t think of a better way to spend one’s evening, the sky’s black as a government envelope and we’ll stand-to come morning, or one of us will, assuming the rosy-fingered don’t wrap itself round our throats first, what have you made there, John, lamb-stew, just joshing, just having you on, it’s a joke, Jeff, to think you’d have a thumb-snip of mutton, I expect you’ve made a hash of it, using, correct me if I’m wrong, there’s a nice chunk of firewood you can cosh me on the cap with if I make a mistake, using the unyolked marrow of a boar’s jawbone, and a crow’s gritted craw, stuffed, if I’m not sorely s’éraille, we’re speaking frankly now, aren’t we, or is it just me, with roast walnuts and quince, the fresh spoor of a centaur, a couple of buttered parsnips, sliced thin as lined paper, the plum of a pawpaw, a swarm of walleyed lobster, a

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footsore chocolate Labrador, skinned by a quilted whore in a pinafore, wielding a brass whisk, why such mouthfeels should be outlawed, and so they are, via the whereas and wherefore and therefore and furthermore whosoever and evermore and moreover forevermore never again amen, gehen the fire-new way of the tyrannosaur, as such stirrings shall heretofore be perfected by signors standing outside corner drugstores, wearing blue pharmacists’ aprons with their names sewn above the left breast pocket, they will iron their aprons every morning, the tip of the iron carefully pressed around the loops and curls of their consonants and delicately dipped at the prick and pluck of their vowels, as leaves, seeking leave, do leaves of leaves deceive, it’s a first-rate plat du jour you’ve got there, my friend, seasoned right, with a pinch of sel and a fistful of Pfeffer, my mouth’s watering like a fresh warden, I bet even our enemy’s salivating at the stew you’re brewing, this ragout, this thickthin soup, he’s dreaming of croutons and lard de poitrine, it’s butter for his spinach, the speechless bastard, he’s out there now, juices running at the mouth, teeth dark as a tinman’s bitch, he’s got no neck, but a wolf’s wooly pelt grows directly from his shoulders and shags of oilskin anoint his sour and hairy ass, he bites into another bloody birdwing, and sucks the air with an ox’s slit nostrils, the foul stench of him smelt in Kensington, Karlsruhe and Cucamonga, they’ll pour it into small molds and make smaller lead soldiers, suitable for melting, and all the while, us here in our smocking, why look at you, as if you could do such a thing, you’re as adorable as an Alpine schoolgirl, are you wearing your hair in braids then, you should, it suits you, whereupon, as I was dogmatizing, you are a good country cook and a better pallbearer, after all, despite the cold and heat, I’m in no ready rush, it’s still night, and you can hear them creeping about out there, setting up wire, cutting through wire, patching lines and practicing television, the knack of a nail on a split board and the hawk of an avuncular cough, creeping about, like ants, I should say, but don’t worry, you won’t catch me at that again, it’s the outdoors that puts me in mind

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for a meal, but bless my toes if I’ve got the stomach for it, no, you’re right again, right as wildflowers and dear Winifred, what a lovely girl, I’d marry her if she were her sister, the one with the turned-up nose and the well-bitten nails, she’s raw as an oyster and warm as a cuspidor, she warbles like a wren, the worrywart, and can whistle My Sweetheart’s Gone to Warsaw backwards and forwards and now and again, she sits in her wiffletree and loves nobody but me, though I’ve the guts of an ostrich, you’re absolutely spot-on, dead to rights, thank you for pointing that out, you’re a thoughtful fellow, you use your head, you’re the sort that makes something of a crisis, puts it in a pastry-shell, adds a dab of sherry and a shot of flame, voilà, crisis jubilee, though I applaud your capital lucubration, you have sense, son, as the French would say, you add one to one with creamy progression, and soon as we get to Paris, you’ll be the chat of la ville, they’ll speak curiously of your accomplishments and someone’s sure to put up a bronze statue, hovering hatless over an eternal flame and a fleet of daffydowndillies, yes, of course they should give you a horse, and a chestful of metal, they’ll give you that gratis, the committee for the erection of monumentals which feels no need to capitalize, having quite enough of that in the day-to-day, the distinguished members of the committee, to wit, the Hon. François Crever, son of a miller, as a boy, François loved nothing more than to sit by a hayrick and enjoy its many discomforts, the musty air of the drying grasses and the needles of straw poking persistently through the rough weave of his father’s broadcloth shirt, François wanted to be a poet, he’d heard, somewhere, that poets see things differently, or not at all, and as François knew from the time his soft spot cemented, that he, aussi, saw things differently, he could spend a month naming a trove fledgling, trying to find that perfect combination of the mythic and the contemporary, the thing that rang somehow said and yet still unspoken, that connoted both the bird’s Iscariot wing and its oblivious eye, the boy took a hunk of chalk and scratched Greek gods, down to the demi-, on the stone walls of his father’s water mill, mindful of the

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kidneys of wheat inside, he fed his sparrow pomegranate seeds and gooseberries and wrote odes to its future oracles, the sky, he noted, was mostly metaphorical, while the elbow was not, and the boy took to wearing caps made of flour sacks, bleached till close to blinding, then re-sprinkled with his father’s second-fruit, keeping head and shoulders perpetually powdered, he wore wooden shoes and taught his sparrow tricks, to swoop and loop-de-lou, to rise and sharply dive, to flutter and land in the gentle cup of its master’s hand, to drink from a thimble of water and peck seed from his pink tongue, he tied a length of silk to one of the sparrow’s legs and the bird flew directly overhead wherever they walked, fancy giving flight to fancy, and one plumless night, as the boy dreamt, he dreamt he was in a great unroofed barn, black rafters slotting the sky like bottoms of boats seen from the sea-bottom, the barn was full of stepped warbling, sweet song cannoning the ear, sweet singer rifling the eye, he saw a thousand husbanded wrens and a thousand single pelicans, a thousand swans and a thousand pigeons, a thousand peacocks, plucked, their blind beauty more blinded, a thousand kites and ducks and orioles, turtledove and quail, racked in guarded vitality, a thousand hamstrung hawks and ruff-rung pheasants, a thousand nominative owls, shrieking in skulled desolation, a thousand barren storks and a thousand fell falcons, a thousand spat eggs spotting the straw, and in those scattered warrens where nests had been excavated, pecked the chick of the lark and the nightingale, scavenging for seed among the scavenged bones of their scavenged brothers, finding the doubled corn double sweet, the unsung barn was black and white with bird, and the boy trembled and woke to find the bright leg of his sparrow tied to his bedpost, and only the leg, and the boy wept and understood he was to study law, whereupon he did, and sobriety jacketed him like a statue’s verdigris and his bones baked to bare facts, in testate time he was known as a solid solicitor, and, after he amended a certain codicil in the governor’s contract to purchase a particular plot of land, it was a small plot, pocket-sized, involving no more than four men,

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strategically placed, amended it to the tune of a Johnny Mercer song, he was named judge of the township, where he proved himself sight-worthy and embarked on greater and more sacramental displays of sound and common sense as a circuit justice, his most famous decision being the striking of a miners’ camp, which caused the miners and mine owners no end of headache but saved an excellent number of Chinamen and canaries, in due course, then took his tea and final soda crackers in a red wing chair and was given a mahogany-backed brass plaque with his name and seasons of service engraved in fancy Huguenot script, the whole cast in paraffin and set on a stack of dice, there were three rounds of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” in admired French, because all French will settle in the South, by the sea, and named to the Committee, and Mr. Reginald Pecock, who walked life in an uncircumflexed line from candle to cave, Mr. Pecock never used fewer than three forks for any seated meal and insisted on rigor, liberally applied, Mr. Pecock believed in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried, He descended into hell, the third day he rose again from the dead, he ascended into heaven, sits at the right hand of God, the Father almighty, from thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead, and in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic and apostolic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting, amen, Mr. Pecock made no bones about it, for he thought it augured well to bend one way but once, and Miss Emily Otis, not that Emily Otis, you monk, the other one, the one with the freckles and plenty of sass, Miss Emily wept great golden tears whenever she contemplated the need for memorials, but had to admit of their necessity, she was a level-headed girl, she would balance a glass of port at parties and the gang would laugh like gangbusters, Miss Emily would wed, tuck two or three chickens to bed, to bed, sleepy-head, she never lost her temper, keeping it

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safely secured by a thousand silver threads, Miss Emily insisted on netted beauty and was glad as gladiolas to meet Frau Shöpfen, the young widow who wore her weeds so prettily, she kept a snap of her honey in a scrimshaw locket and smelt always of loganberry and dew, the two ladies and gentlemen were augmented by eight more, Messrs. J. Kunst, Simon Fitzgerald, Jean-Paul Luc, the renown horseman, Father Matthew L’Hippocampe, Mrs. J.Q. Windsor, Dr. James Jones, and the twins, Peter and Mark, who took minute notes and tidied up after meetings, the Memorial Committee determined and decreed that hereafter all authorized memorials were to be distinctly oversized, naturally rendered, and show the subject staring off into some indeterminate horizon, preferably on horseback, the figure, not the horizon, though perhaps that was a mistake after all, what do you think, after all, it’s your breath they’ll be dipping in brass and, watch, your legs’ll be gone green before your legs, that’s a good one, that is, that’s ripe, chum, high, as the Bürgermeisters say, locking their thumbs across their tum-tums, the fat Phoenician bastards, though I know envy’s a sin and lust a chore, and that they suffer, I doubt less that I not doubt more, they suffer and suffer from such suffering, for greed clutches their gilded guts and sloth purples their goutish feet, they’ve got a touch of the boiteux, you know, it comes and goes, weather-bound as a book of Tyrian sonnets, but just between us, I could use a strain of hot arthritis, and I freely confess I miss my sabots, faithful they were, despite their footloose nature, though who between us is not given to a well-turned ankle and the casual flip of a thinboned wrist, why hand and foot are the torturous measure all things, the first measures, coming most conveniently to mind, fearful they were, like their sad country cousins, for if this was a map, and I’m not saying it isn’t, that’s not germane to the argument, it’s a minor premise, nothing more, for my syllogism, which, if I’m very lucky and it’s about goddamned time, will prove an occludent tautology, such as if this were a map, we’d be home by now, we’re barely a foot away from where you stand and I could walk

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there on my hands, by anyone’s estimation and on anyone’s command, we’d be here in a jiffy, why the sea would mean nothing to us, we’d sniff at the rage of valleys and achoo each well-crept hilltop, and once we were back, we’d never look back, we’d would stay, you and I, put, incisively anchored as Wales, welded as Éire, steady as the flower of Scotland, you and me, in perplexity, till they blot the eye on our requiescat and buttonhook the final amen, what’s that, there’s mud in your aye, that’s nice, Johnny, a good riposte, amigo, you’re not napping, as anyone could see, for anyone would answer where you answer back, your amicus curiae has real horsepower, almost American in its equanimity, how is the stew going, I hope there’s fish, I could use a spot of snapper, hope, that’s what I most miss, Johnny, a sense of hope, I’ve seen the pictures, and it was a beautiful thing, creamcolored, though it’s hard reading the old photographs, marbled, as they say, with light crunchy fat, slightly golden, slightly singed, no wings, whoever said that’s a rotten liar, hope’s heavy-set, shaped like a pear or perhaps a pineapple, and polished as a courtesan’s welcome, polished to a shine you could shave by and never suffer a nick, if you slit it surgically to expose a representative cross-section, you’d find meat sweet as butter beneath the fat, meat packed pink as a lady’s lips but with the bed-banging potency of a water buffalo and if you cut in farther, there’s a netting of nerve, thin and blue as mapped rivers, then muscle, not just any muscle, not such unstrung sadly sported by you and me, but the old kind, favored by Fortinbras and his set, carved from tulipwood and ivory, and finally, the ebony pith, with its firm, dense grain and inconstant resolve, my grandfather used it to build credence, some of which stand in other people’s parlours, still, the stuff retains a certain spongy interiority, which sops up other things, such as boots and hips and ceiling-tacks and ravages and rings, and this dustbin quintessence, the which of which smells primarily of vanilla, rims the center of the center, this muck-made marrow is not airy, as some have claimed, nor purplered or liver-rich, it’s a dull olive lattice, composed of three things, salt, naturally, for a sailor’s health and a

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soldier’s salary, dirt, laced with iron, to ensure perpendicular growth and avoid excessive deformity, and dry lime, for quicksetting and the fast dissolve, to be unfinished in the final frame, the sad faded slob, still, we chew on chalk and smile, and there’s a bright spot in that, isn’t there, my friend, the sea’s full of such sustaining shrimp and the wood abounds with staggering possibilities, not just the sentries, for don’t forget your deserters, they’re the most hopeful of the lot, they’re wild-eyed with aspiration, over-foaming with future, they’re the runners, sure as shot, not like you and me, more proportionate-natured we, still, no matter what they foretell, we’re staying, put, waiting for the dawn, what do you mean we have no choice, we most certainly do, and I’ll clock any dick that says different, sure as I’m to be called Stubby and you Rings, why we have the choicest choice, to go, that is, or stay, stay or go, go or stay, see what I’m saying, note the perfect pivot, conjoining choice to choice like roads to Rome, like the pitch of a pendulum or the bit in-between scale pans, well, you’re right as a foregone conclusion, that’s equally applicable, still, we’re lousy with choice, not just those eggs and nits plucked plump from the groin-pit, but options dainty and stiffly undecided as here and there, hot and cold, then and now, high and low, life and death, tea and crumpets, hymns heard and those left bachelored, and, not to state the obvious, but it’s the French that pinched our preferences, they handed them out free as pillow-peppermints, then kipped them back, they’ve got feet made of pink erasers and ruminant souls, and even in that you see or’s eyebolt, have I commended you yet on the flattering cut of your vernacular, why, you look amaranthine as Mister Telquell, all green and ocean-gray, it suits you, I remember on the boat over, before that, when I woke this morning, there, I left for the train to catch the boat to bring me to the trucks to cart me to where I began walking, before that, well, I recall with a woodcut’s grave precision that before I woke the morning I left for the train to catch the boat to bring me to the trucks, etcetera, I was walking with some purpose and greater determination, there, it was light in that thin brown way one

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reads about in liberal magazines, clouds appended overhead and sun smeared everywhere, there, the road I was on was tactile, reasonably pebbled and socked with pocks of soft illustrative dirt, there were gentle pastures on either side of me, one full of sheep, wanting shearing, the other, horses, well-kept, with the heavy hooves and shining shoulders of animals accustomed to the dray, there was a church, there in the distance, though what distance was hard to gauge, for there the earth was very flat and consequently compressed, there was a church with spatial designs, such as is found where and when a town begins to aspire to a city, it’s best to begin with the church, vanitas honor, says the caterpillar, and it’s something upon which we can all agree, for doesn’t the fire seem friendly, especially at first, watch it there, it was a largish church, cut of soft, clean stone, its lines uniformly parallel and triangulate, all signs and cosigns gestured to a golden statue atop the tallest spire, a larger-than-life but otherwise very realistic portrayal of Mother and Child, wherein Our Lady was, instead of clasping Babe to beatific breast or slinging Him on one steel hip while balancing a basket of wash on the other, holding the Lamb, out, extended at what could be called a right angle, Theotokos, indeed, but of what people, and as we pondered the footpath, for there were plenty of us by now, you were there as well, buttons burnished, hair unparted, we broke out packs of kiwi seed and snacked, enjoying a sip or two of good Rhine wine, some of the regular fellows started singing, Mars is braw in crammasy, Venus in green silk goun, and cook shook his gravy-ladle adding, the auld mune shak’s her gowden feathers, the irregulars shouted, Their starry talk’s a wheen o’blethers, the lieutenant, a rare McCormack tenor, rang out crystalline, Name for thee a thouchtie sparin’, giving the nod to the sergeant major, who baritoned, Earth, thou bonnie broukit bairn, handing off to our attentive Corporal Dumpling, But greet, an’ in your tears ye’ll droun, and the entire company, every last mother’s son, save yourself, whooped, The haill clanjamfrie, and by then, there we were, right where we’d left off, only farther, at the first field, not that field previously

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mentioned, but a new field, encased in low walls of stone such as are unbedded by the farmer’s plow and set aside to be used in the building of low stone walls, some of the fellows wanted to stay alongside the parapets while others maligned the apple trees and maples aligning the pasture, for a thing cannot have two shades, you see, but the captain counted us off one-two-three and the ones went up first, on account of their undisputed primacy, I was a lucky number two, a saved second to second a second assay, but H. M., standing just before me, he wrapped his paw around the warm stock of his rifle and held it tight as a mother cuddles her tot on the train, his fingers went white under the black of his nails and he licked his lips and rubbed his chin steady with the back of his free hand, repeatedly, his ears grew rosy as the daylight and he began to fuss in his wallet awhile, pulling out bits of paper and unfolding them, he’d study on each, deciding what it meant, or if it was for keeps, but each time, he’d refold the sheet along its original pleats and tuck it back inside, beneath the sheet previously examined, next he counted out his money which took more time, for he had squirreled away all his draw, he was one who planned a future, then fished a stub of pencil from his hip pocket, extracted one of the aforementioned slips of paper and wrote down an amount in careful, clean hand, dating the same and signed it, I was his witness, and the amounts exact to the penny, I tell this now to unseal any doubt as to my motives, for I stand accused, John, of circumnavigation, but I have no global interests, nor prone to revolution, why, by all reports I am witted thick as cream, my brains calf no great conceptions and leave the golden ox ungored, facts to me are simple as simple facts, as sets of noses and roses and tricolored flags, and the fact was he adjusted the leather straps on his back and wished aloud he had better socks, something was always caught between his toes, he said, it was distracting, and I’ve no reason to doubt his charge, there’s no profit in such argument, as wool will have its way, and who’s to say what’s fabrication, he decided to dash off a postcard back home, tawoo, I’m sorry, taewoo, you say tatou, well, tatou to you too,

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I’m afraid I’m not following, Johnny, could you strike me a flint or draw me a map, sorry, that was a bank shot, boy, nothing personal, toooo woooo, oh, certainly, and a reasonable question it is, too, though I’m afraid, as with so many reasonable questions, and we have so many reasonable questions, and I’d even go so far to say, with every reasonable question, if I weren’t afraid someone’d slip me a recipe for gingerbread, isn’t that what Hansel and Gretel crumbed up along the trail, no, so you recall it otherwise, well, then, augment my understanding, take your time, sir, for there’s no chance I’ll wander off while you’re amplifying your aeration or shedding illume on that particulate trail of infamy, I’ve the attention of the summer sun, you say it was soda bread those two spilt along the forest and ginger’s what housed the witch withal, well, I’ll admit, that’s ben trovato, a perfect example of close auctorial attention, nothing slips between your fingers, boyo, in some circles, you’re so avaunt you’ve your own axis, which favors softcloth caps and Spanish omelets, but still I beg a difference, the kinder wouldn’t toss off a good round of soda, as any red-winged mother could tell you, and so the story’s a crock and a sham, those kids went willingly, snacking on their spice-loaf all the while, the greedy piglets, they’d no notion of conservation or the mythic wood, it’s a crossing, a bonus unround, why leave a line of crumbs the way you’ve come when you’re so insistently going forth, soup to nuts, fork to knife, there’s no retreat, not on such flimsy evidence, not when, for a few cents more, you could buy a guide or a couple of native bearers, glad to carry your haversack on their heads and sing ennobling songs of the local terrain and the kingdom of the risen sun, a future conditional, Lord knows, no one gives up fresh meat for a shack of weathered gingerbread, I don’t care how many peppermint pinwheels you append, still, the faraway fact of the matter remains, and here’s where I’d ask you to pay close attention, Johann, we’re getting to the part where everything changes and yet stays the same, if I had a cross, here’s where I’d stick it, and if I had a lollipop, here’s where I’d lick it, because the smoke grew thick as glass then

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and smelt of mandarins, it made you think of little girls and other close imponderables, here’s where the red car pulls up and the conductor calls for twos and threes, so we get on, very orderly, duly leaving behind the others, there’s a tense moment when one of them tries to pass himself off for a second, but the conductor, a man with a remarkably large head, bald as the inside of a mouth, wound his watchstem once and sent the boy back to the front, and as I’ve got tooth and tongue, I spit and attest that once we got going, we never looked back, though there’s more on that later, the red bus is longer than one expects, however comfortable, two men to a seat, two seats to a row, I lost count of the number of rows, they multiply so readily, though the seats are made of good green leather, stout as a boar’s bladder, buttoned along the sides with small brass tacks, one could flip down a mahogany armrest if one liked, or take a small satin pillow with the words, Kann er was inscripted in rose, from under the seat in front of you and fold your arms across your chest and rest, while stewards, small men with smaller hands, walk the aisle, dispensing more packets of seeds, plain, salted, or with a jam doughnut, though if you ask politely, you can exchange them for a slice of Saure Nieren and some new potatoes or a couple of cigarettes and little silver cups of buttermilk and beer, one of the boys had a flask of Kirschwasser and was passing it round to the delight of the others, who clapped him on the back and called him Padre, the bus bumps along, the road laid straight until we turn, revealing an accordion-type pleat in the middle of the bus, naturally dividing the men into them and us, and a fight broke out along these lines, whereupon it’s decreed by the driver there will be no more fraternizing between rows, though we could, if we wanted, sing in rounds, and so we sing, the mass of us sang Kumbayah and Frère Jacques and Komm, Süsser Tod and as we start on Row Row Row Your Boat, a small cadre splinters off and begins shooting dice out the window, it’s a fool’s game, we agree, for no one could see how they fell, but still they persist, declaring some winners and snatching up the script of others, far as I can tell there’s no pattern to it whatso-

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ever, though the conductor seems to have a hand in it, making off with more than one wristwatch, by this time the sun is sinking over the fields, which have become vineyards and rice-paddies, all in one, the cool abused earth silvered with fruit, the sky beautiful, purple-gray, portential as a newborn’s bruised eyelids, each of us agreed it was deep, some swore they also saw pommes de terre and de Ruggieri, they were suddenly that hungry, and as luck will have it, Cook brought out an enormous platter of bitty buns, tiny cinnamon biscuits smothered in orange icing, we fell upon them like first formers, and spent the next few minutes naming things spotted out the window, I came up with block and tackle and Carl put his finger on chocolate, Winfred cornered hope, Black Jack got horizon, and the twins put their heads together and pronounced stainless steel, which everyone acknowledged could not be topped, besides and moreover, it was dawning on us that we were reaching a destination, for Freiberger began putting on his pack and he was normally the most oneirocritical of the men, so the rest of us followed suit, and as we did, some in the other section begin praying, it started soft and scattershot, an Ave heaved heavenward here and there, a man murmuring amen, then the gunners take up crying Kyrie Eleison, which puts the second platoon into a frenzy of applause, Sapiencia Dei Patris, notes the Captain, Potencia Dei Patris, answers the sergeantat-arms, they shake hands and salute the conductor, who pulled the silk bell-rope and announced, “Agincourt,” in such a comic way that we instantly felt better, one of the men puts on his iron cap so his longish hair juts out all round the underneath and he stood stock still and paraphrases, Full of peat and made a’ goog, We, a dowf an dowie brood, what cougher blocher caller meit, Full weary, eftir couth weep, Perfay, mon wo and wreuch spreits, Sakbbit, sary, with glar gladderrit, hiddowus weirs, tramorts gorgeit, Our blaiknit hewmounds preif tha keek, Jakkis in sle an trowis siccarly, Soch bonnie wichtis will na greet crammasy tyres for bairns unbelly’d, our douce lasses, maculait for-tiret, Gawsy lads, brute for bale, Makaris brief our tayken tale, whereupon young

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M’Naghten tossed his hat, shouting, “A fag for those by God protected, Liberty’s a scabby priest, seals for sirens were suspected, whisky spilt to tease the peace,” and everyone took whatever coins they had on them and likewise threw them in the air, and whosoever got heads paled, thinking they are for sure doomed to the front, and likewise and contrarily, them that tailed got into a lather, figuring they’re destined for the rear, but the Captain holds up a telegram from HQ that countermanded this altogether, so heads would be chiefly assigned, no, Johnny, not posterior, that’d be pretty pat, don’t you think, the old switcheroo of the sign, a Michelangelo hardly worth mentioning, the confusion absolute and thus easily abated, for if one had a mind, one could simply ride the white pendulum, side, that is, to side, the temporary transposition’s logistically and pointedly useless, a practicum solely for the Manichæan world, a world favored by metaphor and the man in the street, no, the isolate fact of the matter is heads were sent west and tails headed east, save Freiberger, who’d had the luck of landing sideways and so was not immediately shot on the spot but rather, and you’ll slap me for this, kissed on both cheeks and sent home, where he did not perish by the pistoled hand of a once-loving woman or incensed man, and similarly, where he did not grow gray surrounded by tow-topped tots with strawberrykissed lips who called him Boompa as they fished lemon sours and licorice bits from his great coat pockets, but rather went on much as he had before, no more or no less, no better or no worse, no or, for that matter, at all, for Freiberger by nature lacked any tock by which to measure his tick, and thus by the time Freiberger unpetaled his bough, he had become a local river, reasonably deep, with a steady current, good for Sunday boating and Saturday fishing, claiming only a few luckless lives now and again, as luck would have it, I had a mind to head west, my understanding was our company was to guard or attack the donjon, which I’d not noticed, not before, but the fog had rolled in and my vision was constringed, I heard the lark and the nightingale, and much confusion among chickens, there was the hearty tramp of a boat-

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load of boots behind me, an orchestrate footfall such right left right left right right as has been heard from time immemorial, and we ourselves went on for some time in this same fashion, occasionally spying a spring of incipient heather or the grand spine of a milk thistle passing beside one’s brogan, bringing a tear to many a good man’s eye, it was cooler than we’d expected, you nod, Jean, and you’re a wise man at that, it’s always cooler than one expects, especially around the back of the neck, but there’s nothing to do but keep breathing, that’s the secret, just keep breathing, there you go, out in out in, never mind the mustard, keep breathing, out in out in out out in, there’s nothing to it, out in out in out in out in out in out in out in out in out in out in out in out in out in out in out in out out in out out out in slowly out and sweetly in, deeper now, don’t be afraid, let your mother rest her hand on your chest and watch her smile, go safely out, it’s more dangerous in, but still you go, it’s a bit like falling in love, in and out out and in, out in out out sweetly out why such songs we have that’re worth singing should be sung in the bush, and if I had legs, I’d throw my arms around your neck and kiss your lamby cheek, you’re a golden-faced boy, you with curls the color of seafoam and your heart warm as a cup of milk tea, you’re a good man, flattered by sun and shade, why if I had a pipe, I’d play it, and if I had a tourniquet, I’d apply it, but there you go, you’re breathing easy now, wondering about the dawn, don’t deny it, Jose, you’re peering at the sky, searching for purple in the black, listening for the chirr of that eastern lark, but this is but false disgrace, son, for what is light but the lack of dark, and what is dark but lesser light, your complexion herein lies complete, and therefore needs no further predication, I’ve got a good feeling about this, as if I were laying outstretched under a sea-green tree, popping clouds with my pupils, did I mention Freiberger would gradually grow blind, his eyes chilled to the deepest blue, his smile summarily indiscriminate, I suspect he was happier thus, as, it may be fairly argued, who amongst us might not arguably be, relieved as he was of the buttery obligation to specify his response, smile he

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did, and just kept breathing, that’s the stuff, in out out in out in in in out out out out out, he emptied so prettily, pretty as a pitcher, unjugged as a lapin, we would have wept but we had to keep breathing, so we beggared our breath and snuck sips of sorrow on the side, a few of the fellows took to fishing and some went swimming, we never heard from them again, but Freiberger welcomed the pennies me and a couple others pitched in, out in out in, he granted all our wishes as if he were a well and we approached the donjon with renewed purpose, like hounds to the hunt, we harried each other’s heels as we headed toward the tall unsightly tower and then I woke, but briefly, I woke and wondered where I was, and why, there were cockle shells under my shirt and the smell of baked walnuts tangled in my hair, I woke and wondered what had become of my friends and how were my enemies, I wept for such wondering, my tears ran tongueless down my temples to season my unturned mind, and the man next to me was groaning and another down the line screamed, my father used to say hell’s breaths are the screams of man, but I think he was wrong about that, it’s whimper then silence that aspires the damned, insufflate in marble or ash, one stands, unmoved, the other scatters, unmade, Ghost to ghost, no thing added to nothing, to nothing’s credit on no thing’s account, and I screwed closed my eyes against this constancy and wished I could cover them in copper, but luckily I fell back, asleep, and my unit was almost at the gate now, behind which stood the donjon, the gate itself was forty feet tall and half as wide, the door a hardened horror, oak, possibly, or ash, pierced with foot-long iron nails, thick as a man’s hand, the wood softly pocked with blisters and scabs, huge rusted thorns, twisted and crooked, wreathed the roof so if it fell it would run through a line of men to be drawn back up to wiggle on their hooks before being cast out again, Jesus, it was a fine fettle we’d come across, a muckle of a mess, for the door was our welcome, the walls it conjoined composed of sheets of Anzeichen stone, shorn from some Northern hilltop where grim viz’d Goths buried their better members in hillocks overlooking the sea, there was not a fis-

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sure to be seen in these walls, the blocks packed tight as if woven by the Parcae, some of our hearts sank like cherrystones, while others cheered and tossed their caps, believing ours to be a defensive posture, seeing themselves tucked safe inside as beetles in a sarcophagus, you say guy, possibly, I forget which is properly multiplicate and which stands à leu leu and which more simply passes, you’re sharp right in that regard, it was a Parian structure, you could tell by the satirical cut of the chisel, here, and there, so the shadow winks exactly and the truth of our boot-licked plight lies roundly in one’s eyes and ayes, we bolted our brows, resolved to our rawboned situation, we bayoneted our rifles and kissed our reflection in the shinging steel, those that thought themselves defenders sewed small silver stars to their shoulders and began addressing one another as “Comrade,” while those of us who believed we were on the offense turned our jackets inside out to show off the soft brown lining and grasped each others arms, bleating “Brother,” then I, who both sides called Nespasien, or Four-Eyes, I took my white handkerchief and affixed it to my bayonet like a flag and began waving it in unconditional surrender, I offered up a communal cup of der Muckefuck and a crust of unbaked bread, still poor Platzhirsch caught a round shot by a man in a red plaid cap and went down like a mouthful of marmite, and there was no turning back, we assumed our positions and fell to drawing lots amongst ourselves, the first group who got the short stick was marched in the middle and strafed, they pulled themselves into a unit and knelt, steadying their arms as if to shoot back, a large ragged one shouted an order and a portly one with cheeks inflamed by roseola passed it on, the men grimaced down the length of their weapons and were cut in half by machine guns on both sides, cut into quarters therefore, the boy in front of me died with a sigh, his head fell to one side and his cheek rested on another man’s shoulder, and the other man, used to comforting his own children, put his arm around the lad and kissed the top of his head, there, he said, there, and he died, and one man dragged himself from the circle, blood was coursing down his legs and

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the bones of his hips were showing, an awful sheer white unpeeled from shanks of purple meat, still he inched himself along, quiet, towards us, trying to get back, his fingers dug at the dirt while his feet squirmed like fish at the bottom of a boat, he got close, I could see it in his eyes, he looked right at me, Johnny, right at me with a look I’ll never forget, a look that was the full measure of the man, that put his heart on a platter heaped with hope and salted strings of need, he wanted to live, John, wanted it more than ever a man wanted for anything, for it’s not a thing, you see my meaning, it’s the breath of the thing he was wanting, the aforementioned rhythm and rhyme, he looked at me full of my time and he wanted, and his desire was needle-pure and so it pierced me, it was my first wound, and the man looked at me and saw me still standing, still prevaricating, still searching for meaning, still chewing on the bit of gristle I called purpose, still, in short, consumed with facts and theorems, and he groaned then, and coughed, and died, and I woke and put my hand to my side and drew it back and there was plenty of blood and a good clean scratch, nothing, that is, that wasn’t also settled fact, and I found my legs and set to composing a jig in honor of the fallen man, but red-haired M. Suçon came along, and said, M. Suçon

have you been west before,

myself

compared to what,

M. Suçon

true enough,

myself

you just thought you should prepare me,

M. Suçon

for what,

myself

once I get inside,

M. Suçon

chances aren’t good,

myself

there’s little enough in any event,

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M. Suçon

and too much in each,

myself

exactly,

M. Suçon

on the other hand,

myself

there’s that,

M. Suçon

always,

myself

what you mean to say,

M. Suçon

come out with it,

myself

(sighs) palm trees... movie starts...,

M. Suçon

stars,

myself

television, naturally, computers...,

M. Suçon

comparters,

myself

it’s a whole new world,

M. Suçon

again,

myself

it can’t be helped,

M. Suçon

it never can,

myself

still,

M. Suçon

still,

myself

there’s this,

and he took a jelly doughnut from his pocket and silently ate, then left, and I took a scrap of paper from my pocket and a stub of a pencil and began to compose a list of things I hoped to see and never to see again, I divided them into two columns, then added a third, things I didn’t mind noting so long as they were kept well in the background, and other things which could

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be seen, but not heard, and upon finishing my list and folding it into four sections and slipping it into my breastpocket, I found myself along a wooded road, I wended withal under the shade of the mighty canopy, praying to meet dear Patience or sweet Charity along the way, though there was no possibility of Hope, she’s far too skittish for that and would soon snatch out your eyes as look at you, but I kept a nice blue collar, just in case, with a silver bell to warn the birds, and set out in the direction of the donjon, stopping now and again to welcome a wildflower and pet a stray kitten, it was a glorious day, Jack, and I no prisoner to my goal, the sun was full of vinegar and piss and the sky refused all ointment, every weed spit and smouldered, and blades of grass grew glint, each tree came tipped with lavender, and each rock, a filament, it was a glorious day, Jan, my chest was full as a robin’s breast, and just as apt to burst, there was sausage in my veins and roast pork beneath my feet, what’s worst you say, you callous bastard, how can you squat there armlessly stirring a pot of camp stew and feign sudden irony, it’ll get you nowhere, you know, that bit of levity one wears like a rubber nose in the face of cold terror, such weak crooked lenitive proves a man’s uncrutch, for unflappability and a sour sense of doom’s the last refuge of the devout, next thing you know you’ll go presbyterian and start kicking the cat-lickers, take my word for it, Ivan, there’s neither glory in disbelief nor salve in salvation, later it will be better, though, later there will be food on the high shelves and razors in the rose parlour, all breath shall reek of spearmint and satisfaction, later you and I shall walk, uccello sulla mano, through a glass door, on one side will be affixed a length of green tape to scale a man’s height, in feet, that is, and inches too, and if you look up and over, there is a video camera to attract our entrance and the expulsions of others, later we will ball butters of popcorn and ice slurpees and preen positively before a digital monitor in the back room, perched on a green leatherette chair between boxes of Ramen noodle soup, shrimp, perhaps, or pork, we will laugh to see ourselves historically, in black and white, having been willing

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to be, and in no danger of becoming, we will be amazed at the q.v. of our closed-circuit situation and its unending verity, for it’s a plain truth that color trivializes life, reminding us of other, similarlycolored things, things of staffed and distaffed meanings like rosebuds and bullet-wounds, you see the simile, it becomes a bit much, the cleft, I mean, for I know we shall glisten in the absence of the ticktack of our pigmentation, we will be black in places that come deep as desire’s smooth nub and your heart will snap at the alabaster veined in my eyes and there will be a marvelous clap of gray, fluted, with a long tapered neck, snapped off to reach the sweet bellied ointment, the gray will smell of amaranth, and be soft as lead powder and gentle as pigeon dust, dappled as a New England wave and timeless as the concentric canvas, shadowed as a skin of granite and bright as a summer slab of cement, your forearm will scream through the dark crescent of your sleeve, stronger by comparison, your hands beautiful, heart-breakingly rendered, the pale fingers longer, more defined, the fingers of a fire-god’s second movement, the pale fingers linger, more defiant, the tips glow from the friction of the unspun thread, the dip between the pale fingers a lacquered prepuce, promising ashen joy and eventual surrender, the web conjoining the pale thumb and forefinger turned to a trough from which the women of the town may safely draw water, will becoming well, the wrist gentle white as the dove secrets beneath her wing, there will be a clock running on-screen at the time, reporting the date, the hour, and the minute, denoting the slip slip slip of each salubrious second, proving our necessity and our permanence, for we are permanent fixed here, in time, as time past is time future and time present is time past and time future, there is nothing but that which was and will be, which is what is, and here we are, having nothing but time, being nothing but time, time past is time future and time present is forever and ever amen, we who walk above this running time, a nickel a bottle, ten cents a dime, it’s a penny for a pound of paper, but it beats being in the chips, which chips would you today, Sean, potato or corn, perhaps

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pork, shall they be curled or stripped or tipped into triangles, puffed into mini-balls or dusted with orange cheese powder or cool ranch dressing, be BBQ or macho nacho, imbedded with chilies and lime, salt and vinegared, or onioned and sour creamed or be flaming hot, choose, ma qui la morta poesi resurga, what tune hath thy calliope wrought, who he who he woowhee and rightly so, your questions so perfectly posed, my darling, balletic as a mug of beer, and soon as I find a clean pine plank, I will establish an arrondissement to handle all your concerns, but the real money will be in issuing permits, see Sally upstairs for fishing and the hunting of game, and Black Rod at Window Seven for theocratic regulations, questions pertaining to natural law and openfaced sandwiches, meantime, would you, could you, please select a beverage from one of our wall coolers and a personal hygiene product from Aisle Three, grape, certainly, hand sanitizer, of course, if you care for a sweet, go across the hall, next to the Department of Motor Vehicles, I recommend the white chocolates, they’re our most popular item, pale palliative to be sure, but then what, as the Head of Human Resources winked, isn’t, still, the Boston Baked Beans barely move, and we can’t give away the Mike & Ikes, or the Whatchamacallits, though the Mallo Cups and Atomic Warheads are going like gangbusters, I see you’re eyeing the small plastic puppy that wags its head when moved, note the spotted noggin’s cleverly attached by a bit of wire and weighted, perfect for dash-or floor-board, why this cute lil’ fella’ll provide hours of passenger enjoyment and something for Father to watch as he drives, you say you don’t drive, impossible, there’s no not driving, not here, not if you expect to get there, at any rate, and don’t come whining to me about the traffic, for that’s what ball bearings are for, we’re a proud people, sir, we like our flags magnetic, our pants pressed, and our presents wrapped in only red paper, this is where the murder occurred, right between the aisles, the corpse’s body’s badly bloated, the sea changes a man, management apologizes and hopes you will overlook the forensic techs scraping microfibers from the floor and an

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empty bottle from my lips, you didn’t hear it from me, but l’arbre de Judée, that’s the flowering one, while the rosewood’s dead as yesterday’s sun, you’re absolutely spot-on, John, it’s the mode of apprehension that sells Cheezits nowadays, mode of production’s for pollywogs and bootblacks, and you can rest assured photographs of the splatter will be used to prove conclusively such a trajectory could only have come from a mace, circa 1173, Christmas Eve, to be exact, unless it’s the day after, meantime, you can purchase a conciliatory candy bar, three for a dollar, I suggest you get four, we’re a proud people who know the value of creamy caramel and peanutty nougat and a great cookie crunch, this is our finest moment, my love, and if we could only see ourselves in digital, we’d know only positively when that moment passed and what we were doing and how we were wearing our hair, for we’ve come clean from our glass house and must go back to the land and set fire to the house and smash the garden, and here’s where I get confused, for yesterday, or the day before, I received a postcard with a picture of hula girls doing their hula dance in front of an orange orange sunset and a cup of black milk, and underneath, in jolly up-and-down cursive, was captioned, “I am Sir Brian, brave as a lion,” and I wept and nestled deeper into the side of my trench, I wept and wished we could speak plainly, just us two, but we’re crowded here like bumblebees in the sea, shrimp, you say, indeed, do you hear them breathing, out in out in in in sometimes I think I’ve lost my mind from all the aspiration, shrimp, you say, indeed, I pressed myself deeper into my slit of earth, for I am a proud people, and would have my country to come into, I am Sir Pat, played like a Jack, and mark my encyclopedian words, I will tell the tale of Bob Lee and Mister Tiddy, a man once who told such tales as mummers would play but who has the time now, or the inkling, no one, that’s right, Jenkins, not one among us, and feel free to use the highlighter to underscore the unimpertinent points, and ignore the rest, for we’re a clan without a clanguage, though we carfolly burnish the hiss in our history and buggerah the gluttery bytes of our callective sin and starey-eyed

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solvation, why you ca’n’t hardly see a lawn jockey north of the Mason-Dixon, though I’ve reports someone swiped the live gnome from No Man’s Land, that’s one less, then, the point is, it’s no fun anymore, being us, not without absinthe and chewing gum, I dreamt the wood turned to water as I was walking, but that would cause me drown, so I would dreamt it the other way round, see, we’re all of us rosy-saviors, needing only the predicate disaster, and to make matters worse, they say the cease-fire’s rallying, some woman named Sylvia’s running around with a basketful of butter buttons and glad tidings, we’re to shoot her on sight, for she’s nothing but trouble, that’s one less of one more, so sing us a song now, will you sweet John, sing us a song such as your mam muttered in her cups, a song such as tooalooaloorah toolahroolahray, if I don’t die by midnight, t’will be a brand new day, admittedly it’s late, though we’re safe from day so far, and you were an orphan, Mister J, you never met your father and your mother’s a beatific vision, her prenom was Faith and her middle appellation Kelvin, she bucketed no surname, but kept an extra set of keys and a spate of cinnamon-colored freckles dancing on her delicate nose, she smelled of something, to be sure, and when you turned like a worm from her too-solid breast, she spat gobs of bonnie clabber into your glabrous beak, she loved you, as any mother might, the moonlit men called her Elia and the toothless women lamb, she was the dutiful daughter of one Emerson Scriblace, muttonchopped solicitor and man’o’war, and his wax wife, the former Effie Dean, who graced the common view with three sons and two other daughters, the boys all grew to men and half the girls as well, Mr. Scriblace set his offspring to practicing penmanship, which kept them close at home, unable to leap the latticeswept wall or the wooden mouths of the galping gailers, or to penetrate the phalanx of frenetike fauntekyns and frythed fendekynes, there came a day when a wandering mankyn with curls the color of new potatoes and eyes clear as a child’s weep came along, singing of the dawn and the current scone, and Faith plucked an armful of Jacob’s ladder and climbed

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to her freedom and eternal reward, but only temporarily, for she and the minstrel set to squall their own sons and dotters until one day the beard disappeared, as you know, for he was your true father, missed by your mother sorely as a hangnail, we’ve neglected to send flares to let the enemy know we’re here, though I’d’ve thought our misery was enough to attract company, or, failing that, the superb barley stew you’re brewing, you cook like a Chinese assassin or a serene antique queen, acquitted in English, it’s the laudanum that gives the night-odor of nutmeg, and can you see the stars already, the sky’s stuffed with them, there’s one if there’s a one, still, I thank you for humming The Heroes of Vittoria so prettily, I don’t know why but I’m struck sour with melancholy, is it so awful here in the wood, knot atoll, knot at awl, not tautaul, you’re a mumbler, man, you’ll not come to much if you don’t speak up, or better yet, down, you’ve got to sing out lusty and long if you want to become, as the Praenomen said, the fair tenor of your fair race, ah, right, privatum commodum publico cedit, and what’s the chance of that on a Sunday, I’d smack my forehead if it weren’t a droit reminder of your limbless state, but you’re correct to cure my mistake, you’re absolutely right to whisper and slur, to insist on your persistent misunderstanding and the faint line itself, I’ll keep my fingers crossed and pray you will be eventually disregarded altogether, for there’s nothing that speaks to immortality like oblivion, and wh’a t’reye’it, as you so unpipishly note, do you have to sift through the sense of sound as such a course befits exactitude and a strong ribbon of strong cream, but we’ve no point upon which to stick and there’s no use in me standing for anything, as even a jugged child could see, such as the young François Crever, son of a miller, as a boy, François loved nothing more than to sit by a hayrick and enjoy its discomforts, the musty air of the dying grasses and the sharp pricks of straw which poked attentively through the rough weave of his broadcloth shirt, plying him with mathematics, but François wanted to be a poet, he’d heard, somewhere, that poets see things differently, and as François cut an ogham to

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that effect in the wood of a hazelnut tree, an older boy named MacGuill pulled up at the sound of the saw, and saw it was a beautiful sound, lonesome as a winter pine, yet altogether friendly, like the picklock call of the rossignol or the silent kits of St. Ives, and MacGuill asked the young François to what end was the boy battering the gates of heaven, the violet-eyed François drew himself up on his thin knees to say there would come a time and when such a time came, creeping on its brass-buttoned belly, all good men and better women would have swung the spade, dug the keystone, done dress rehearsal, compounded Ave, shouldered arms and armed shoulders, cleared the decks and decked the clair, trimmed the sails and sailed the trim, smoothing and palping and sculpting, rending feathered and snug, forewarned and forearmed, cut the powder and powdered the cute, counted all cards, including the faceless, anointed the godless and those in falling towers, and those with keys, but no prisons, and those with prisons and no keys, and those licked into shape without their consent, and those who count and closely watch their eggs, and those who have no centers, sine die, amen, and he fell back exhausted, MacGuill nodded, fingering a water-worn pebble in his pocket, and softly said, “wait,” he said, later the older François would find the word beautiful, lonesome as a frozen shipwreck, yet altogether friendly, like a barmaid in a bold cotton cap, or a child with rotten teeth, and would have it engraved on every approved memorial, chiseled in Fraktur, each letter deeper and more beveled in its interior, to be a better culvert for the tears undoubtedly shed overhead, or set scratched in Englische calligraph, or seriphed in Algerian haschisch, the first perfumed the monument with self-satisfaction, the second lent pure sunlight through the forest, bubbling the warm milk-green wood and shivering the fiercest condottiere, resembling, with its hinges and planes and cambered grace, the common skeleton, that shock of white that runs through all of us, boy and man, woman and petite fille, that fair chamfered proof of our raw Creation, are you certain the pot’s not on yet, ready, I mean, I can smell the

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squeak in every stir, you’ve added something on the sly, haven’t you, precious, confess, you culminate bastard, speak up or I’ll beat you senseless, you thrush tortoise, you can’t put one over on me, Monsieur Josse, it’s calipash or calipee, I can tell by the rounds of fat and the sense of mock narration, do you think we’ll put on a few pounds then, that’d be nice, to gain a little girth, I’ve been feeling a bit slight lately, less myself and more the other, I’m afraid it’s taking away from my authority, dependent on a certain gravity, innate, as it were, in the thing itself, which curves around the pentecostal hedgerow and naturally corresponds to pounds lost and fistfuls of poetic frost, whatever I’m worth on earth is far less than on Mars, for example, though more on Venus, that’s physics, my friend, and there’s no getting around it, it’s stalwart as a salt marsh, though with winter’s englassed grace and summer’s spare depravity, we were reminiscing about various aspects of the donjon, how arrow loops filleted the turrets like a bit of Friday’s fish and how the south wall was thickly pitched, the tar wept clear tears which some of the men caught in cups and called caudle and draught, the air was singed with fortified excitement and the hot crushing breath of the future tense, neither stew nor stone spewt from the machicolation, but a burnt viscous dribble clung to the east, so we went west and found this visage compound and unfamiliar, windowless as the face of the father, held thrall like the mother to a thicket of briers, each twig bearing a slit-eyed, rivermud-colored lizard at its crown, warming its umber scutes in a rag of silver sunlight, there were hundreds of them, and when one was sufficiently suffused, it fell from its thorny perch, and another immediately took its place, seeming to come, not from shade or underbrush, but from the very branch itself, the bark echoing with mute turdish beasts as the heart is enceinte with its catalogue of cruelties, the air was rich with dull brown droppings, whereupon half the platoon laid down and smoked a pipe and slept, refusing to wake, so we left them and retraced our steps, crushing shoots of spikenard underfoot, wondrous perfume, rank rich as a Texas fart, there was a grove of withered fig trees, and poor

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Will Caughron spotted a spotted pelican and commenced to crying, what, he sobbed, was the porpoise, whereupon gentle Stearns, Imagist and lance corporal, explained that although the beach was littered with crosses and winter honey murmured in the bees, one gamely shouldered scot and lot, for it was one’s duty to duly shine one’s boots and Brasso one’s belt buckle and each one of one’s buttons, to carve a part in the hair with the tip of one’s comb and dab a bit of lily-water behind one’s well-washed knees and elbows, there’s a line of loose Mädchen someone’s left lying about, grab one or two and commence trotting, and I did and he did and you did and we did, word, my girl’s not fat, just overemphasized, she grins like a goal-keeper and snaps her skirts like a mains’l, her hair’s batter-blonde and her eyes blue as sin, her skin’s a catch of tallow and her lips, pure lanolin, I’m a lucky man, by kringle, lucky to have been, lucky to have had orange-oranges and yellow lemons, here comes a candle to light you to bed, thus I woke a third time, to the jingle of an ass in a graveyard and the cawdle of a violin, I cursed my waking, wishing the earth I clasped to my breast were the pearled tits of my lady and me still in my boots, did I mention the sheer fineness of the footwear, leather supple as an Inverness whore, sole sturdy as St. Martin of Tours, each side stitched together by a team of crackerjack surgeons, the whole seamless, a historical lament, I’ve had my quiver of sorrows, Ian Ruadh, strung and nocked and notched, Ian Ruadh, bowed in passing, Ian Ruadh, answer me, Ian Ruadh, or keep perfectly still, for I wouldn’t deny Ian Ruadh his own woes, sore rein and bitter purpose proved proof against the ringing beehive, ah, it’s the even road to which you refer, sir, fair playing-field of referential grief and singular heartache, good-night, sweet laddie, good-night, for while I’m not entirely disagreeing with you, you being the man with the ladle and no means to stir, while I’m not disputing your core premise, I’ve noticed a cool Unbegreiflichkeit has crept into your comments, a fiddling Rhetorik which does you no flattery, English, sir, for the absolution of sin, take a daily drop in water, if you’re not better,

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well, you oughter, one day there will be freeways, and the day before that we’ll gather at the banks of the depot to rub the bald head of the conductor and kiss the train so long, hurry up, he’ll say, hurry up, it’s time, sir, Miss Campbell of Sacramento will be there, on the blue-wool arm of Bill Harte from accounting, the MacNeils of Ugadale will have their baby in wraps, in the perambulator, a butt-ugly infant it is, despite the pink ribbons strung through its weak hair, Glad Colin will have penned his cattle for the day and settled the striking hens, Commander H.H. Reid will wax his mustache straight as a Black Guard’s strict attention, Mr. Theodore J. Mooney will arrive in his swallow-tail coat with Mrs. Carmichael on his arm, what a handsome couple, happy, by the looks of the jig they’re cutting next to those Persians, who’d set their broadcloth bags to one side and proposed a reel, setting Miss Kirkwood and Miss McLeod O’Raasey to spinning, their sashes and bows twirl and tangle in the green May of their ardor, and the nuns from the orphanage will signal their children, each tow-headed tot will toss a lily-white rose into the teeth of the cowcatcher, Engine Number Nine, and each nun a nickel, the Parson will clear his throat with a prefatory hauuk and rub his sorely eczema’d hands before saying a few about progress and powdered biscuits, precisely recorded on tape by Jones, the newspaperman, who will commission one Francis MacTavish to illustrate the same with a detailed sketch of Sonny Boy Ascendant, irradiate skyways haloing from his white posterior as an ancient earth burns black beneath, some said it was sacrilegious while others thought it an excellent example of India ink and gum rubber, wrought lace-delicate as a real Gothic cathedral, later, when the bourd’d died out, and all their words given their exact meaning, one small child, who’d snipped the head off his rose and kept it withering in his pocket, noted the general resemblance to, a ploutered poulp, the first fisherman interrupted, la méduse, the child amended, and this was the final comparison, the one that would bore the best fruit, given the friezes to which we’ll will find free will freely prone, ceiling to the floor, I’ve information

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vegetable, my data quite consensible, I can subtract without addition, and act in subdivision, in order theistic, I can cite the realistic, as commander general, my epic is prehensible, by the commonest manimal, not that great blue anonomalous, so indifferent to the likes of us, as the official in-chief, it may be briefly said I read much better in my head, for my syllables are but jeweled cruelties when I speak for me and you, and will I will I say I will as I say your will too, for we appreciate the jims and jams and ballyhoots of more contemporary traffic, it’s a nice loss of momentum, rare at such a swiftly categorical age, secretly we aim to gum up the works, to take a fair drubbing and give ourselves the gate, going up, I should think, or at least something needing three steps, and to that two-keyed end, we’ll dip our hands in paraffin and call for a pair of wicks, delighted to announce the birth of our red and weeping gumboils and sing sweetest at the razor-thin slicing of our haunches, anything to delay the milkman’s matinee, the awful yodeling of the rosey-fingered, the gape of yet another god-damned dawn, I’m sure I speak for me and you too when I say we’re scotching time, we’ve duly considered the thick of the clock and rendered a verdict of not proven, in summation, ladies and gentlemums, there’s no portal by which the prisoner may pass, let him be kept on the dock, in a holding pattern, as will be said, for the objective purpose of serving a sentence, laddies and gentlemans, doing his time, dämpfen und heulen, négligées et nécroses, cowboys and cowgals, Oyez, oyez, let us begin our formal proceedings in full retrograde, the Court in recess, the jury excused, having been selected from among those matted-haired peers what showed up and took a seat, you will find notebook and pencil underneath, to be used as a floatation device in case of financing, to otherwise issue notes, from a quarter till to a quarter after, scoring those tidbits of testimony and parsnips of parsimony as you feel might later prove most harmonious to a certain order of things, persuasive, that is, to your sense of what is, while other facts pipe flutish around this base rendering, please be advised such note-taking should not distract

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you from your primary purpose of eyeing the oystershelled bastard and gauging the traverse of his prepository sin, and for those of you uncomfortable corkscrewing your black bristled tail about the soft forms of your fellows, those who would refuse to be the Empire’s lapdog, don’t fret, my pets, you’ll get the hang soon enough, and if not that, the gate, but if it will be of any assistance, our bailiff will gladly comb you for nits and eggs of hate, with or without a prefatory sock in the eye, now who will bear witness against time, you or you or you, you there with the bushkin and stew, please step up to the box and place your left hand on this good book, hereby annulling and mooting every act of aggrievousness you’ve heretofore cogitated, really, it’s that easy, while raising your right hand, gentle palm facing gently forward, and swear by the clear note to tell the yolked truth, to scratch and lay before lord and man the very gumma and gamma of your reticulated infinity, dangling green-black buboes from your lungs, shedding sheets of slink blue skin, let hollow yellow teeth snap and fall from your grim shattered jaw and your bleeding tongue be splayed in slices, your eyes pricked clean from their sockets with the tip of a shepherd’s short knife, sockets cleaned by the delicate sip sip sip of a bottlefly, your cheeks come stinking sunken sumps of scum and weep, your guts tumble free from your belly, purple-ripe with pain and shit, swinging reciprocally, let your heart reveal its soft vomitus rot and the longbones be marrowed with muddy stinking grit, your sin can be high as a bit of bad fruit, and damnation corpuscle-close, yet still, you palm the key to your prison, and if you place your hand on the good book, it’ll be all right, ah, right, sorry, John, it’s nothing personal, if it makes you feel any better, I’m told there’s a fellow whose sole occupation it is to hack the limbs from any who try to touch the book, honestly, the sinner steps forward and whuusk, fast as that, faster, zzzist, faster still, hic, all right, if you say so, hic’s a respectable and common clip, quick as hic does the man of muckle-might bring down his broadaxe, whacking off first the right arm, causing the potential witness no end of puzzlement,

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being naturally right-handed, there’s little left to do but follow suit, as our friend Hanson can swear and attest, there’s a certain order to the thing, a pale symmetry which must be kept in the dewlapped mind, I don’t make up the rules, you know, I’m a bystander, or at least I was, before I lost the common genius of my common boots and their uncommon understanding, and in so keeping with the in saecula saeculorum nature of the proceedings, the axeman dispatches the remainder and said subtraction takes the stand and is bade face the clock, purportedly for the purpose of identification, but truth be told, he’s the only one in there carrying a sickle, no, you’re quite right, it was a scythe, where’s my head, and still the murdering thief coolly sits by the pile of fell hands, grinning like he’s caught a whiff of quiff, and in the broad bolt of spoken silence that summarily ensues, runs a whispered ichnicht-ich-nicht-ich-nicht-ich-nicht-ich-ich-ich, a tick that proves unbearable to many sunburnt men and a barrelful of women, it’s the dull pit-pat of sand being stacked upon itself and the sharp whistle of a tin flute, bent in three places, several jurors will fall to adoring the earth as four others would spit at the cornered sky while the shore cries, more and less, less and more, and the foreperson, one Simon Fitzgerald, immediately recognizable due to the profusion of red hair shocking the head and shoulders and his huge hardwood oar, Simon Fitzgerald was a sea-faring sort, a sailor by nature and night, who dared the vast gray gulf lease its antique patience, double-daring the white-tipped froth which licks the land on both ends to equally prove order and chaos, and the constancy of formal accident, double-dog-daring his reward be his main inheritance, water-born from his sea-chained fathers, this triple-black-dog-dare, made under fate’s faithless cowl, sent the giant Gould Fitzgerald and his gray-maned son, in memory of good men deepbeached, to hoist the morning-dark sail and strike for the great keep, the tar-tipped prow of his boat cut through gullies and gulpers and sleek dolphins danced before its sturdy bow like an archer’s muscles presage his arrow sent, Simon Fitzgerald kept his keel level as a statistician’s head and his bowspit steeved to his

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steady aspirations, one morning, Simon Fitzgerald and his men set out, in best habit, just before the night was tinctured pink, their craft cleft silver in the cold dark water, the moon-spat surface pouting and puckering with the multitudinous beneath, everchanging, ever-unchanged, and this is its rare and usual beauty, not to be feared, nor denied, but embraced as true and proper as the five-fingered fact of a soldier’s right hand and his weak belly-meat, on this dawn’s cusp, Simon Fitzgerald and his crew saw a crest on the unsolid horizon that did not crown and curl in the godly manner, but continued to rise, surf pushing in on itself side to side, accreting without abating, growing first taller than the tallest longbow man, then taller than a favored summer rick, and again still taller, till the tip of Avalon’s oak would not tickle this Hymir’s beard, and yet then taller again, increasing unto itself fourfold, higher than the swollen clouds of unburst skies, and it became clear from the way the prelight crossed the climbing water that it was undercut with scales, great scutes of great circumference, each plate big as a girl’s cart-wheel, thick-weathered as the broad planks the sailors swayed upon, and cleft with one cut rib like a poisonous snake, not a man aboard did not feel the hot buttered breath of the Almighty coating the back of his neck then, and some cursed God for their mother’s milk, some abused their senses, while others ave’d in blind supplication, two tars cast themselves on the salt water, to unearth themselves ere being tooearthed, rather the cold watery lungs than the dry touch of that colder tooth, it was said, Simon Fitzgerald, brave and bold born, his head crowned fearless to vaulted fate, eyed the beast breaching the crests and seized a hatchet from an awe-stuck sailor and began to hew the jibmast and those sailors who could unscrew their minds for a moment from the avant terror turned to their good captain and were doubly confounded, suspecting, if able to sustain such cogitation, their chief had let loose his faculties, no matter, for Simon Fitzgerald swung at the spar with the strength of forty more, those nearby soon bled from the chips that flew from under his hot blade, he

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hacked till the cross-tap was three-quarters cut, then as suddenly halted, his axe-head gleaming white-red from its biting, Simon Fitzgerald stopped just as the sea-beast burst from its sea-sack, hydraulically keening its hunger, teeth long as a man’s thigh and fair as the same bone, cruelly tapered to the stabbingpoint, and the trembling souls on deck too-well felt the heat from its bleating nostrils, its plated skin now sinuous shone, purple-rich as a prince’s vein and well-mailed as his champion, the creature understrung with heavy gritted muscle, a ruff of stiff webbed spines radiated from its thick-roped neck, particled underneath with fluted black barnacles, and the thing caught sight of the shivering sailors and its eyes flashed sudden yellow round jutted slits of black and it struck, taking two unfortunates, one grasped headfirst, his travails cut short, the other, taken sideways as a dog carries a bone, the man’s screams wormed each heart that heard them, and as the beast’s teeth met where man’s bread begins its transformation, the poor wretch commended himself bodily to an all-mighty in tones bursting with all men’s apologies, and as the wretched squall wound to a perrieweerie and the creature tipped back its great ragged head to gullet its terrible meal then did Simon Fitzgerald take up his axe and strike three more blows to the mast, tortuous blows which shook the ship’s every timber and hewed the post from its mooring, and the beam slowly tilted toward the sea as Simon Fitzgerald put his back to it, till finally it fell, dropping plumb as if Simon Fitzgerald’d been a carpenter’s son, it fell, striking the monster just in the maw, shattering the substance of its jaw and dashing the awful mince from its mouth, the sailors below were besparged with marrow, man mixed with monster, and as hell’s mastiff turned, raging towards Simon Fitzgerald, its jawbone hung cleaved from its hinge, it lunged at the brave captain, aiming not to feed, but simply to kill, like a man, the odious creature swung down upon our hero, intent on flensing flesh from spirit, like a god, a sour cloud of blood and bile disgorged with each bitter breath, a lesser man would have faltered before such vile and evil an apparition,

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but Simon Fitzgerald held, unbowed, waiting until the moment was ripest, and the creature almost upon him, he swings his axe in a sickle-sweep and lays bare the place where the first root lies, meat and muscle split butcher-neat, the bones crack clean from their joints, the murderer’s heart, like the lover’s, uncaged from its solitary pew, and that organ could be seen for a second, shuddering side to side, keeping life’s pluperfect time, but Simon Fitzgerald brought the axe back and sinks it deep into the heart itself, the monster’s scream sticking in its throat as its center is hewed in two and black blood spews from the gushhole, sleeting the rosy sea and the men below, and the men below them, and those in the keep, and the beast fell back, untroubling the water as it dyed the dawn deeper, and the men shook off their fright and praised Jesus and God and Simon Fitzgerald, his red mane mizzled and rouged redder still, they lifted him to their shoulders and sang of his tempered mettle and base courage, and later the town heralded Simon Fitzgerald, holding a feast of purple extravagance, its delicacies so exact compounded any addition would have been subtraction, they brought bowls of candied pears swimming in caramelized cream and vanillakissed cups of poached quince and roast nutmeats and aching platters, long as a mother’s farewell, overweighted with grilled honey lamb and brownbutter haricots and ginger ham with glazed apricots and slink o’veal bedded on garlicked baby potatoes and soft tea-soaked cakes and black chocolates sinned with warm brandy and the grateful villagers presented Simon Fitzgerald with a gold axe banded in the purest silver, studded top and bottom with princely carbuncles, and so Simon Fitzgerald did pass boldly into the lore of his people, to be periodically invoked as courage’s paragon and virtue’s habitué, an unfettered spectre of team spirit, such a mascot was the natural choice for our foreman, the rest of the venire, I’m sorry to report, was far less distinguished, thought in their faces was etched a peculiar apprehension, the rueful look of the carrefour, a cheese-coated kind of desire and concomitant denial, the women, for there were women jurors, if I’m any judge of

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skirts, four and a half of them to be exact, who could have hummed “The Well-Tempered Caliver” with the keynote precision of circus jugglers, the women had unknitted their brows in a plain of permanent wanting, they’d each spent a Parisian St. urchin’s childhood pressing their frozen foreheads against the débried glass of a boulangerie, uselessly bleating brittle fingers with short puffs of warmclouded breath, their sour-milk scent uncracking the crowd’s bottled deathwish, it was Friday, after all, and the weekend lies terribly long, what with soccer, and a best friend sleeping over, and him, home all day, parked in front of the tube, useless, the children shivered like gutting light in their grizzled rags, and forgot what it was to run as their small joints curdled into stone, but Pierre the Baker was not an unkind man, he would save scraps of dough and pastry points throughout the day, and after the shopdoor snapped after the coat of the last paying customer, Pierre would toss the lot onto his board and knead it into something of a shape then slip it into his vast brick oven and bake, and this rude mix of bread and cake, provendered with the seed of the sunflower, the sesame, the caraway and the poppy, a kriah strip of chocolat and dry, stringed jambon, snippets of olive and onion, abricot and boudin, pits of cherry and black plum and bits of oyster-shells, shucked by a one-legged sailor with only one crutch, soft-edged scrapes of dates, dragées and candied citron, the nipples of dried figs and the thin red skin from the rim of a jam jar, dustings of dill, rosemary, sage and saffron, husks of peppercorn, shards of walnut, hazelnut and marron, tongues of sweetened cream cheese and orange-flecked butter, a rough scrub of gray salt, a backhanded pat of marzipan, parings of meringue and little thumbs of macaroon, the dough itself potshot, fluffy and dense by turn, compost of potato, pumpernickel, barley, wheat, and rye, country white and cornmeal, sour and soda, the urchins witnessed the loaf from chthonian incantation to yeasted ascension, the final mold slid onto a wood peel, slid quickly and quickly committed to the oven, informed, like man, by the flame, consumed, like man, by either fire, they watched in wonder, their

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mouths slick wet and their bellies harrowing, they would wait, each minute of the waiting rising, like the dough, rising with the boated sense of promised comfort, starched and smelling of bleach, and at the proper time, the baker would extract the great golden loaf from the oven’s throat and top its perfectly cracked crust with a thick icing cross flecked with vanilla and wrap it in parchment and hand le bon pain out back of his shop, and the aforementioned tykes would elbow and jab one another most ferociously to get at the bread, there were screams and tears and cries of out of my way you shit you bitch you fuck you bleeding grey greasy smothersucked eyeless abortion and the children tore at the loaf with their rotting childteeth and filthy fingernails and cursed all the more, for the hot iced crust could not be pierced by soft tooth or boneless nail, the former powdered on contact, while the latter split and shred like paper lanterns, and so most of the children abandoned the bread and resumed their starving ways and Pierre the Baker felt himself quite vindicated, he believed sustenance ought only go to them that’s got the heart for it, tactical and ideologic, and four little girls did feint moving off with the feral pack only to circle back, two of them had knives secreted on their person, having relieved a couple of drunken oyster-sailors of the same three evenings previous, and those two, with their two sisters, further vindicated the baker, then tucked the bread up one of them’s dirty skirts and retreated up an unbarred stairwell, the sort often skeletoned against the plane of action, to a tarpaper roof with a breathtaking view of Manhattan, you’ve seen the skyline, I assume, and you’ll agree it’s something to see, we really ought take snapshots along the way, you say we’ll have no need of memory then, but you’re too predictable, my quinean chum, pat as a sleek brown rat, pat as a riverbank that, but I’d like to point out that just because you’ve lost your arms, you’ve got no corner on the contrary, what you need to cultivate is a field of violet and wild parsley and the four-way alkaline spring, for you know as well as I do and don’t that the vista’s been permanently infused with fact and fancy and the spurious

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quale of our sun’s setting, those blue moons, yellow stars, pink hearts and purple horseshoes and the delicious red balloons from my mother’s wounded mouth magically frozen in me as any Nippon mushroom or Manassas pillow, have you seen the glass photographs, housing the victorious dead, they who will not heal, for there’s no one to forgive save themselves and even if they did, did you think the divine no dialectician, the purpose of the pictural is supplementary, my friend, my companion, my comparison, what we’re really looking for is presenttense communion, something between us and them, where one becomes the others, for we’re fleeting as licks of cream while they go on for brass-tipped centuries, are you stamping your foot then, you maggotted bastard, you’ve no call to complain, the clabberous fact of our matter is, as you know as well as sigh, manifesta probatione non indigent, we warm our small chestnuts by an actual flickering fire and slurp sincerely shivering oysters, we insist, that is to say, on some daubed measure of materiality, for we believe, despite our calloused knees, that conflict completes, that the building renders concrete the sky as the crow punctuates the eye, and in our phenomenological contemperation, we refuse today, am I going too fast for you, Jonesie, you look addled, perhaps it’s the light or lack thereof, you’re right, night’s its own permanence, and what sweet sweet comfort to be kept in the dark, I dread the occrustate horizon, and the finely-augered moment we’ll come conformed in our poor flesh, done and undone, my only consolation is the soup you’re brewing and the sight of schoolgirls under umbrellas, they do keep dry, and that’s a thing worth cheering, speaking of the girls, our jury listened with quotidian politeness to the testimony of the watchless brutes paraded before it, each dropped a black pearl upon taking the stand, till the witness box was full of excreted treasure, but Time was not impressed, he already bore a heavy string of annexed riches noosed round the neck, he yawned, and the whole court stood shock-still at the gape, do you remember, Jon, how puckered pink was the back of Time’s throat and how rubber-red its front,

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just so, it was a waterlily of a yawn, the sort that puts fish in a bowl and a man on the moon, it was a fearsome thing, terrific in the first, all it lacked for stature was a pair of pleated trousers, as the convivials say, life’s sad and death’s bad, still, birth is ever worse, and there is is, lying true as a gullet, true as a goon, true as the prick of the rosed thorn and the snick of a cane sword and this is what happened, immediately upon yawning, or in its aftermath, Time took a foil from its throat, well, I can’t answer that now, can I, I’ve no idea whether it’d been specially swallowed beforehand, was kept routinely sheathed, or, like the egg to the soup, was a dropped afterthought, regardless, it had the effect of a hatchet broken out of glass or a loose cap of cyanide beside a bicuspid, an emergency brought forth in case of an emergency, in any event, there Time was, wielding its warm épopée, its hair foliate with vine leaves and wearing a cocked hat, the bailiff ordered it to freeze, which caused a round of frightened giggles, most audibly from the bench, Time strikes the judge with the back of its hand, thereby condemning the court to a sentence of interminable length, defacing the justice, come the Micklemas, and the despondency of the future conditional was enough to make a man kick a minister and take a beekeeper from behind, meantime, the court reporter worried over shorthanding the epistasis, but it couldn’t be helped, for Time was running out on very tall shoes, and had to be stopped at once, unfortunately, the witnesses were bras-libre and thus could not be counted upon to seize the moment, but as Fate, the coarse brake, would have it, a passing cripple of uncommon beauty caused the thief to roll back, to pause, to pull up short, to delay, and stay, forgetting such a breath would shatter all mirrors in the vicinity and frighten the poodle away, Time was beside itself, and we all enjoyed the break, I myself welcome any caesura, I was happy to pay the tax, affixed at thirtythree percent of a homemade apple pie, and after I forked over my contribution, I fell on its gray chiffoned shoulders and dreamt of a time my companions were not candle ends or cheese-parings, when men were men and women too, when the world

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woke with a shout and stamped around the dungpool, complaining of nothing, when truth was a thing to be steamed and parslied and had like a clam, when this follieshat about my neck was mine and mine alone and not a shared condition, for we all wish our own jellyfish, do you know, mi amore, all unhappy families are identical as apricots, and all men idem, and the stone-centered quiddity of our suffering is what puts the bread on the butter or the butter on the bread, it’s all very sad, this bread and butter business, it’s as if we’ve given up dancing altogether and although I find myself temporarily legless, I keep my hops up, never say die, that’s what I say, not while there’s still another limb of lamb, for that’s what hope dines on, and there is hope, sure as bread pudding, you see how I retreated there, I saw you wince at the coming shot and so I recharacterized, I can, you know, nothing’s written in stone, or it is, but we’re penciled in at best, we’re a sketch-book of emphatic caprices, a homespun comfort for the quilted set, those happy many, who damn violence with but a single hand, brightly ribboned at the wrist, still, a passing paraphilia made Time tarry, the two struck up an argument on the pleasures of sheet music, for which the spoiled beauty was a heartless advocate, but Time sneezed, categorically dismissing the whole encounter as hoarding and wasting, what was the point, Time clucked, of keeping track of a tock, it’s a schoolboy’s trick to note the passing minutia, and the lady, whose nails were bitten to the quick but to no end, begged to disagree, she said such sweet sounds were in themselves sweetly spent, whereupon Time puffed its bejeweled breast and bragged there was no knell that wouldn’t lisp under his authority, but Time’s rude boast was duly altered by me, yes, you too, Juan, you’re a genius, don’t let them tell you any different, well, let’s be honest, we’re both geniuses, we have that at least, that’ll give us some comfort in the early fileted light, we’ll go out in a blaze of particulate glory, I imagine, with an éclat of fat and a frenzy of mythomania, you carry the flag of Japan and I’ll goosestep winsomely, we’ll be sautéed where we stood, actual as Yugoslavia, rothaarig as Iscariot, piquant as a tin of Boston brown

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bread and an eye-sock of salmon, and the good Lord will see fit to pronounce our passing appropriate and our memorials nancy-pretty, and the flax-haired girls of our moist youth will festoon them forthemore with oblations of pippins and honey-nut butter, and still Time stood, cemented in its steps like a movie star, whereupon several heretofore occluded gentlemen clocked the Orlach and clapped on a fresh pair of legirons, allowing the broken belle a final riposte, she noted ants plague the prince’s picnic and small matters serve and usurp their masters, it was a bit oblique, we all agreed, but sort of saw her point, something to do with all things being the undoing of the very thing they constitute, makers unmade or some such sense of truth and its scabbed constituents, and the prosecuting attorney made a very nice speech in which he quoted liberally from Bible and Bard, making a whiskered gentleman cry and a dog return to its vomit, it had to do with the sins of the minute, how it laps like a cat at the breath of the baby and nurses the white cap dessicate, how it scratches one’s ears and cottons one’s eyes, or vice versa, it hardens the bowels and barbwires the heart, and vice versa, slips a pink oven mitt over the slickered silver coils of a croisered mind, and versa, why there’s no telling the Time, it’s deaf to all tries and tintinnabulations, and doesn’t give a fig for the penis or any other obverse proposition, but what it does is count, but only itself, it clips its nasty toenails and counts one one one one and one one one one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and two and you and me and one and one and he and she and one and one and we and one two three and one two one two one two three and one and one and on and on and one and two and one and one and on and one and two and one and one and one one one and one one one like telephone poles stud the sides of train tracks and important dates spike time lines, on and on as the river of records scrubs our sandy winning shores and rises our knit socks separate as we catch the snowflakes of our nows upon the stems of our tongues, and do you remember this one, uprooted just today, well, I do, it was served complete as a dish of

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stewed prunes and smelt of hummingbirds and gasoline, it was purely pis aller, we took a picture, to last longer, we reasoned, and it worked, for we’re not yet to morning, so you see the power of a creator, demonstrable, sir, why anything can happen on the way to a donjon, including the circumambulation thereof, for we eventually made our way north, following our copper nose, extracted from a small cedar box lined with yesterday’s news, we paused to admire the snout’s snubbed authority and the passionate flair of its nostrils, the bridge arched slight as a dowager’s eyebrow, indicating parabolic refinement and the need for an amorata, but was thickened at the apogee, which abated any tendency towards unchanging airs, I thought the tip knobbish, but Tycho said no, and we held our nose and stumbled along, north, as noted, where cabbage is king and freedom nadkin, have you been north, mine Kamerad, my con-Juan, then you’ll believe me when I say there’s not an aspect like it, everything’s canted at an exact angle, and a flock of priests with protractors scuttles about, ascertaining each refraction and correcting it to half an arc minute, but I’m getting ahead of myself, the first approach is through a cove of shoetrees, the lower limbs garlanded with brilliant corpses, while partridges couple in the upper branches, and around each knotted trunk sits a panel of experts, representing all sides of every debate, so there’s three, then, not counting Cadbury-Schweppes, the moderator, whose function it is to interject humorous remarks and dopamine as needed, and though their conversation appears adversarial, it is sweetened with bon mots and the respectful showing of wrist and rump, as we passed, a thin gentleman with a pincenez displayed his, a crescent of pallid flesh hanging radiant as pearls from the slight pubic-bone, whereupon the other experts, heretofore seated, shifted to a single side and raised their right hips and trumpeted their pomp satisfaction, one of our boys made the mistake of sniggering and was seized by several experts-in-waiting, who sprinkled him with cardamon and ticks and sent him swinging from the bottom of a box-wood, they stood in a semi-circle and

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poked his breast-bone with barbeque forks, setting the sorry lad spinning and sprinkling as he spun, whereupon the pantless professor lobbed oranges at the revolving body as a praeludium for his lecture on systems solar and otherwise, gravity, I think it was, or impersonal dissipation, and it disheartened our side to see one of their own treated so demonstrably, a few cursed the country, this one, and some blamed the mission, that one, and the one who chewed his sibilant syllables complained of the lack of bird calls, while another one cried How! in grief, just like in the movies, and yet we soldiered on, well past the Grove of Elucubration and into the Slough of Dispond, where the going got tough, we were to our calves in a clutch of vain muck, foot by foot wedged in the deep crevice bottoming the trench, its thinnest part, though the sides swelled from there inwards, engrossed with wet ruin and damp rust, swallowing any bracing hand put to them, many a man uprooting a boot was pulled to prayer, and two went down altogether, it felt inevitable, as drownings sometimes do, despite the free air about the head and shoulders, the sky was nettled purple-gray, sticking the sun, and a few boys fell to weeping, the Chaplain slapped them and said oh be of little faith, which we felt a fair and reasonable request, so we affixed tassels to our tassets and counted ourselves faint among the supernumeraries, all we wanted was an unbottled beer or a draught of Liebfraumilch and some happy music to sip her by, a bit of whistling in the smokehouse, don’t you know, eases the convict’s lumbago, but the Slough was sucking our ankles so steadily we began to suffer beyond all philosophy, the fear of encroaching got to us, and namshach were content to become firm affixed, to forego the solace and conceit of imagining ground is tread like water, and, like water, holds the same final promise of diving in either direction, down, or up, heaven or earth, isn’t that the alternative, I can’t recollect at the moment, though it conjoins two satinfaced implausibles, and as we struggled, the mire clung like cooling pitch, it stunk and oozed like the devil’s own perfume, of sulphur and diarrhetic excursion, it was gritted with snatches of brindled fur

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and the bones of snapped birds and ran liquid with hot vomit and pus, it was bitter cold and worse warm, and our teeth shook in their sockets but even so we heard the bubbles and puffs of our dearly departing, those who had taken most deeply to the soil, their powder skin midden-pooled, embrowned by their assignation, later we took to calling them Boggles and Petey, still, there was a lick of rosewater running through our jaspers, and no matter how odd-hung seemed our creped limbs, we knew or should have proposed there was worse to come, that the dark clay cloying our brogans was light verse compared to the end of the line, ah, why so sour, Jenny, you look like someone’s pissed in your pot, it’s only a kidney, mon fleur, sweetened with vinegar, perhaps it’s mine, I’m as salient as the next fellow, and twice as pious, why I’d put pity in a cake and pat it, yes indeedy, I’m chockful of aimless optimism, you, too, we’d roll it, pat it, put it in a pan, bake it up as fast as we can, top the top with acid drops, and line the sides with sugar mice, take it out and bramble it with bees, save a slice for Bonnie Anne Stoudwater, the Minister’s daughter, she’s a one that’s got to get some, she’s got a hankering for a congregation, a catechetic itch, if you catch my drift, as you tend to, why I recollect back on the isle of Colstaff, when I first saw you pocketing fresh scalps like there was no morrow penny-bright as today, you were close then, weren’t you, you two, tossing each other about as if you were broken-faced biscuits looking for a spot of warm butter, like Howard Carter and Albert of Fishbum, it’s certainly beside the point, John, though it seemed fitting to step to the side, back, side, up, and stand hatless for a breath, dedicating this tick to Boggles and Petey, now neatly in pace, Willie Byrd chucked a couple of coppers in the general direction of where were last seen their eyes, we liked to imagine they’d gone spelunking after nymphs or fairies or some other aboriginal miss with hitching-post thighs and impardonable breasts, we said a prayer to this effect and after we’d added a ripe Benedictus and a proper aye-men, adding first the decasyllables and then the single digits, good Willie made the sign of the Cross and we all fell to

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laughing, in fits, you know how it is, Jackie, there’s nothing like a Cross for foolishness and a bit of razzmatazz, and we excavated ourselves, smiling, traversing from this to our next this, which appeared most beautiful in our eyes, but I’m getting ahead of myself, though that’s insupportable, given the bloody hams I’m perched on, but this was before the filthy lucubration’d set in, when I still had my fine boots and white hen and stumped about with journalistic authority, we entered the fair hollow of Our Lady’s Throat, a balmy cove laid lush with flowers of manifold variety, Winfred collected a bouquet of field poppies and Carl snatched a fist of snap-dragons, Blind Harry lay down in a bed of red orchids and moaned, while the Captain fell to sketching a sunflower with a snub of charcoal and the thicklyfreckled Quartermaster professed his love of the progressive heliotrope, he cleared his throat with his finger and declaimed To The Company of Men Seeing as How I Mayn’t Continue to Another Day or I May, Let it be Known my Fondness and Fortune lie Here, Among the Flowers’ Faces, Which I Greatly Prefer to Others, as They Alone bear No Reflection to My Own, I Therefore Commit My Self to Their Happy Preserve, Come What May, or Mayn’t, and he left off talking a moment, overcome with green sentiment, the flowers shook their skirts in satisfaction and one of the boys, I think it was Augoost, capered up and handed him a dandelion, provoking a teary grin and a muttered So It Is, the QM turns the wispy blossom in his hand, So It Is, he looks back at us with moist and meaty eyes, tumm Te Deum, hummed Winfred, though it wasn’t as funny this time, yes, you agree, and that’s just one of the spare reasons you’re a genius, Jackaman, you see how things change, you got that from your mother, I assume, she had a habit of looking in the eyes of others and you see where that got her, a babe in the basket and one on the bone, best let covered mirrors lie, to fabricate uniform selfreflection, do you think it’s together or alone we’re in, and what is the existential pronoun, and where properly said with the relic dialect feature, the aitch, double hockey-sticks, who will pick baby bats with

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violet faces, and how naturally, dear, for we were en thrall to the mission, though what was the mission, none could recall, though we knew it had something to do with a cat’s comb, and after saying that, we paused and pursed our mouths upward, indicting no, that wasn’t right, though it was a very important mission, we felt that warmly, and our feelings were bolstered by our bedrolls, for no one goes full pack on a fool’s errand, ergo, as the Black Bishop said, given our ample provisions and utter lack of knowledge, our office must be far greater than we know, wait, what’s that, are you trying to applaud, a sad and sorry sight, sir, your shoulders shrugging up and in and down and out like a man cowering in an aching wind, try it the other way, son, rotating the right sharply inward using a flinging motion, then swinging it back as you sling in the left, that’s much better, that’s got a nice tartish roll and the clap of my father’s conviction, all you’re wanting is a spot of rouge on the lips and a penciled pox mark, there, on your right cheek, there, where the Blamed bussed the Blameless, starboard, that is, signifying beauty’s err inherent, the flim of the flam redux, time number two when Man played God at God’s behest, that’s twice at the plate and twice struck out for the selfsame reason, for knowledge toogamely poached, and by such gaming was salvation penny-proved, and to what human end, my contemplation, to set science simmering over peace, naturally, scientia super pax, Wissenschaft über Friede, la connaissance préferait par la paix, jamais, jamais, goes the refrain, and you’re right again, the canon is made of song and silence, each in constant agreement, there’s the yeasty need for immortality, that common hunger for the forevermore, but it’s only the one set whose beard stops growing, who prances on his own foal legs, cheese-coated and slick with wet, while the setless stands everyone for rounds of cold beer, no, I’m not befogging the point, though that’s a point, the effects of intoxication upon the spirit or the spirit upon the intoxication, helpless she is in her occludation, beauteous she is in our peregrination, we want it now, don’t we, Giovanni, we want a bushel of apprehension and the neverending light of day, we’d munch

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our mothers if we could have a moment longer, we’d belick and scuttle the wainscot, but there’s no choice except the choice, and here we are, our mouths stuffed with apple and the scent of brown sugar in our hair, still, the goddamned will dawn, you know that, don’t you, John, ah, tell me it won’t, that’s a good ham, tell me night will compose a thousand tangos and we’ll waltz every one, tell me Time will stop and play the bassoon, and our cares’ll be consequently blown to catastrophes and our bewails clot into countless rare gumdrops, we’ll bop till they drop, ignoring the calvered perch on the buffet and the blueberries stuffed besides, we’ll be cockled and muscled, alive alive oh, what’s that you say, black-bleckit, well, black-bleckit indeed, it’s been said before but bears repeating, black-bleckit, black-bleckit, that was the sound, thank you for reminding me, of our muddied boots hobbing across the loose stones, for we’d found an old cobbled road leading back to the fortress, I can’t recall from what direction, we were north, I know, but I’ve a funny feeling we’d ended west, despite our concerted efforts to the contrary, still, we found ourselves once again outside the great wall, before a section made of jadeite, bevel-cut to show the stone’s sworled fingerprint, and the inhumanity of our resolve, true, well, you’re astute, and I’m a claver fellow, so let me be the first and last to congratulate you on the addition of shoestring potatoes to your stew, with or without the potato, I won’t ask where you got them, or how you managed to untie what look like intentional knots, I think in any relationship one ought preserve some mystery, for after all, isn’t it that degree of unfathomability which keeps us smacking of the divine, exactly so, you’re a four-fathomed mystery to me, sister swallow, and ever shall be, I never know what you’re doing with your hands, for example, or what you make of commandments in courthouses, true, it is contraindicatory, given the penalties, but I’ve wandered when I should be straying, for we found a little door in the far corner of the wall, carved to about three-quarters the size of a man, also composed of green stone, emerald, or tourmaline, with a faithless window made of gold

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leaf, and the body of the door rose here and there in permanent pale pimples, as if the stone skin were studded with pearls, absurd, but not impassable, we tucked daffodils in our button-holes, and behind the ear, an evening primrose, and pushed open the door, it was dark on the other side, dark and cool, though not unpleasant, somewhere was the after-thought of fire, and, thus, its potential resurrection, we were quite jerry on the idea, so we hot-footed it through, pausing briefly to unhook Cook, who’d got caught by his vibraphone, and to pass the Chaplain, for he’d donned his miter and refused to doff it for any vesicular portal, he lay on his back and recrossed his arms and we grabbed him, alb, maniple and pallium, shoving him over the threshold feet first, and when we had him and us on the other side, we stood him straight upright, smoothed his ruffled chasuble, and received his nihili est with forensic devotion, it took a few moments longer to adjust to the honeycombed light, Corporal Vitiligo shook sand from his musket and said it was all the same, philosophy having long suffered such velvet shadows of faith, which Cook thought a beautiful sentiment, incontestably true, so promptly set it to music, with banjos and a copper kettle drum, inspiring Ben Kirkwood, brother to the lover of Miss O’Ramsey, to act as precentor, he wet his middle finger and selected Psalm 78, reading the familiar verse in angelic cadence to the tune of our plumed harmony, we were yolked with satisfaction, happy as loose lobsters until Kunst pointed out Kirkwood’s psalterium suffered from rot, being mildewed through in irregular spots, unfeathering the source of our flaming inspiration, and this rot ran as well around the root of a leafless tree next to our orator, and blackened the ground at his feet, at one such point of weakness, an eagle wheeled and struck, shearing the lower limb of the luckless tree and rendering the earth an open throat, from which triplets came, each three-headed, and each head, three-faced, and each face, variously countenanced, one was three spotted young, bland, bored, and beside oneself, unshorn by history or the future continuous, two was three bearded ones, cool, cruel and powerful,

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conformed shallow about the eyes, three was three grizzled ones, sunken-cheeked, liver-lipped and toothless, jaws lacerated with impotent rage, they were all the same, we stood stock still and Kirkwood faltered between opinions, we saw ourselves uncomposed, a rag, a bone, a hank of hair, wrapped about the wrist, in our dreams are formulations, the calculate of this to that, our days we otherwise know, this to this, we are constant made by such contingencies, true, true, as all will do, oui, oui, I agree, such high fidelity’s a real crippler, we prefer our bittersweet embodiments ironclad and wrapped with tarred string, kept white, as they say, unblemished and unbeknownst, albumenate white, hoarfrost white, the sheltered white of a rabbinical edict and an infant’s open armpit, a white moreover in-itself, egg-whole and solid as an eyeball, not softly plumbed with dark sour pits or the probing press of an icon, we abhor and foreswear woolly growths nettling our sacred texts, mixing spore and dust, dust and spore, to no end or beginning, as amaranthine and blasphemous as ribbon candy and the reflexive pronoun, see, see, see yourself, you armless jag, you know the source of your agreement lies in your inability to tell the truth, you, you, good for nothing but stew, though the thought of your pot quickens my pulse and hastens the pace of my thought, even from here I spy the savory symptoms of a black butt of pork and a shag of Turkish delight, though I wonder from where the pitchfork came, you stab and stir so cleverly, sir, you’re very handy, given your limitations, and what’s that floating just there, tell me later, will you, when there’s a lag in the conversation, as there ought be shortly, we’ll turn to the topic of your soup naturally as flowers to the sun, and agree it’s much nicer to save such subjects to savor later, save them in a cork-capped bottle, licked with port, or a babbling cave, abhorred pit where nothing grows but fungus and mistletoe and nothing comes bursting to tongueless nothing spewed, you can make a good green relish and tell me the base of your violent silk bouillon and I’ll tell you my middle name, no, not Bob or bourbe, though that’s vastly amusing, and if I might get a bourbe in edgewise, I’ll

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continue on our way, for after we forsake saying our prayers, and soothed little Dickie Leocourt, who had thrown himself on the ground and given himself to weeping, we picked up the tyke and tossed him in a bag, butter-colored, with a worsted cream tie, we began down a riven-run path towards the donjon, which, being near, we could barely see, just as a man approaching a mountain observes no transcending peak but only accented elevation, and our way was imperiled by many low-hung branches and thick jutting roots, our feet were tripped and our faces whipped as we went along, not speaking, or speaking of things now unspoken, but better spoken then, and a broken quiet crept through us as each man concentrated more on stepping over or ducking under, all in all just getting by, it’s the getting of the getting by that comes up most difficult, Mister Johnson, for there’s no rest in a dunking-chair or on the uppermost floors, and none securely blest but in the Good Lord’s autumnal Bosom, I felt in the pit of my own pearled breast the treacle strength of the Almighty, and wished I’d said, to myself, or to three others, He Will Provide, foreshadowing the many’s shadowless flight, and had I heard coondogs then I would have added, He Will Protract, but we did not, it was silent as a seaside cemetery as we bucked along this intolerant road, our faces bestriped as a prisoner’s backside, our feet sore as nightcrawlers, I think I can speak for the entire company, there’s none left that’ll stop me, save you and your feathered murmurings, your daisy-strung bits of bold incomprehensibility, like the frog and the philosopher, you really have to be there, but you’ve got bigger fish to fry, is it cod that’s bobbling so whitely, no, well, it was worth a shot, as are so many, you’re right as riches, my barrator, aught’s not worth shooting, there’s a cottage-comfort vérité, I’d crossstitch it on a sampler if I had your fingers and a snip of blue thread, but the crux of our crisis was yet to come, Carl caught a thorn in his side but Sarge got it worse, for as we made our way down Blackstone’s Lane he was struck acrost the forehead by a particularly nasty branch, gray-green and lightly greased, one I’d just slipped carefully past, which is no point

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of pride but a matter of some fact, there was a great snap and his face come undone, a rouge memento shorn from brow to chin, split tip to lip, uncovering the bright common skull, the man looked puzzled at first, then sighed as he reached up to hold the flap off his eyes, his sudden anonymity a rude surprise, just when you think you know a fellow, to find he’s everyone else, still, we immediately received a communique from Commander Reid, ordering us to itemize the master sergeant’s effects and collate them with the gravitational, Sarge stood obligingly still as we went through his pockets and shook out his shoes, you found a book of Romantic verse, Swinburne and such, dog-eared couplets including, forever this, forever you, from love’s impermanence never knew, was it Larry who noted the silent consonants, and Curly who said heute nacht beneath his sausagebreath, I remember locating a locket containing the cameo of a young girl and a tiny pot of brown fat, Billy Byrd counted all the loose change, saying there was none to speak of, there was moreover a petit Crucifix, made of tinfoil peeled from spearmint gum wrappers, and a ladies’ stem-wound watch that kept time like a pensioner, a drawstring sack of bubbles and a nickle-plated moon, we committed each to memory and the twins pronounced mess kit and that was that then and the man disrobed then, knowing he was to die, then, wanting to slip back in then as he’d slipped out, or simply to slip simply out and simply in or simply out and simply in or in and out and out and in and out out out or in in in and out and in and out in out in and in in in in and out out out and in or out out or in in and out or out in out and in in in and out out out and we’re at it again, dance with me, Jean, let’s do the fandango, you call me Boolie and I’ll put on my puttees, we’ll fain twain be, and our homologous love a musical novelty, we’ll postulate our existence as if we were metamemephysical poets, patapouf, patapouf, we’ll dreeple and drizzle, drizzen and drouchle, we’ll turn out the tables and sharpen our spoons, we’ll droon by the light of the slavery oracle, affix goldthreaded roses to the napes of our necks and swing forward and back like reassured thieves, for I

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love you and you love me, and well we might, or there’s none left, and no right, for all that matters is not told, wouldn’t you say, still, dearie, Feint take us and pass the dormitif, you look surprised, do you, it’s hard to tell, being so dark still, and still so dark, and there’s a thanks, dawn’s not yet in full feather, we’ve time to weep and gnash what’s left of our teeth, do you remember how we left the faceless man curled in a clutch of pink chrysanthemums, making our way down the Lane without further ado, we soon began to pass through pastures of raspberries studded with pots of dark chocolate for dipping, several peasants stood by shaking their fists at the constricted green buds, thinking they were strawberries and stubborn at that, the sergeant first class, having just been promoted, strutted and swayed roosterish across the road, taking one surly fellow by the elbow to point out it was raspberries he was subjecting to slander, and raspberries, by their nature, rattle on to no other end, having neither the promise of pie nor, like Cain’s thorns, the mark of immutable creation, and though the raspberry tart is rightly trumpeted, the strawberry’s widespread obligation bubbles more bathwater, but the raw-nosed peasant was poorly humored, his jaw tippled in ire and perpetual offense, he rudely shrugged off the new topkick and said he would not stickle over these strawberries, for he knew too well interrogating fruit on its nature inevitably sows seeds of bitter discontent, which in turn leads to the discovery of apprehension and the attendant abandon of expectation, thereby permitting discontinuity while foregoing the very sum of its preserves, and this bifold approach is the wormy route to all manner of agnosticks, therefore the only course worth sticking to was insisting on the strawberry therein and by that be thereafter damned, but the new sergeant determined this was an issue of some honor thereabouts and so shook the man by the black crease in his collar, chastising him for the intent girding his ignorance, Christ, said the noncom, fashioned truth from fabrication, like the adroit tailor cuts his coat from other hides, exactly measured, stretched, the skin proves sturdy and impenetrable, yet inexplicably soft, He

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lines the fell with fleece shorn from couch-dreams and the airy cushion of a poet’s comma, adorns its high collar and cuffs with silk brown fable, pipes the shoulders with feathers of smoke and canard sauvage and dips each pineapple-button in bronze and Brasso then slips this perfect jacket about your inconsequential shoulders and promises you protection perpetual, you’ve been saved, laddie, suited in heavenly case, and thus must cease and desist in your calumny and defamation, for the produce you here harvest furthermore is and ever shall be the knitted rasp and not the heart-shaped straw, and the noncom said all this most slowly, taking a surgeon’s pains with his incision, but patience exaggerated extends no patience, and the foolish peasant shook off the man’s grip and damned his donnée, saying what’s it to be a man if I can’t name my fruits as I see fit, why, isn’t that the point of excommunication, that I may majestic make my single state, patriciate my country with myself, fixing what is as god-given as what will be, to the bitter endless, and the poor man shook in full fury as he spoke, setting little Will to trembling but spiriting the new master sergeant with Germanic resolve, have you been to Germany, Jonnel, do you recall then the empirical swath of thin sky and the rude proliferation of pine, was it pine or lime, no matter, there was something perpendicular, something of significance, something that sheltered swans and encouraged supplication, there were castles, too, castles great and castles small, castles tall and castles caudate, castles cordate, comate, clathrate, crenate and plumate, plummy castles made of cranberries and scarlet-crept consequence, castles that ruffled the hair on your arms and stocked your chest with flattery, castles that made you bemoan the length of your rude bones, even the long fevered boast of our bones, the one most common jocular-slapped and plucked from shallow graves, unclothed by plow or storm or the silk snout of a Labrador picking its way through the coarse stone, rocks sharpened on rocks work their way into the cracked black paw and the dog moves on, whimpering, miserable mouth music mimicking, mimicking, as the fiddler haunts the peatbog and the

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waiter passes the yellow paper, this one is yours, and that’s my pen, for I’m the only pure proof of silence, and I’m put damned close, oh, dance with me, Janny, just dance, just this once, just once more, before we pass through rose and ash and enter the great donjon, once we do, nothing will be the same, just as nothing was the same before and will continue to be, nothing’s as comforting as a swag of crochet and the arm of a clean night nurse, it’s a world in a word, this cutwater nothing, nothing wears pretty beaded slippers and tucks brown beetles up her long sleeves, spring clouds soften nothing’s demeanor and winter’s sun deafens her cries, nothing tips at knotted cans and keeps sentiment decanted, nothing yawns at Cupid’s whisper and shakes Argo awake, nothing is for nothing’s sake, why nothing’s one and nothing’s two, there’s nothing but nothing and nothing to do, nothing wears a wig of human hair and a skirt of amber skin, nothing is as nothing does, and nothing does all in, so let us cackle like spotted hens laying seedless eggs for gentlemen, shout keek-a-boo at Her Randomness and crown our days with orifice, nothing is and nothing shall be, and nothing was and nothing will do, we’re bracketed as bedposts, stated and stateless, and if you knew how much I loved you, ma poitrine, you’d grow new shoulders and new arms, and two new wrists to wrap in red ribbon, new fingers, too, at least six, and I’d sprout the legs of a seaman and there’d be nothing we could not do, not between us two, we’d bury ourselves in the pebbled beach and laugh at salted water, nothing would come of us, trimmed in gaiety and strung with the sweet peals from children’s tongues, nothing will anoint us with the rack of lambs and pyramids, we’ll wear simple crowns of paper cones and carry rods of dull-sabered light, we’ve come to nothing, just us two, and by our inverted victory, do nothing prove, it’s clams now, isn’t it, you’ve put in the stew, nod then, and dream of wagging an index, just as the new master-sergeant did upon hearing the peasant’s firm denial, thrice he denied, or ought have, for there’s too many cooks and not enough Simons concisely called Peter, the topkick wipered his prominent digit back and forth then stepped on a strawberry basket and

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admonished the serf to exchange rank servility for another kind as He shucked the Shroud for the Cap of Many Coolers, yes, Jeannot, it were several mistakes, all worthy of making, for the point was raspberries, and to insist otherwise was to keep oneself hopeless as a loose thumb, but righteousness was never writ by rhetoric, truths are script in spittle and sealed in our decay, the great ones hollow as a schoolboy’s hand, yes, that’s a good man, yes, you’re right to admit the bivalves, yes, for what other answer could there be but yes, and then again, no, is it me or have we become our argument, and will there be sides, then, and of what variety, the peasant, as you know, did not cotton to the master sergeant’s oracular assumptions, he denied the predicate, crying that he was not one to probe puddings for eggs or question the three-way conjunction, for modest wit is the soul of breviary, and some day a young Oaxacan man would stand, holding a handful of red-lined take-out menus he was setting on the flats of apartment doorsteps, stand on a street named for something, stand and watch a group of girls playing softball across the street, on a high school field, that light dust scored in pasty white chalk, the chalk clinging to their feet, the man would stand across the street, wearing a red apron and a blue baseball cap, he would stand and smile, another location written in white script across his back and bowed over his left breast and his eyes would slant against the tipped afternoon sun, and the man would stand and whisper por favor and time would stand for that second, and what, the peasant asked, good would raspberries do then, and the topkick dipped his fingertips in the shadow of his lower lip and would have painted him a picture, but his cunctation proved costly, for the peasant’s wife knocked him off that soapbox with a brickbat lobbed from a furlong away, or farther, she had a good arm and a better eye, and the master sergeant flew back, clearing entirely the strawberry patch, yes, of course it was, if only momentarily, and we ran to find the poor man lying in a tangle of rusted vines, the back of his skull crushed completely, no one was more surprised than he, he looked as if he would weep with sympathy, and as his

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mouth filled with warm gobbets of fruitless woe, he would have shook his head, demanding what, satisfaction, we suppose, but such appetites can contract no accord, then perhaps a napkin, a rag to wet and soak with his travails, providing damp composition in consolation of what prize, but neither was to be and neither more was he, who, don’t you agree, could have a contrary expectoration, don’t you agree, the snubs of your shoulders have movement in them, although I’m uncertain as to the import I ought append to your unappendages, I could tack on a sailor’s tattooed sinew and send you round the bend, or would you rather the deaf limbs of a fat man, swathed in Vietnamese silk and confounded by self-puffery, perhaps you’d prefer the cambric sleeves of a genuine lady, and the thumbnails of a six-pack whore, given the right tools, I could fashion the leather-banded watch of any oncologist or the crusted manacles of an African slave, downed while making a dash across what river, hounds snapping at his cracked heels, bound, poor fool, for rumination, to be hackneyed by history and drowned in the well of his best wishers, petitioned white-lipped and dessicate even as his mouth fills with the sumpy waters of the brown river, famous for its fishing, would you, could you, do you dare, would you, could you, do you dear, deed I do, she said, in her flower-print dress, Lawsy, it’s all the same to me, I’ve the blue-tainted wrists of the common suicide, it’s all the same to me, in or out’s our common destiny, for those were my father’s hunting-dogs and my mother’s wrists, faint as matchsticks and twice as tinder, the flame failed at first, but not at second, she’d come in at night, put her hand on my chest to assure herself of the fact of my breath and I didn’t disappoint, now, perhaps, but not then, you as well, here in our sun-shorn present tense, having proved to be an ejaculation, an article indefinite, sujet sans predicate, my time an ill-measured loiter, minutes tipped hollow as a sausage’s foreskin, hours drained like a bath, bloody tub, once it was full of babies, where are they now, that’s right, all gone, that’s what becomes of belief and buoyancy, sweetheart, I haven’t forgotten when you bore arms and they were beauties,

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they crooked and cradled the cracked skull of the topkick and comforted Carl, who took the loss hardest, though we didn’t know why, why not even when Mrs. Mountstuart Jocosa appeared with a grab of hyacinth and a cuppa cock-a-leekie, your arms still wrapped the grieving man as if you could compress his sodden laments to logan water, but the best we could do was skin his sorrow and sort it into strips, tacked together with small squares of tin and worn below the knee, the mirrored beauty of our design provoked the rest of the company to fits of throat-slitting, except dear Carl, who wanted nothing more than to set his hands floating lazily in the eye-green sea, Ich mache mir Sorgen um die Meeresverseuchung, he kept saying, a canon, I think, a creed, but by then we were at the donjon door proper, sawed side to side like a magician’s lovely assistant, the top half composed of goat’s horns, blackberry bramble, red cups of cabbageleaves, salted figs, and sour cherries, the bottom barley stalks, oxtail, rabbit, and stuffed dove, a breast of pork hung somewhere, and dabs of sour cream and almonds still pocked, it’s Schildkrötensuppe you’re craving, you oxymoron, but you’ll get none of it here, for we’ve arrived at our featherdust destiny, our mission having become whatchoo might call a faute accompli, but it does no good to grieve, not standing at the door, the slit of which’s been waxed with bitch butter and licked exceptionally clean, we stood there proudly, me in my legs and you up in arms, our hair fluttered light in the breeze and sunshine warmed the knitted backs of our necks and the subtle tips of our shoulders, I was taller, if you remember, and you were dipped in opium, we marveled at the knacked welter of our biceps and our pastern’s honied breadth, we were top and bottom suitably acquit to any formal hearing, though had I taken half a mo’ and properly consulted the times-tables, including nine and seven and the cross-town bus, I would have seen how it would have turned, out, that is, in unto, that is, and how this soup could only be rightly spiced with the olio of us, now and evermore, all men, what’s round in the middle and lies in between, so unshadow your gentle brow and let’s get cooking, fortune means most

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when least seen and it was indeed Father Matthew who spoke plainly of des pays des merveilles, the door was ajar as he muttered murder, aguzza qui, lettor, ben li occhi al vero, for fear is the beginning of wisdom, and wisdom is dangerously apple-scented, in this Fra Matt was exact as a lawyer’s amendment, never doing what he was not afraid to do, finding in fright faith’s sticking-point, at home he made country omelettes and blew grand soufflés, in battle he wielded a club, slishing and slashing bashing and mashing till the blunt was incarnadine, cher Père, Mr. Finney was once heard to say, thou art a liberal messenger, altering most severely that most abject objet, not afraid to break a few eggs, untrue, untrue, said good Father Achoo, I am a publican, a first-rate abecedarian, thanks to the Lord Bejesus, but you mistake the culled churl, for though my club recruits a few new members, faith admoves the great oak more to pity man’s poor topsoil than provide richer shade, still, I’m a wisky widow-maker, separating bright yellow fact from clear white fiction, fact is, Mr. Finney, the priest slapped his palm on the table and leaned close to us, he stank of stingo and eel and coarse brown paper, fact is, said Father Matthieu, we fossicked like there was tomorrow today, damn if he weren’t right about that, Jaspers, there’s not a second sun left, judging by today, we’re piggish for our futures and would spend our final dividends while slaughtering the stock, though tonight’s luculent as the Lethe, or any longish river, still, we may yet husband the dawn, let us raise our waxed leather cups to that, Jack, to the continuous ducking of the day, may our fears turn clabbered as an abbesse’s milk and our loves come coppered in pearl, for as Suckling said, Love is the fart of every heart, and as Mam added, courted with wine and a bit of tart, sic ars deludo ars, you’re right to cross yourself there and mummer a gentle amen, for now we were inside the great donjon, there was nowhere to go, but up, though the twins insisted on bending their knees to increasing degree as they walked, giving them the true appearance of descent, and we were all inclined to appreciate the gesture, crowded in that ancient stairwell, shoved

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against one another in ascent, the stones had been well-worn by the passing of many men, each step sunk in its middle most severely, less so on the sides, and the pursed trough provided the smaller boot greater purchase, and entrapped the larger sole, we left Owan on the seventh step, foot soldered to floor, he cursed and struck the wall with his rapier, hoping, I imagine, to hack a handhold from the stone, but the walls were smooth as seaglass from centuries of seeking shoulders and palms put flat and hopeless, though now and again a lovely swan could be seen lifting from the surface, and the man next to me swore he spotted a brood of diving ducks but the sound of Owan’s sword was fire to our eyes, freshly wailing we crept on, we loved him like a sister and M. Suçon insisted he was he, trying for substitution, but no one paid attention and no one wanted to wait, rumors began filtering down from the front that there was gray rock and ruin ahead, starvation, some whispered, while others spat and spoke of scissors, they were the serious ones, the ones who polish their cudgels with coon cheese and hiss in the middle of Les Invalides, they keep their arms linked and their hearts profound, they were the real thing, methodists, if you’ll pardon the expression, not like you and me, who eschew violet lactation and drip of wet kisses and regurgitate dreams, but be what you seem and seem to be, as the long man sez, be full of salt as you will without and all will be foresaken, but we’ll prove fleeting as bacon and eggs, mumpsimus sumpsimus, and dry gene chips, we’ve that, at least, to look forward to, our absolute annihilation, that, and breakfast, and do you think they’ll make a story of us, something small and patted with powdered sugar to hand round to the kiddies, or something sempiternal for the Volksmarch, filled with fresh figs cooled under April’s first glaze, nous pensions à l’époque qu’un engagement limité s’imposait au quelque afin de prévenir l’avance du quelqu’un, I hope it will be as tasty as a moon-lit moment and leave the same loose change, and so we made our way, noting how each stair pooled a pat of sandy cold water, clear, it was, pellucid as a ghost’s throat, a great commotion broke out on the right, for

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it had been discovered that some of the wall stones were a mere façade, one of the twins, I think it was, tripped and put his hand to the wall as he’d fell, and his palm pushed in the stone’s skin like one palps a swollen belly, he pulled back with alarm and cried foul at the false front, his brother, whose name escapes me like a breath, drew his short sword and plunged, if that’s the word, into the gray skin, sinking the blade to its pewtered hilt, he withdrew, examined the tip, shouting, it’s been kissed, and it was bussed with stick most corporeal, several men stopped their climb and stood sworded as the twins pulled at the slit in the stone, stripping back the leathery hymen, skimming it from the wall, revealing a deep bright pocket sweltering heat and stink, cum Helios’s asshole, the first twin tied a check silk handkerchief over his nose and mouth and plunged into the pit while his brother nervously waited outside, explaining to the man with a pencil standing next to him that, at the age of five, his other was amply freckled and loved dodge ball and corn on the cob, but refused all footwear, so his little boy feet were soil-brindled and harshed by grass and stone, the man with the pencil licked the lead and took it dutifully down, complete with punctuation, giving some comfort to the second twin, then another great commotion, coming this time within, a shout sounds, a scuffle’s rasp and clang, the rattle and grate of stone against skin, the hollow ring of wood cracking bone and tooth neating nail, our ears pierced by skirls of pain that mirrored in our mouths, sounds plumped and fevered by fear and the hot stinking pouch, sense suffused sense, all radiant from all, the empocked wall unforgiving till the first twin re-emerged, head bathed in a mulch of sweat and blood-rust, dragging some novel abomination from its womb, he threw it at our feet, wizened small and oblique as all abortions, eyes dull green and mouth sharply beaked, yellow as a hen, eyes set side to side like a winter flounder, hands and wings stumped and stunted, useless circling things, each shaft broken in its middle and each barb licked in green suet, setting each filament against its mate, its trunk was no trunk, but the staved hollow of a starveling, though pearls of fresh meat clotted its

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rancid hackle, the twin bore a bloody stripe across his arm and we saw how the foot-claws were composed of unadulterate gold, each talon iron-tipped, each hock wrapped in tarpaper, silver gaffs were its spurs, pared razor-thin and razor-sharp, sickles were its sickles, so it rattled and clappered where it lay, the beast snapped opened its beak as if to bite, displaying the serpent’s bitter fangs and black cleft tongue, and the man next to me, Pvt. Gunsar Mooney, of Inverness and Calabasas, swooned at the cockatrice, having been previously ignorant of all mythology, he was shortly revived with the promise of chocolates and colocynth, and we set to interrogating the wounded creature, we thumped its chest with the heel of our boot and it proved hypocritical as a empty-eyed lecturer, it wept blood-red tears and said it was Fame, God’s second creation, but we didn’t believe it, it being so corporal, and communicative as Sunday’s cloth napkin, we ordered it to provide some form of identification, but Fame smiled at that and said it was, as we ought know, bereft of insular identity, and moreover, recognition lie with it, not us, just as “when these,” the monster trembled its faecal wings, “were indesinently employed, I would flit from shoulder to shoulder, my attentions drawn by the wit of one, the rude beauty of another, my eye, aying him who,” “certainly,” interrupted Jean-Paul Luc, who’d whipped his way back from the front, his handsome brow tressed with anger, “there were better blooms and greater erudition, why choose this one over that one for your clerid considerations,” and he raised his crop, but Fame drew back and retorted, “my perch is not without its own consideration, for there’s many who welcome my bite,” and as it spoke, its tonguetips licked the air most viperish, “and who do willingly part with a bit of heart to savor my pecculant favors,” but Luc bargained hard, “odiferous fuck, what of those chosen who never profit by their renown,” “tally who,” queried the creature, “and to what percent,” “twenty-five, twenty-five, six, eight hundred thousand and two, I will not account them like a gossip of symptoms,” said Luc, to which the beast rejoined, “names then, if numbers undo,” “there are

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too many,” Luc struck his thigh in agitation, “of these too-few, these Jesses and Jesui, Glöck-dropped and driven-by, of Isaacs gassed in heilege Masse, of Abdullahem and Chugokum blown to kingdom came, of wee Brittanys smithereened, our unbudded are homemade by the bedful, their bloody photos beguile the brain, yet in truth they are no more loved alive than the moon, yet once dead, play the sun, commanding the very maw of heaven, gluttonous heaven, would that it choked on your freakish compost,” and Fame edged forward, its golden beak twisting to a grin, more awful in its confidence, “those are those who I do not not recognize, still, you misalign me with Sister Fortune, in her random charity, more capricious and calculate than even me, son of a seraphim, I am, I am, you think my objects selected for their own properties, who you then judge unworthy of the boon and echo of my recognition,” and Luc made his look an aye and the beast continued, “you, Captain, discredit my value, yet protest it promiscuous, and thereby increase its estimation,” and Luc sensibly rejoined, “Maledictio, pimp, for men should speak of their better brothers as plants grow stronger bent toward stronger light,” “what of criminals,” wondered the second twin, tired now of waiting to kill the creature, “shouldn’t they be renown as well, so their sins may be well-known and wellcondemned,” “well,” his brother added, nursing the wound on his arm, “we should also note the lucky, so we can see how good comes like a crocus through frost,” “I quite admire the selfless,” added a fat man with freckles on his back, “and am always curious how they wear their hair,” “I agree,” said Berwyn, the former smith, his hands thick with work, his face still forged flush, “the selfless are constantly interesting, as are those who excel in tricks of perceived fancy and persistence,” “you mean actors,” said the first twin, biting a bit of loose skin, “yes, though not all actors, and not only actors, it’s more an ineffable quality, really,” said the other, and the fat man nodded, “I see what you mean, it’s the masque itself which suggests something else, that’s what’s alluring,” “well, now you’re talking about pershonae,” said a

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thin man with a port-wine patch over one eye, “lugged lions and bears, thash all, whish returns us to the queshion of greatnesh, of every pershuashion,” and Fame struck out then, faster than any of us could comprehend, it nailed its iron-tipped talons across the throat of Jean-Paul, bringing thin ribbons of blood along the width which slowly unfurled over his breast, Luc paled and put a trembling hand to his injury, then silently regarded his spotted palm at arm’s length for a breath, brought it close, and fainted dead away, Fame stood over his body and shook its foil sickles and twice crowed, “look, look,” and we did, and it is an amazement, for Jean-Paul Luc abated two of four dimensions, his form foreshortened, flattened, constricting its extremities, his facial features cut and etched in an antique collar, until all that is left is a coin’s bright profile, encircled by Fame’s deadly furrows, the fiend crowed once more, “see how he is thrifty spent, being woo’d and won by lover’s eyes, I blind my beloved as he unshutters me, for there’s only cupidity in such saving,” and Pvt. Mooney, fully resuscitated, brave and foolishly seized the beast by its rank and gobbeted neck and made some rebuke, the content of which slips my mind for the moment, though it was a piercing insight at the time and elucidated the matter most satisfactorily, but Fame’s black tongue wound round the boy’s soft neck and squeezed altogether slowly and there was nothing we could do or did do or will do to stop the murder, later we agreed it was as if we were rooted on the spot, anchored, like now, in time’s perpetual hinge, the articulation between before and after, like now, stuck, in then, and not a one among us could recall making the slightest attempt to lift an arm or leg against the creature, each sensing our gloveless and bootless nature, knowing then, like now, offensive movement was beyond our present capacity, or capability, it was a long-distance number, sure to be busy, so why, the second twin would crack his knuckles over his oatmeal, even try, and we nodded and quietly spooned salt through our bowl, though now looking back, I wonder if the death of Gunsar Mooney wasn’t in the cards all along, given his lack of currency, but such

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thoughts are freshly minted excuses, you can be sure of that, Jack, sure as Fame dragged the hapless Gunsar back to its den, sickles and toes scuttling against stone, stone splitting like skin to swallow them like the sky takes in hare and falcon and returns to its inviolate state, and waits for Fate’s next mate, the first twin cried in surprise as the lips of the wound on his arm sealed themselves shut as the creature archived itself, as, after a moment, came a sound we’d never forget, like now, a feeding sound, a brute echo of snapping bone and the wet tear of flesh, first vociferous, then more awful in its subdued satisfaction, and weren’t you the one who pocketed JeanPaul, did you know you’d be needing alms, Johansson, or did you think Fame left a gratuity, we promised to mythopoeticize Gunsar Mooney, and we’ve kept that bet for three years, or at least as many nights, I’ve lost track of the time, though not the light, there’s to be another, my grace, sure as we are there will be another Germany, frothy with Rocks and waxed Hühnerbrühe, a dispaired Teuton wherein Gertrude and Ich can loft to our heart’s content, sling steins without ponderous consequence and Ruhe Ruhe Ruhe for the home team, and I hope so, for permanency lies nearest my inward heart, though the outward quobs with the possibility of some afterlife, it’s true, corrupt, sez you, again true, for rank and reviled truth keeps men from lapping at mirages as they quaff intoxicants, no hopes but in small beer, similarly, we stepped up the stairs, holding hands and shouting tra-la-la and lah-de-ahde-ay, provoking fits of Zing Boom Ta-ra-rel, we had the blues on the run, and the stairs as well, the steps began to arch towards the right, making the circle before us larger than the circle we had just completed, and the next circle larger than that one, and again, each circumambulation taking forty minutes longer than the round before, and upon the third traverse, we felt a bitter wind that bit to the bone and blew thinner men to their knees, we bent ourselves towards the blast and found ourselves in a corridor strung with cages, each cage swung wildly in the tempest, jangled and wind-whipped like tavern lanterns in a storm, a true torrent it was, hail big and unforgiving as an

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American fist, raving sleet that nailed shut our lips and eyelids, the whole slabbed frigid as a corpse’s armpit, my skin was purple with chill and cannonade, some of it tinted an ill-augur’d pink, a fearsome howling commenced, freezing us further, so frightened were we unhappy few we evacuated, or would have, had it been warmer, but in this puckered corner, crap fell frozen from us, and soon the stairs were littered with bitter shitballs and bright gold bands drossed many men’s trousers, the bravest among us bent our heads back and tore the ice from our lashes and saw each cage was occupado and the hands of each prisoner affixed to the bars by a girdle of solid red ice as if the poor inmate, trying to gain some purchase in the gale, had grasped the sides of his cage, only to stick fast to the metal like a schoolboy licking a lamppost in winter, and in truth, half the unfortunates were stuck by their tongues, they then doubly cursed, for as their cages danced in the wind, the mouth-flesh torn from the iron like a babe peeled from his mother’s grip, keying a freezing froth of blood and spittle from each hoarbitten gape, the foul spume turning into a new lock of ice to be broken by the next breeze, and the ones caught by their paws howled like collared dogs and would wrench themselves free, trying so mightily one waited for an arm to snap from its socket or a wrist to break in two, instead the skin of the palms sheared to the meat beneath, the cooling hot blood from these distempered mouths and hands flung away in rosy nits and eggs or roped into a mottled mitten or muffler, emboldening a fresh embrace of the bars, provoking fresher defeat, each cage thickly trophied with these thin and brittle scalps, and the little drummer boy cries, “what,” and his innocent wonder drew whistles and catcalls from the militated dark and one fastened by his hands bawled as impudently as he could, his cadence corrupt by the flourish gale, “what wonders who,” and I suggest he see for himself, “see,” he scoffed, “not at this latitude or in this housed hour, for we’re at the full edge of the eclipse,” I saw then through my own rime lashes how his eyes and the eyes of his companions were cartoned in clouded ice, and they peered through these false

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glasses and hooted, “who, who,” philosophically, and I, toes bayed in fur-lined boots, a gray seal or bright moleskin, quip, “we are the ones whose fortunes can still be read and whose breath is sweet and colorless,” “then you have no business here,” said the garrulous one, and resumed wringing his hands, straining to free them from the frost, “for we’re in a fixed rate of exchange, I myself was something once and, as you can see, will be again, it’s a corniconcupisence of resurrection you’re in, costing, like the snake, but a bit of skin,” and I answer slowly as the cold stuns my lips, confusing my speech, “we’re to take the donjon,” and a tongue-bound inmate, more freshly apprenticed, his cage thatched just once or twice, his hands loosely manacled, croaked, “ah ou ohoh,” and again, “aaah oooh ohhuhuh,” then a third time, with some great urgency, and when no reply was forthcoming, wept in fresh frustration, and the salt of his tears cured his tears, and the palm-bound spirit stopped struggling to clarify in strong Southern accent, Georgia, I think, or Arkansas, “my brother asks by whose order,” and aren’t I proud of my John then, taking a good poke at the indentured bastard, good aim, too, your staff slipped neatly between the bars, despite their constant movement, you had an arm on you, I’ll attest to that, two, to be exact, and weren’t we happy as parolees when you smote his side and it snapped open, neat as a lady’s purse, and like warm breath clouds the mouth on a cold morning, a blast of air colder than any cold felt or seen by man glittered from this vent and he screamed in pain and wrenched his hand from its iceclamp and clapped his side shut, screaming in greater pain, a hero’s pain, toasted, with sesame, while I pressed my opportunity, “tell us who you are, so we know that for which you suffer,” and the prisoner, lips bent back to bare blue gums, he dared not weep over his weeping wound, though the globes of ice that were his eyes seemed brighter, just a bit, trembled, then licked all around his mouth, a stubble of icicles embearding the orifice, and quod, “suffering is a sovereign vengeance and a swift virtue, thus we marry our worse part, for it was us that did us in,” too vague, says the drummer boy, meaning pronoun or acronym,

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irony or history, lower or upper case, mister, so I try again, “indirection,” I sniff, “is not what buffets you like a paper skiff,” I was proud of the rhyme of the thing, you see, Johnny, for form was beginning to unfold, “and the concrete and bitter air which undid you continues to undo,” you’re right, it was a little much, but there were reports to be made, and we needed to fill all the spaces, “oamnhi, oughannic,” hissed and grunted the tongue-tied one, which his consociate, after taking a sharp toss and reseizing his bars, unwinded as Romantic, whereupon I struck Plutus’s raw coop with both my hands, my hands proving well unctioned against the frozen pen, setting it frisking across the current so the tongue therein dissembled in four respects and the hand-held one laughed at his cousin, calling through his frigid beard, “note how the great author quarters his words, though I may have as neatly foretold, had I been one versed in onomancy,” which was quite pretty, we thought, as another hoar-fisted one bellowed, “a posterior,” between blustered cheeks, as another chattered in his teeth, “witness how my predecessor quiddits, why he’s the guy who’ll quillet the common sense of is, but can’t duck the little princess,” and the hand-held one darkened and riggled his fresh-frozen fist violently, and violently interrupted, “soon as I’m free, junior, I’ll fetch you a fish that’ll make you rue the State of Florida,” and the unfaithful poet cackled through his fractured kiss as the first politician jerked his hand free and sent his cage swinging mad as a boat-tossed sea, setting a sudden series of fidelities spiraling through the chamber, defrosting tongues, unpocketing hands, and as each cell was tossed and upended we could see then at the top of each a steel spike and on that spike a small head piked neck to crown, or two heads, set like a pair of parents or parenthesis, the hand-held prisoner had a miniature Caesar, Julius, like the juice, another inmate sported a tiny Napoleon with a large cigar, a third had twin Victorian Alberts and there was a blackfaced German above the chatterer, and when that one spun, a whitefaced German showed on the other side, and these heads spun and screamed through the air like

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sirens as the newly liberated scrambled to right their cold-spun prisons, and the provisional poet lunged to restick his tongue, but I kick his house and demand his account, “I am anonymous,” he whimpered, trying to slow his pitch, “or might as well be, seeing there’s no genius, and ergo no sense working in stone, don’t you agree, sir,” he paused until someone, the chimp, I believe, said, “Youbetcha,” then torqued towards the bars, uncurling his woe-riven tongue, but I bat him back again, and back again he goes, heavily, his side now fixed to his confinement, “If you’ve not genius,” I go, drawing a bead, “then you won’t mind giving up the ghost,” you see how it was, ironized as a Saturday night fish fry, and didn’t he confess then, being already battered and grilled, “I mouthed without meaning, my morality my immoral platform, I played puppetmaster to my masters and pattycake with saints, I captained what I’d capsized, commanded second-hand, coined tragedy commerce, and comedy the same, I made crosses oughts and convinced husks they housed heaven,” and the poet angled towards the chatterer, and moved his mouth, causing the other to speak, “I loved life that was mostly unconscious, while will made me feel all nauseous, thought my noise was flawless, come up like the sun, done, like my Father, before I’ve begun, lemme tell you what our cause is, be- be- be-” and we put our hands over our ears and screamed and a man with the port-wine stain pirating his eye took me by the elbow and introduced himself as Sandy Frye, he said orders were was time to go and I gladly left this corridor, stamping my feet to untooth the cold as we rounded the corner, I tossed a final glance back but the figures were hidden in their swirling inkhorns of ice and the whistled wind obliterated all their words, and so we went, soon splintering ourselves into two companies, it’s always two things, unless it’s three, one side, the right, right again, Jacqui, we is our objective correlative, though the subjective correlative, would you not agree, highly carbonates ontology, and is what prompted the right flank to sing in perfect Vietnamese, bÖ khìng hiéu, ph‡i khìng, which means you don’t get me yet do you, which fetched the perfectly

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composed reply, Thüa, ðÉy khìng có thuñc l† MÒ, meaning “No, we don’t have American cigarettes here,” and Taylor the Water-Poet cited this as further proof of the wonderworks of Ste. Philomena, for apparently she was disinterred, if not here, elsewhere, though he allowed it was a dead-certain accident, for they found her in the cemetery of Ste. Priscilla, also known as Prisca, which is prettier, having the slap and salt of the sea about it, and Ste. Prissy’s was soulstuffed as the sea, and astonishingly beach-like, studded with sand-castles and starfish, a steady marine breeze refreshed from the west, bearing the scent of sunscreen and warm tuna salad, how children would dig for sand dabs and little gray crabs while adults sat under cutaway umbrellas and slapped sandfleas behind their knees, one Memorial Day in 1802, a small boy named Reggie Pecock, who had a belly potted as a poinsettia and a tuft of clear down gracing the small of his back, was not three feet from his Mum and Da, digging with a red plastic shovel and matching bucket, and occasionally sniffling rivulets of clear mucus back into his small nostrils, Reggie was digging, he supposed, to China, or thereabouts, digging deep, past the dry and into the wet of the sand, where the saltwater sept into the sides and white spiders scuttled for safety, digging deeper, where his hands purpled and chafed from the unbaked sand, and just before he had to stop, for half a jelly sandwich and four corni-chons, Reggie found a blue glass bottle with a clear glass stopper, top and bottom cut in a pentagon, but billowing octangular in the middle, too small to hold a pirate’s treasure map or a penitent’s note of undue desperation, the small boy held the small bottle, up, examining it most quizzically and in due course unground the glass cork, revealing flakes of rust and the scent of an ancient seigneur, Reggie was naturally disappointed, but decided to rinse the phial and present it to his Mam, who reacted most satisfactorily to any gift of his, with squeals and coos and isn’t-it-beyooteefools and best of all wet kisses, right on the lips, so Reggie clambered out of his sandy pit and proceeded seaward, but having gone one step,

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noticed his nails were decidedly longer than nurse had scissored them the night before, and after another step, felt his hair, which had been kept in a fashionable bob, brush past his shoulders and down his back, another step more, his limbs were longer, heavier, and thickly haired, his feet, he found, came further away, and his dear little bathing trunks could no longer contain his suddenly rude member, shocked, young Reggie cried out, but his voice bellowed bass and caused his darling Mommy to look at him and scream and his Papa to leap to his feet saying see here sir, what’s this about, unanswerable in any event, but particularly on the occasion of thaumaturgy, ah, Yahn, ought I gather by the juke of your head you are inclined to agree or do you yet think this lucubration mere liplabour, don’t tell me, Yahnmann, I see by the empty set of your shoulders you’ve blunt recollection and I would thus suggest Master Pecock’s seat on the committee for the erection of monumentalia, which was permanent, he provided moral fibre stout as a butcher’s thumb, he knew his psalms like the back of a hand and tolled matins like a Scandinavian, he never loved better than the Bible, he cared, but lacked opinion, his empire unfettered by empiricism, in sum, Reginald Pecock was the altern of the earth, Ptolemaic, and it all began when he was no longer a lad, as it will do, you remember the day you muthered the child you were and begot your very own father, why, it’s as if it were yesterday, and I believe it was, and then again, tomorrow, do you wonder if it’s summer, this evening, it must be, for spring’s but a memory, yet I feel real heat on the back of my neck and a sure sense of fall, now why Reginald Pecock and his preternatural extension, it’s got no bearing on anything, for neither man nor boy was there, in the donjon, of course, have you not been paying strict attention for all your nodding, or are you too busy mucking about in your mortrew, it do smell most delicious, deary, I’ll grant you, it’s to die for, well, that’s a bonny mot, my shaking bud, there’s none like me Seanny to zing one off with the deadly sporadic accuracy of a bullfrog, but I require both your ears and half your conjugation, for the lack of you will be the proof of me, we’re

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vesiculate as hydrocephalic twins, we’re engaged en amis, and we both understand that in the end, it’s exitus acta probat, we have our standing orders, written on rice-paper with a feather-edge dipped in warm chocolate, we’ll do whowhee half two, you’re errorless anew, it was indeed the wonder of Ste. Fulimina that started me on the chalked path to righteousness, or at least moving ahead, for though Taylor the Water-Poet appears in our corridor, he was made in the trenches, right down to the black bristles thatching his dimpled chin, he was the first to suffer shell-shock, though none noticed at the time, having grown too used to the sort of painting he passed off as new, I’m stalling, true, but don’t you think there’s chapters between cantos and billions of babied breaths, just as a matter of harsh technique, later, when the world is rife with whiskey and the opposing feet of ordinary men, after the Föhn has warbled through the dying lichen and winter brightly blooded the pale cheek, after eleven sets of schoolchildren have gathered nosegays of jewsears and bunched them with rubberbands, we’ll picnic then, spreading our red-checked tablecloth and our seasonal plastic plates, you wanted the sectional dinnerware, cosseted by food kept segregate as sins, don’t correct me, I’m aware torts are as tarts, composed of honey and fig and well-kneaded dough, black around the edges and raw within, but as each cake has its constancy, each crime can be grossly characterized, thus the man who shoots the night clerk who has already emptied the register and offered extra Lotto tickets and packs of menthol cigarettes is condamned for his vile cupidity via the felony-murder rule which includes among its perambulations death to those who take and kill, whereas murder simple is not rewarded in kind, nor is complex theft, and the one who comes in the window and croons lamb while he thumps you like a yellow melon is more taken to task for the home intrusion than the split knees and soul of you, utterly unremarkable in speechless event, his transgression is trespass, Lust most virulent, as for me, we allow no cause, though I’m a thief most murderous or a murderer most thievish, for on this day of gentle avarice there

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is no inequity in any consumption, death comes in inches, ham to ham with life, and as there is no mechanical difference between the bow of a cello and the rasp of a saw and as the sweet scent of rotting dog reaches the nostrils with the same alacrity as the decay of roses, and by the same moted measure, there is no difference between these sentiments, save opinion, and as there is no difference between these, so there is no difference between moments of life and moments of death, save sentiment, and what is sentiment but tasteless preference, still, we’ve got franks and beans and potato salad with real egg mayonnaise, and after the sun goes down there will be ice cream sundaes for the kiddies and ice cold beer for the aldermen, and let us incant God the Fader, God the Sone, God Holy Goost of bothe, and remember for a peat-filled moment from where we’ve come, nothing, and what we’ve come to, organized composure, we thought we’d never catch up, but we have relish and mustard too, the smell of which is vastly overrated, we’ll run sack races, burning and looting everything in our path, we’ll rape the dogs and tie the women out back, later the bitches will run by our sides while we ravish the gentlemen, who weep pink and prettily, love is evergreen when most red, this is when Carl determines to resurrect, though a couple of the Shropshire boys swore he weren’t ever dead, making it less of a trick, even so, Sandy Frye cracked them a good one in the mouth and pointed out any gore worth his salt can bounce back from that, but it’s a rarer one to show up same as before, undigested, no better, no worse, unaltered by his alteration, history running off him like sheets of white pudding, that’s the honest test of a god, and we understood and set to beating Taylor the Water Poet for falling for the gag, it’s a raw thing to admit, but I kicked him in the side once he got knocked down, it was cowardly by halves, given the supple calf-leather of my boot and the tenor of our oblation, I see now this was a waste of perfectly good violence, but it’s difficult not to overeat at a feast and harder still to foreswore the thick of a bullet into a body’s bloat and the crackle of bone broken over an open fire, it’s

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music to my ears, Johnny, this sawing and rasping and bowing and moaning, I’ll lead if you promise to fallow, we’ll swell as we dance the Sir Roger de Coverly and think of old Virginny, the verdant queen, how the sea comes right up to the shore and the mountains snub heaven’s latched gate, the grass green as an amputee and daubed with the same good grease, there’s no finer bed on which to lie, bubbling and gurgling, the eye rolled mirror’d to the sky, I fell in love there, her eyes were blank as cowpeas, her heart pitted as an apricot, she was bloblipped as a refugee, and she made a boy of me, using only spare parts, but the world springs from an empty set, John, it’s true, nothing comes from nothing and nothing goes right back, divide by nothing and you get infinity, divide by infinity, you get nothing, and isn’t that the zippered truth of our predicament, our lovely patch of darkness foreshadowing the dawn it forestalls, our small avoid begat with ghosts and virtuosity as any celestial vacuum, out of aught comes naught, and from naught, naughty comes, there’s love, still, above all, and still, only that, my muddy Valentine, wretched you are, and therefore to be hung, bemired you are, and therefore to be impaled, for no woman’s sired son has no arms, and two heads, as the red Queen says, are hardly ever better than one, still, our Passion will triumph over the snippets of our birth and the hopelessness of our recognition, we will be untempered by Time’s misprision and the prospect of picnickers, perhaps they will serve a fine stew such as you, beautiful boy, and overhead sweet pouched figs will tremble from the becafico who alights to unseed them with her beak, as I’ve picked you and you me and as we become one as birthstrangled twins, let us begin, O Salutaris Hostia Quae caeli pandis ostium, Bella praemunt hostilia, Da robur, fer auxilium, Unit tronoque Dominio, Sit sepiterna gloria, Qui vitam sine termini, Nobis donet in patria, all men, aye men, either way, it’ll be German, or Mary Maudeleyne, sez you, and I suffer your relentless correctness, you’ve the logic of a mirror and the heartbeat of an assassin, you wait for the in-between to squeeze the trigger, what makes you so good is there’s never another

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shudder to disrupt the shot, the enemy drops like Georgia peaches in your sights, not reversed, mirrorlike, but rather inverse, like an umbrella blown backwards on a blustery day, the earth within moves without, like the ripe fruit, heavy with compost, composts, still, there’s no prospecting mortality, though many a grave wants its digger, and Sandy Frye wasn’t wrong when he led us from that icy circle to the next level, do you recollect, love, how the corridor arched in constant ascent like the eagle, with seeming ease, hurls itself against the earth’s pull in preparation for the pitch of the kill, we were cast in the same sense of security by the effortlessness of the grade and the lovely tapestries that began to appear on the walls, large and small they were, seven in sum, the first one a large one, exceeding the length from floor to ceiling, so the top fringe bent to the floor and the bottom curled past our heads, like Rapunzel making a veil of her locks, there was the odor of aloe and polished balsam and past the garnet and indigo borders there was woven a dark field crowded with flowers, wild exotic stems, certain patterned most naturally into a knotted union of E and U, copses of trees laden with fruit of all variety, their trunks regularly sized and their branches extending, some were barked smooth as a lady’s shin, others wore rough and regular stripes, one concealed a small boy peeping on a wedding party, the bride black as a berry and ripely unplucked, her gold gown studded at wrist and neck with crimson fleurs-de-lis, in her right hand she held a thistle-tipped scepter and her lips were bitten pink as the insides of plums, the groom was pale and his hair fashionably long, and woven of the same gentle gold as his love’s dress, a single feather curled from his snug red cap to the coral touch of his chin, his eyes were knots of blue, a lute stratagemed over his shoulder and a sword scabbard’d his side, he held his arm towards the priest and his hand was a dove, lifting in flight, pale hounds primed near the happy couple, as did several ladies and their gentlemen, the priest was clean-shaven as a priest and thin, his right palm put in final benediction, his vestments white as knifed butter and his feet cast in

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chestnuts, and this was followed by a small carpet, no bigger than a man’s thumb, we took turns peering at it under a magnifying glass provided by the quartermaster, it showed Cleopatra, seizing the asp, provoking the hiss of history and the continent of her discontent, her circumnavigation now complete, for love lives not in marble nor does fire linger as fire, and the Clown’s trick lies in worming his Queen, though we’re all cankerbit by birth and it’s no great shakes to expire, milk does it regularly, as do many college freshmen, consumed by the mirror-gaze, for love, true love, my darling, is bicipitous, amour being, being no more, we’re proof of that, aren’t we, with my tweedledum and your tweedledee, our devotion goes past the red carpet and into eternity, the things we put up with, still, the sky will hang in the moon of an armpit and the sun spinnake in the cut of an eye, I slipped my arm through yours, remember, and you touched my leg, gentle unthrift, we had limbs to spare between us, and moved then to the third tapestry, of a size somewhere between the first two, spun all in blue, of such tripled depth and subtle variation that had we not been as crowded then we might in haste have mistaken it for a pure field, plowed, waiting seed, but our glut-sluggarded passage revealed small figures woven in the furrows, this way and that, so if one grasped the tapestry and bent it purposefully, this way and that, one would be rewarded with a series of related but discrete pictographs, a double folio, to be exact, though cloth is capable of much, fixed thus unfixed, the art hidden herein as ordinate, but did partition in part to tell the tale of a city likewise rendered, its denizens set against each other with flagless ferocity, though there was a tint of cobalt between them, one pleat revealed a temple schismed by mounting men ripping plaster from walls and clothes from their brothers’ backs, once naked, they flayed the next layer, leaving their fellows unskinned and their sanctorum demortared, exposing the terrible skeletons of each, then these creatures enfolded to tear one another, snapping ribs from cages and staving in all supports, leaving a rubble of smoking organ meat and rock, while the diagonal fold disclosed the

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aftermath of a marketplace bombing, here the dyer’s hand must have faltered, for within this wrinkle all picts were fungible, we found pinioned in a light blue vertical seam Quod semper, quod ubi, but the rest had faded, Carl said this was the motto of the Reichswehr and showed us his belt buckle, brass wrapped in a brunet braid, the next tapestry was your favorite, Jacq, fabricated entirely of gingerbread men and their horses, adorned with gumdrop buttons and buttercream manes, marshaled by a king with a skull full of caramel custard, he raised his whip of black licorice, his troops sounding off to the tune of a grahamcracker bugle and the red, white, and blue of Mother’s dragées, though I thought I saw the Stars and Bars tattooed in poppyseed on one rider’s bedroll, she would have liked that, at any event, it was a magnificent sight, baked more beauteous by bloodthirsty marzipan Indians lining the enjammed horizon, as will be seen in many motion pictures, and the boys fell to eating the art, for certain beauty is destined for certain consumption and it was quite delicious, that’s what the captain said, though where he came from, no one was certain, Golgotha, said Happy Jack, who had a passion for phrenology, you’re a nut, said one of the corporals, look at the shoulders on him, he’s from Hopewell, sure as if he sprouted a set of wings, aye yer dafter then’e, shouted an unruly medic with a walrus mustache, as any cauld tell by the cut a’ his trowsars, it’s Fribourg that spawn’d yan valevat hearseman, there’s a lick a troublation bowt the knee an’ a q’yet Catlick air a’ dispairation threwout, Faith, cunt’s right, murmured the man next to me, whose name I didn’t catch, he bit the skin from his fingertips and smelt of broken peppermint, but our captain refused to confirm or deny, he coyly turned his head, letting the light from the tapestries silhouette his profile most becomingly, chewing on the scalp of one of the calvary, though they’d just come to help, it was sugar spun clingy and cool as angel-hair, and I broke off a bit of drummer-boy, which wept at the touch of my tongue and filled my mouth with meat, and as I ate, I saw before me a pasture, not imagined but envisioned, a holograph fat about the heart, sweetly

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conjured beyond my ken, of a girl and boy wandering in a dark wood, picking from the plants their botanical food, wrist-pale roots and fat brown nuts and berries blown big as your nose, and I felt great anxiety at their selection, I trembled with real fear as they put buds to lips with no thought of poison, and poison was there in that dark wood, but it was the fruits of the forest that withered and died under the infants’ breath, and when the little girl dropped a death-cap into her maw, the malignant toadstool crumbled to black dust on the pink slab and the little girl laughed and her brother took her hand and the children, having thus fortified themselves with mortality, squealed and skipped off among the bedded moss, leaving my mind uncomposed and my mouth over-watering, the captain barked at us to keep marching, for it was Friday, and we were tramping still upwards, and it was mostly dark, as noted, though a dark less variable than the black of night, which, like the ocean it discolors, reveals itself to be of changeable depth, abated by a passing cloud and finding star-lit augment in a sudden clearing, the sea is taffeta to the sky, who waves more violent in its too-gentle unending, this was an absolute dark, one that precedes terror, I held fast to the belt of the man before me, and the man behind held mine, and we fell to speechlessness but for the fearful stammer of our feet and the squeak of our hauberk, it was silent as Saturday, the man next to me, whose face I could not see, began breathing in such a way I thought I could discern his vain petition, but in this he was interpled, for we spilt out into a vast plain, windswept, if that’s the word, barren, if that’s another, and the sky came lighter, and the air more heightened with anxiety, we scanned the borders for any enemy, we could feel them hovering like deer knowing the jackal’s near, though which was which remains a mystery, and sure enough, one of ours gave a shout and began running toward the edge of the field and the man behind me drew an arrow and put string blind to notch, the strands of his shoulder strain to bend the mighty bow, whose crack matches the click of the .45 hammer-primed to the left of me, the one at my right racks a double-barreled shotgun as his brother runs an

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oiled chain between his fingers, setting it to tricks like a knowledgeable serpent, and the man flanking him is double-armed with mace, in a tin can and on a smooth chain, and from all sides comes the sound of death’s preface, a throat-clearing rattle of tackle and tag, the rasp of unscabbarded’d swords and the snap of tight oilskin, all tattooed with the precipitate scent of hyacinth and the flavor of past things, sweat came from me most copiously, and a gust of red rain swept the plain, giving the men the sudden appearance of weeping blood-tears, I find myself immediately incapable of selecting a weapon, though a revolver tucks itself in my belt and a razor nestles in the collar of my boot, furthermore, my forearms are hot spiked mail, my sides stropped with razor wire, and if I’m not mistaken for someone else, I believe both bazooka and bombard cross my back, though the latter proves to be made of Georgia cotton and Virginia tabac, good for stuffing, not stiffing, say, that’s a good one, Johnny, ripe as the stubs of my knees and the snubs of your shoulders, you’re a funny man, my companion, funny as a crutch or a latex hand, but as I was saying, I’d become frozen, unable to opt for either reflex, offense or defense, and you, brosey Johnson, you said to me, si quis amat Christum mundum non diligit istum, sez you, if a man cares for Christ, he will not cleave to this world, that’s right, Jack, give us a nod, for we remember it well but what the hell did it mean, I am confused as a penny-pack of firecrackers, for, on the one hand, by refusing to cleave did and do you signify a glad departing of the bonny terra, or is it merely its reverse, and were and are you charging the careful to cling, besmirched, befouled, but finally befixed, or is it thirdly the great refusal you reference, by which, and we’ll get back to this, namelessness is gladly named, but the man next to me, the bowlegged one, who’d previously clutched my belt with real affection, fell, and then two men down similarly succumbed, provoking a wave of pitted terror not so much at the proximate deceasing, but at the unfathomability of its effectuation, for the new corpses bore neither bullet-hole nor battle-slash, were unblenched with gas and unriddled with insecurity, we checked

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the sky for fléchettes and found none, the bottoms of our feet were clean as kittens and the throats of the dead neatly unpinked, their lips unkissed by contagion or cannon, their bowels unrifled by bayonet or poison, in sum we could not divine the method in our fellows’ murder but could likewise neither deny their deft selection, for even as we made our inquiries and the cook applied green eyeshade and a mouche to his left cheek, a swarm of insects descended in our midst and arranged themselves into the perfect shape of a perfect woman, the copper spread of her hips provided by flirts of velvet wasps, her hair was the work of honeybees clustered like grapes and stray yellowjackets, unseasonably mating, her alabaster skin a fair luminate of lice and termite, and the glossy black pits of her eyes and the intoxicating furrow at the base of her throat, a blaze of dung beetles, why she was not beautiful but Beauty herself, she smelt of risotto suffused with morelles and soups of onions sweated sweet as caramels, she was, in a word, irresistible, a method of savory contrivance, the bombination of bugs did not mute her charms but richly cast her as our potluck Moira, she languidly extended a snowwhite arm and pointed to the man beside me, not the dead one, another, a youngster who still coddled hope like a damp egg in a cup, and the sleek of her dark nail was a cockroach’s polished elytron, and the lad gasped his last and dropped where he’d stood, and to tell you the truth not a man among us didn’t envy the lucky bastard, to be picked by her seemed the work of a lifetime, and again a vision touched before me, of newspapers and hotdogs, both served on sticks, of blue ribbons given puddings and former Presidents, of books made of leek soup and letters wrought in ether, thoughtless and quick, of things coupled with other things in a way most carefully indiscriminate, I felt a great confusion and a need to dissertate, the universe swelled in midsummer and suddenly I saw the world through a microscope or not at all, and it was rife with gasping quarks and shivering alphabets, stripped of breath, there was nothing in toto that couldn’t be cradled in the palm of one hand or probed with a tweezer’s twin points, my eyes were bejeweled

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by this pocketchange cosmos, suddenly I understood everything, or not at all, it’s a choice, you see, and we’re pro-choice here, our conceptus presumptively vital as anyone else’s, or more so, given my people’s proclivity for prominent cheek-bones and snap judgments, but I realized none of us were breathing, in, or out, we couldn’t decide, the heat, you see, was killing us, for one selection seemed reasonable as any other and neither exceptionally necessary, yet there we were, dropping like slinks for want of determination, and the corpses of the dead began to stretch their limbs upon the cracked and barren plain in stinking imitatio dei, which provoked scattered laughter amongst the men as they tried to unstick their shirts from their sides, but the right reverend, no, I know he wasn’t, but he ought have been, for his hands were soft as pancakes and his mein democratic as mapled oatmeal, Dr. James Jones, born in a very small town in South Dakota, which he meant some day to visit, having left on the twelfth day after his ill blusterous birth, moving to the greater Seattle area, where he remained for six months before moving to Virginia or Maryland or Ohio or Kansas or New York or Massachusetts, though not Nebraska, Arizona or Rhode Island, and never over there, for Dr. Jones was thoroughly American, comfortable everywhere and in no particular fashion, like a man in a dress, he imagined all existence, he got down on his marrowbones every night and thanked the infinite that had made him so latently perfect, concluding with a mussitate all-men, and it was by his compositive he proved his pudding, he kept a small mirror affixed to his keychain by a purple thread and knew a little of this and a drop of that and to those who would delve into one and skip altogether another, Dr. Jones would produce his small mirror and sing, I wish I was in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten, look away, look away, look away, Dixi-man, the Dixi referencing natural confession, the appended -man meaning the father, look away a bouncing prayer to pretermit Time, that sneakered sin, old times being not forgotten for sins age as great trees, growing tall and part of the scenery, landscapes are pricked with genius, and

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rotten Caesars divot the earth, why we ourselves dive like buckets into the deeper well and was ist Tara and Oswiecim once deplanted, uncamped, the parchment shades drawn and the porch door slammed shut, the land of cotton villein to our immortality, that cloudstudded leafless hereafter sketched so prettily by Wm. Blake and several others, I wish I was, don’t we all, brother, what cottered comfort might one take if one could rest on having been, compossibly affixed like a cancelled stamp, permanent as a played violin and leaves painted on sidewalks, and by these yoked fruits shall ye know me, and something about the dyed hand, if read backwards, nearly everything makes sense, ma’am, later we will know this to the honeysuckle spread of our boneless hips and consequently shall reduce our purview to the smallest possible points, petiter than Kinder, more modest than mice, more singularly transparent and multiplicate than light in the eye of a fly, and there will be many photographs, more of them dead and more of us grieving, those twin columns of mortal grievances being the woeful what history settles in whose sad account, and the lesson of Dr. Jones will be lost, sure as I’m hunkered here, we will plunge headfirst into a constancy of being, feeding off our future, forgetting such consumption is simply sausage-making, the transubstantiation of bad to wurst, ho-ho Johno, another close-tailored turn of the tongue, you’ve the stealth and accuracy of a bullfrog, it’s nice to see you learned something from this contretemps besides buttering parsnips, which might be a nice addition to your brew, the aroma already includes buttered toast, anchovy paste and scrambled egg, or I don’t know my Scotch woodcock, which I do, having been raised between heather and heath, the younger, thistle and thatch, the flapjack and paddywack, kirk and kilt, though there’s no proof of that and I’m not yet certain to which country I ought be obdurate, there’s so few from which to choose, and they all present compelling argument, being absent and uninnocent, do you agree with me, Jenny, and if you don’t, let’s not betoken the point, though if I’d half a mind I’d lightly admit a small copper with your hands on one side and my legs

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on the other, we could flip it between ourselves like a trinity of gray ladies and be as temporarily complete, the most one can hope for in any event and throughout all infinity, for the glint of our minty pfenning might attract a hero, as is read about in books, one armed with a silver shield, magic boots and a white radish, something for everyone, who would carom from our present perspectived art like the eagle from the pyramid’s eye, can you imagine, my love, a hero, it’s practically mathematical, being at once the greatest common divisor and denominator, we could use a man like that, that and a box of allumettes, for a spark of refined light would prove the night and belay my fear of dawn, now as simple as three piles of concrete and one heap of asphalt, or visa versa, if you weren’t here, brother John, I’d’ve coiled up in a saccule long ago, resting my defeat at the hands of La Goulue, she that feasts on the evil served hot and fresh by man, savored by the salt of their best intentions, piquant as a pocketful of posies, you’re thinking the bug-woman was her, but no, for the Insect was the terror of drier discriminations, while La Goulue is Beauty compounded into solid perfection, of such unscattered dimension one trembled in fear and orbital emotion, hurled through the pit of one’s eye by the thrust of the gaze itself, the gaze that jetties and spirals through one’s psyche to form a new double helix, of bullfights and god-temples, of thunderclaps and tiny fingertips, rats running grease-backed through the streets and pigeons missing one eye, replacing one’s old genetic code with the qualia of boundless probability, the serial substance blossoms and blossoms again like bushes of black roses, the hips plucked and dried, collapsing all surrounds under their empty budded burdens as the glutton, consumed by his everemptying sac, fills his mouth with hash and tin, elle’s belle, and you’d best not forget your table-manners and string, though I’ve omitted elaboration on the actions of the right reverend Doctor Jones, my lips tangled with tar-baby kisses, pardon my four à gaz, as I was saying, Dr. Jones pushed his way to the man in the back bearing the fire-cross, Anemas was his name, he shook his heavy head and clutched the trunk,

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legend will be he’d burnt the ends himself, using his press money, sometime after the first fracas, or perhaps before, Anemas dashed up and dipped the cross in the clean blood of his countrymen, but when Dr. Jones held his arms towards the token, Anemas refused to fork it over, no, what am I saying, I must have been facing the other direction at the time, watching the pears blush at the base, for it was entirely opposite, Anemas extended the firecross towards the retreating Doctor J, so the latter might take it forward to incinerate the insectarium, but Jones refused, said there was a purpose to plague and its mysterious articulation, a knowable telos if we settle on our nomenclature, for we can’t destroy the facility of discrimination till we’ve’d divined what to call it, chopsticks, that is, for names and prenoms are important by half, and half again, and as the soul may be deemed conscious or conscience, anima or animus, will or just plain Willie, and John at the dawn is Jack at night, so the current administration needed to ascertain by what denomination this phenomenon would be known, if it were known, and the playbills printed accordingly, nor was this a mere matter of semanticks, for by one’s baptism, one’s breath is petitioned, and the populace duly termed in secteur, it’s an ordinal system, that’s all, brother, a means by which one may know who’s to be held and who’s to be held responsible, later, the two sets could be crossreferenced, to find who’s too good to be forgotten, though this had never come to any statistical conclusion, though it’d been Doctor Jones’s personal experience that no one named Diderot could fiddle worth a fig whilst most Pablos were fair porters, especially in your alluvial cities, still, those who rolled stein in their cognomen had best be used to scant accommodation, and he’d never met a man called Fauchentulie that wouldn’t put up a fight, and good Anemas listened to this and crowded his tangled brows together, he was sturdy as the oak he’d hacked in half for his cross and black hair sprung from his face and shoulders with the same coarse determination, he was, in sum, a man without thought or hesitation, feeling ran through him heavy as muscle

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in a runner’s leg, why, Dr. Jones allowed, it’s all hobjobson to be sure, there’s no more or less firm truth in this than in another pair of trousers and sometimes a bum-pucker’s better than a kiss, topologically speaking, and he winked and put out his hand as if to touch the cross only to have Anemas draw a pistol from his pocket and shoot Doctor James Jones dead on the spot, the reverend’s refusal, you see, to bear the burden of declaring an enemy was simple horror to the simple man and Doctor Jones, the right reverend who was, but shouldn’t have been, though that’s rectified in a hot second, was shocked at the carnation beflowering his bosom, he sat down abruptly and began reciting state capitals, starting with Nome, ending with Sacramento, and Anemas, pistol smoking, turned to me and held out the firecross, and I stepped over the dying doctor and reached towards the standard, fully intending to, and this I will swear on a stack of pastors, to take it up, not out of fear, for what’s fear but lack of ambition, but because the buzz of the bugs was becoming the galled hiss of the Gaskucher and the fall of soldiers feulish as the Nazarene Himself, and if it was selection I wanted, now I wanted none of it, for I saw how choice in the collective was no choice at all, and by process of elimination cake becomes make and uncommon wonderment common understanding, and I would have seized the cross with winter’s knotted fury save that the sky cracked open and rain, real rain, began to spot the plain, rain thick and promising as spring rain, the first fat drops coaxing out the smell of the soil and the undying promise of mud, do you remember mud, Ivan, it sucked my boots with a lover’s dedication, I miss the mud as I miss my shoes, for both held me in high esteem and suffered my imprint gladly, and it began raining harder, long loud needles that stung the bare cheek and threatened the ammunition, the men brought out their umbrellas, the infantry’s were dull green, the cavalry’s bore stripes of blue, while the officers cursed and huddled under sheets of blank newspaper, your umbrella was yellow and spotted with baby ducks, mine, a clear plastic I could see through, and the bug-woman dispersed directly,

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heaven dispatching her waspish constituency to the four corners, then the Colonel, who I’d thought long since deceased, stepped in the middle of the rain, now coming down pitchforks, slashing the rifled hand and flogging the face of every man, rendering us almost determinate, and from under a borrowed bumbershoot decorated in April daisies, the Colonel ordered us to rally, there’s one more circle to traverse before we get to the top and bottom of this, men, he shouted over the raging brattle, his dewy mustache sparkling in the gloom, so leave the dead and let the dying, boys, the Great Gardener’ll see they’re planted, and with this, ipse dixit, I confess I left not one but three men on the ground, one whispering mamma, and I pray now the red curl of his chest held to the end her who’d held him safe and hairless, my baby, my peetee gahrsohn, myna klyna beeline, boyoboyo mine, she’ll rub his damp head and kiss the soft of his neck when he’s all achy, but I had my orders, and on this matter I seek small consolation, as my guilt will be determined by my assignation, in other words, dear brother, who are we fighting for, for it occurs to me the tales they will tell, come the honied winter, of the breath and proof of our obligation will depend to which envelope we are appended, affixed like stamps, posted after a loving lick up the backside and a thumb pressed firmly on the brow, like all deliveries, we’ll bear the brunt of our cancellation, perhaps we’ll be German, our guilt vulgate as our Volkslied, we’ll carry anon despite the chancre’s stink in unsere Rose, though if we catch a coup de bonheur, all’ll be Gallic, our souls comme garlicked and cold as leeky potato soup, or maybe we’ll ride Lady Fortuna barebacked and sideto-side, we’ll yippee-ki-yay in the American way, barren of history as a foetus, beggared by unripe pride, then again, we might fall in love with our ancestral halls, our clansmen peeping between purple curtains and Ma’s tea cozy collection, our will will reek of whisky and the rot of soft teeth, we’ll be discreet, eternally, and triple-visaged, naturally, cheer up, Jackson, for if we be Chinese, our guilt’s unfathomable, if Russian, impenetrable, Irish, mutual, Haitian and Dutch, negotiable and negligible, Persian,

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monumental, Israeli, interminable, African, most Œdipal, it’s altogether incredible, and if, by some happy chance, you and I, we Bund of brother, if we can warp the terrible tide of time and stay beauty in the eye of a fly and the dew of divine authority, then, my darling, we’ll be tallied by nothing short of pencil lead, kissed and put to paper, in other words, treasureheart, and dizzy me with those, of all our seven sorrows, none is great as the one undone, as I turned away from the dying, a cavern grew beneath my feet, I fell, as we all fall, as we fell our fatigues were flayed from us by the speed of the fall, till we were peeled bare as onions while black bocches ballooned our necks and armpits and scarlet lesions blossomed inside and out, sorely mapping each man’s skin, the force of the fall pulls first the head’s thatch, then the finer hairs that ungrace man’s limbs, then the coarse rude bush, we’re plucked and puckered, burnt cold by the bald wind, the blind blinding wind, I wept from this steel percussion and slit my eyes to see my oppositions, the cavern’s sides’re coated in skeletons, enwombed in hard sap like ambered insects and sympathetic cameos, placed irregularly apart as necks, bones cast this way and that, in why not burials, unhouseled and unneighbored, as we fell, the skeletons become increasingly fleshed, growing fatter and more crowded, first composing themselves with putrefying meat and reechy hanks of tanner’s skins, bowels hung unhoused like salt-rotted hemp and time-bitten hands seemed to move, and move still, slowly pawing the polluted treacle, raw fingerbones jut from fingers’ unbleeding flesh, eyesockets wrung hollow as clappered hearts and mouths, unpearled, gape, we began to accelerate, the wind tearing our muscles and skin, I abandon my attempt to breathe like one drowning who, seeing the waterline vaulted in the sky, decides to die so as to rise, hope engraft in hopelessness, we were passing the next tier, a larger congress of decay, those more recently but not freshly wounded, their blood ran cool and thick as buttermilk, one had his throat carved open in a mock smile, his skin the color of pigeon eggs, his dull breast tacky as a butcher’s counter, he was trapped from the waist up

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in stick, arms fixed to his sides, hands submerged in the mire, his shoulders shake and shudder as he tries to wrench them free, sinews snap and reel back like ropes over-taxed, tortured by some unseen electricity, he is purposefully silent, his mouth stitched shut in concentration while the wind of our fall whistles through his gaping pipe like a crude flute, his eyes, as all eyes here, are seeled with iron wire, but still occupied, as if the gorged globes hold some fixed and liquid image, and beneath him, a woman, hacked and overturned, a dark furrow hoed from throat to gut from which the heart-stone had been plucked, her empurpled limbs lie illaqueate, her tears flow treesappish, she moves still, but moves slow, in soundless eloquence, then two women, conjoined by skull, heart, and hip, named Rosenrot, thrust themselves forward and back like dogs unwilling at leash, there were three of them then, compounded by virtue of having been broken on the wheel, though there’d been a trial beforehand in which each was required to sing an ode to winter snow and gun-butter whilst carrying a white-hot poker across the round square to the footstalls of the cathedral, my mistake, the trial came after, the local populace favored anise for flavoring sausage and dornoch-law for tautological beauty, execute first, try later, that’s the ticket, rarely is found an instance of real innocence anyhow, and if so, the unjustly condemned reap the benefit of instant martyrdom, it’s satisfying as maple syrup, warmed, drizzled slow over a dollar-stack, for ‘tis far, far better, the assembly agreed, to wrongfully perish than live under a cloud of unproved accusation, the tripleted twins were charged with unshadowed prognosticks, and the entire town gathered at the parvis to watch the executioner lift the wheel high and bring it down, eight of their legs shattered in twice as many pieces, each woman flopped frantic as a small fish, freshly caught, attempts to toss itself from the boat’s bottom, but were constrained in this by their communal parts, finally, like the fish, redslitted sides dilating open, hinging closed, their eyes started to cloud, and they fell into an exhausted and agitate silence, rendered substance, Rosenrot to

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Rosenrot, and Rosenrot again, the executioner hoisted the great wood wheel, banded around the rim by a layer of soft wept lead, and dropped it near-comically across their reciprocate ticker, and Rosenrot gasped and Rosenrot gulped and Rosenrot would have slipped into that murderous sleep but for pain’s floating-point, and Rosenrot, who not for naught would be found guilty of infinite omination, failing most miserably the perp-walk to the church-door, knew Rosenrot would rally if there were reason, for her sister was and would be innocent, susceptible to cushioned logic as a chaired professor, Rosenrot whispered to Rosenrot that the executioner would eat cabbage twice before the day was done, and cabbage twice is death, and death redux, Rosenrot rallied, is no death at all, and the trinity shared an end-stopped smile before the wheel bounced from one set of wrists to another, unknitting their palms, leadening their eyes, setting them steaming like stewpots, they expired most prettily, several and jointly, and we fell past them, foolishly weeping, to a third level, which stung of shit, where the freshest slubberdegullions dangle by the ankles from raw peat nets, wiggling and bleeding like shovel-split worms spilt pink from the side of a hole, this final clutch was the best attended, for these were the ones who burr-clung to habits of belief, yet proclaimed themselves libre, and their compadres, who wore the cynic’s sluck belt, unfolding art from fact and fact from art, each man’s art and every man’s fact their pleated conceit and own adoration, the most famous flailed side-to-side, while the common others bend back, aiming their shame shameless at some higher authority, their eyes open and gobbed with dirt, sightless still, they whipped about as live fish gripped tight by the tail, taking no comfort from each other’s company, complaining of the physiological abstraction as a predecessor of purely logical obstruction, “Berkeley,” a fat man thundered, butting his snowy head into the shoulder of the woman next to him, a steady diarrhetic stream issued from his backside and he was slashed from ass to jawline, his several skins billowed and snapped like a cutter’s sheets in high wind, the wind sallying waves of shit

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and blood, the fat man bleeds irregularly at the padded joints, weeping and creeping with each sidewards flop and flap, he’d been flayed like a blanched peach, his pot-cheeks peeled and enflamed, for what sin I could not be certain, dung dropped down the woman’s waled sides and striped her white hair black, she was thin and thickly stained, her breasts drained and propped with small round bones, her caved belly a casement to the stinking smut and she did not know who it was who husbanded her as he could not see himself wifed with she, they were that different, yet exactly the same, each of them bound in their dim prospects, like so many couples, then it seemed the woman saw us, her clotted eyes bulged cartoonish and she flung herself away as if we still had our axes, and we did, “who,” she shrieked, “are you,” and we apologized, for she was right, of course, we were nobody, but our demurrer did not set aside the main of her complaint, “to wonder at my meaning,” and the shivered fat man japed, “ach, Sunshine, we’ve all wondered at that,” and the shock of his laugh caused him to loose a fresh sweep of blood and shit, he moaned in consequent pain and she, newly bewigged, sniped, “keep your secretions to yourself, you pointless-titted windbag, or haven’t you learned,” and a large pale turd fell from her into the abyss, prompting the fat man to catcall, “learn I do from sister’s dewdroppings,” which was repaid, “pearls compared to your discourse,” whereupon the fat man puffed out his crapulous cheeks and began lisping like a campus orator, “part’n mee, I’m Massah Furtz, nurse of Anglo-Saxony, as pointless-titted nurses be, n’ ‘pon my sainted mammy’s Wort, histories nurse on eine Gas peep,” pppppppfff-f-f-f-T, she trumpeted, proclaiming through crap-caked lips, “I am the harridan of hope, my lines crystalline as truth, my tales ablative and,” she spilt another fat turd, “allegorical,” “there’s my red hen,” meowed the fat man, “playing slapfaced eggs for gentlemen,” he stuck out his tongue, lewdly tickled the air with its tip, and winked, “whilst roostering the ladies,” then flipped backwards, displaying his odure’d ass, “one for a penny, the other for free,” the maculate moon

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emboldened me to ask why they were here enfetched, for although I understood the thinner one believed a set of things, though the constatives were rather idiodialectic, while the fatter was less settled, though more sure, and thus they winded outrages at each other which appeared in their later stages loosely alphabetically, although strictly lunatic “why,” the woman interrupted, “think freely at all then, why ruminate without remuneration, why consider sans consideration, why,” she spat, “account when you can cash in, but see how I,” she pawed apart the crammy pulp of her chest like a ghastly first curtain, “cogitate,” and her heart was smooth and still as a futureless babe, “si, see,” sighed the fat man, flopping facewards and lisping, “you’re a sthinker, all right, why contemplate when you can can-can, why reason when you can roshambo, why colligate if there’s no kittens, me kitshee-kitshee-koo,” whereupon she spun at him with claws extended and stripped a length of lacey blue skin from his throat which she shook at him from the tip of her talon, hissing, “desist,” and the fat man clapped his divided hand across his new collar and dove sideways into the mire, she turned to us, smoothing her savaged shitted breast like a girl pats a curl in place, and lifted her chin, “I was the public one, who stood against the horizon and for the dance, my thoughts were clear as light on a leaf and as prone to photosynthesis, during my dark reaction, I turned my hand to the telling of tales, I wrote romances of every budded variety, some temporal, some satirical, some majuscule et minuscule, yet all of them polemical, sufflate with cornified persuasion and the jussive mood, I failed to see the eyeslits in my own masques, I bedded my fellows like a Greek and set to snipping, I forgot gods pare only their nails and forced my creations to contort around what should instead of what would, I was besotted with self, I had the dustgift of ubiquity, and in m’amuse, I failed to see the stick creeping about my feet, and I found myself in the one true city, which stands eternally cleft as man’s own mind, and they wanted me to sanction a truth, to wrap my lips round shofar or scimitar, to decide, but each had his argument and I would not humble myself

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between them, I spoke of fidelity and mirrored the fly, my imperatives simple declaratives, myself seen, aye to aye, and by these solid indeterminacies I became bedded in the hemorrhaging constipate of my histories, spewing black milk from my bottom and propulsing blood blued by half a heart,” whereupon the fat man rose from the west and bayed, “don’t moon over the metaphysic, boys, it’s but cut cheese that’s her siren song,” at which she feigned to strike again, advising, “they’re obviously trying to extract a moral,” and the fat man fell to weeping and gnashing his teeth, “you pumped cunt, they’d’ve better luck yanking a hen’s tooth from a jawbone’s ass,” and he lifted his arms and let loose a torrent of liquid shit, “for chaff is the only mote to be reaped from us, am I not pithless proof of that, gifted beyond compeer, I fabricated aeroplanes that propellored only my pension, like the lad by the lake, I stroked none but myself, like a Sunday schoolgirl pimped by preaching, I preachered the pimp, the ovens were corncobs I packed for my pipe, I knew what was and cared not what is, and now hang, like Scrooged goose, zuallerletzt, zuallererst, said the oyster to the pearl,” and so saying, stuffed a handful of crap in his craw and commenced chewing as the woman commanded, “name his the greater sin, then, for at least I cared,” and the fat man squealed around his meal, “like a glutton for his lunch, her love’s single-handed as a schoolboy’s, piggy as a Mallon, she would have blown breath into statues, but only statues,” and he pursed his lips coquettish and farted upon her face and she bit his butchered back, her eyetooth hewed his hide a new seam, he screamed and twisted away, leaving her ruminating on a cud of fatted flesh, and her tattered nethers parted and she spat the profane mouthful into the gape of the Caliban that appeared brief beneath, whereupon next to her, another great one, who we leave nameless, who had been flapped profoundly right, hair embedded in the foul amber, flopped abruptly left, ripping the tresses from the scalp and the scalp from the skull, we saw the stick by the feet was mossy with such leavings and the paler side of the pate knotted thick with new and old scars,

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and from this about-face seeped fresh red blood, mixed with yellow pus from prior voltes and faeces from the ground, the one wept at our gaze and confessed, “pity me my averruncatcy, it can’t be helped, you know, for as a thing is, it is as likely not, and there’s every conclusion to be drawn from a tree, in Deum patrem omnipotentem, and yet, as I say, not at all, Ich bin der Geist, der stet bedingt, Lawsy, Lawsy, I’se de constant conditional, de dead belly laugh, I’se de pope’s popliteal, kneedeep, kneedeep,” croaked the spirit, sinking farther left, and the hair on that side began to slip light and fast into the amber then wend its way up, then down, then smaller hairs split themselves one by one and more quickly embraided the muck like a snake traversing the forest floor will slink in and out of the litter, and, spotting a frog, stops one part so the other may move faster, “I suffer in succotash, you can imagine the difficulty planning ahead, not knowing if it’s ich or nicht, es or churrigueresco, moreover, there’s the matter of the disjunctive, syllabi and syllabub, the bigger the buckle, the smaller the ranch, should not therefore gots to be, playin’ my sixteen and my thirty-two, ain’t no nigga bigga than tu, is it still Saturday,” the spirit sharply inquired, thwacking tongue against teeth, and dove further down without waiting our answer, hair pulling head under the beshitted ground, and I could not clearly hear, save a prayer-soft, “hollow-point bullets,” and we fell past this faecaled circle, who, you’re right, Jake, you’re spot on, had nothing specific to condemn them, and their commendations were as rustily consumptive, we fell flat, son, I landed next to a smiling old man who put his hand on my face and called me mon fils, he spoke French like an Argentinean, was freckled pale as a tonsured scholar in pleated pants, and had Always embroidered on the side pocket of his silk shirt, and Jamais tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand, and when I made to cover my nakedness, he waved as if to dismiss my matter, “I’m blind as a librarian,” he apologized, jerking his thumb down toward the shitty souls we’d passed, “ah, for the figs stuffed in those skulls,” he smacked his lips delicately, “what a tort they’d make, served with jets

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of real cream, for bidden fruits are the sweetest, teaches la primera doña, and hang highest, sayeth the grape to the fox,” and he laughed and elbowed me sharply, so prompted, I said, “pleased to meet you,” I said it automatically, and you can see why, Jenny, for I never unwound the silk thread, and am as amazed as you, though somewhat less admired, still, we’ll’ve’d the sisters by the shorters and the bull by its locks, “pleased to meet you,” I said, “cheesed tomato, fleas two meat chew, sneezed tae mate yew, t’woo mete t’woo, yu, tu, du, du, du,” he echolocated, then scummed me fair in the jaw, “what was that for,” I said, “wassail,” he said, “hat fur,” and did it again, and when I made to why all over again, he banged me bitter looshtre straight in the maw, rattling my teeth and clipping the tip of my tongue, I scrumbled away in the nick, and the poor gob what caught the backswing saw his tongue severed by his own bite, he shrieked and spits out the useless and faints dead away as the blind man says, quite contentedly, “well, well, welcome to Inverness,” and now that a name was hung on the donjon I was overcome with curiosity, for as you know, Johno, where there’s a name, there’s a mission, and a mission, a bell, we wear our silver bells religiously, and tinkle them like cats, bewaring birds and bewitching biddies, it’s murder to be monikered, known by this over that, for weren’t MacGregor and Thatch the finest fellows that ever wore hats, and yet, by way of nomancy, therein lay robbery, in two of its tropes, ieri, joie de viol, and a cool jab of vanilla, which is how all future executions shall be effectuate, the condemned will be brought breathless before all legal witnesses, to wit, members of law enforcement, to wit, peace officers, the press, the pruned families of his victims, and the great Empedocles, in his allonge-perruque and red plumpers, duly impressed to service, and after receiving a final slap in the face by a clergyman, will be laid naked but for a child’s chocolate pudding on a bed of honey graham crackers and infused intravenously with rich marshmallow creme, made fresh in Wisconsin that afternoon, the crack-hemp seeped in terminal pleasantries, all sigh in collective relief, all

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men, we’ll murmur, augment the murderous din, just as I was moved to admurmuration by the blind man’s reference to Inverness, I wanted some more, but whether I’d crawled or been pushed, I cannot know, for the blind man seemed to sense my approach before I’d made it, just as he answered my question before my blunted tongue could brace my teeth, “la città dolente,” he says, “this Inverness, if you’d entered from the north, you’d’ve beheld a lintel made of osprey and lime ice, with a hint of mint, spelling out quite clearly the maxim,” and he nodded as if agreeing with himself, “in very small letters, as one would expect from a child seamstress, already stunted from hunching over a pattern table, already scarred with pointless stitches, poor little girl, her hair’s gone ash and her lashes have fallen out altogether,” he slowly sighed, then slowly winked an unseeing eye, “but what she won’t do for pocket-change,” but what of, countered I, the mini maxim of Inverness, “oh, that, well, that remains to be seen,” and he took out a cigarette and asked for a match, but we hesitated, being buck-naked, and he brought out another cigarette and pronounced it exact, we laughed, and he reworded, a light, that’s what was wanted, but still naked, we could not comply, still the blind man waited patiently, cigarette held delicately aloft like a lady in a feathered hat, so I flicked my thumbnail against the tobacco’s tip and pfisssted like fire and the blind man drew deep on the unlit cigarette and exhaled with deeper satisfaction, “that’s better,” he puffed, “it’s mentholate, though it’ll be the death of me, but then, so’s the breathing, the old in and out, out and in, in and out out out, interstice rhythm of the thing,” he pouted at no one in particular, “as I was saying, welcome to Inverness, now that you’ve found the end-stop, I’ll be happy to issue tickets to wherever you think you’re going,” and he produced a small booklet and a golf pencil and began to print “one way” on each page in painstaking capitals, periodically adding “Freiburg,” though others he would round-trip and immediately void, slashing these tickets so ferociously he frequently tore them in two, he tried to hand me one of the ripped ones, but I kept

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my head down and asked for Freiberg, please, for I had a hankering to see the cherry blossoms in the spring and the Ice Capades in winter, or visa versa, though that never works out, but one can dream, yessir, and so, bright red buds will ignite the sunless snow and Pan Americonga glissade the inferno, ad infernitum, that’s the ticket, wouldn’t you say, John, naturally, they’ren’t blossoms, but the fruit thereof, you have to start somewhere, and often it’s at the end, and for that matter, had I imposed the white petals onto the white banks, you’d’ve seen nothing, and then where would you be, in the dark, very funny, Abdullah, but I’m afraid you’re dead wrong, for the naught you’d be sighting’d be the absorption of light, to fatter wit, white, whereas and evenechriste, the zip you now occupy is a gentle-bodied black, friendly as a thin Labrador and as liable to lick your hand, sorry, man, I find myself forgetting and I’m a little weak in the knees, it’s a long night this night, seeped in all our morrows, though tomorrow creeps closer, can you feel it, my adoration, the coming of today, it comes, a golden turtle with alabaster mail, a mutton-mouthed lion with candlestick paws, we’ve but a third of a clock left and you’re still cooking, mind you add the bachle, for a good stew ought have a bit of the huttwo-three, and don’t forget pestles of pork and gentle poaches of egg, and the rubbery curl of a fine brass cello, I’d like to see your soup stuffed with sense and nonsense, a fragrant confuse of essence, a consommé of sense sans sens, into this tohu-bohu we shall slip our dainty feet, provided I can find mine, and soak our precious ten till they pucker in the pot, and with our wrinkled little ends we’ll fish for bones and gentlemen, and draw up only feathers, which we’ll suck for the hotchpotch in the shaft, and who knows, lamb, perhaps we’ll become blackbirds then, baked in press-pie, or, being acquitted, we’ll go to heaven, we’ll cock our wings and fly, silent in the face of the silent soldier below, that sorry sad sack with the blackmeat belly and the cannonball nose, we’ll pause on a telephone line to recollect how Sir Thom Aquinas prefigured the creation of the world was the annihilation of nothing in an act of divine alternation, omitting

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the god-thick avant and the idem after, for if God can do everything, He can do nothing as well, Deus meus, Deus meus, ut quid derliquisiti me, either way, we’ve a remedy, weaponsalve and deathmeat, remember the sauren and the sweet-potato, grits would be good, salted and peppered, and there’s nothing like a bitter dash of regret and a scut of pricked pride, as I was saying, we’ve found the cure, now need to locate the weapon, post hic ergo propter hoc, donchano, I suspected Freiburg, who’d a suspicious frottage of good fortune, but when I held out my hand for a ticket, the blind man grabbed it quick as that, quicker, quick as the flirt of that, when one’s tongue tenses to touch the cool slip of the tooth’s back, quick as that, he grabbed my hand and put me close, and his breath reeked of clean water, “speak,” he said, “speak,” but I spoke not and he heard my mute terror as music, all discordance agreed, “it’s well you don’t confess,” he said, “when by your silence you prove yourself unproven, your sins either great or not at all, for the greater the sin, the easier to absolve, there’s much to be gained by forgiving much, treaties and contracts and such, on the other hand, if you are mainly blameless, there’s nothing to be done, I’m sorry to say, and your case quite hopeless,” and as he spoke, a pond-smell came from his mouth, sweetish and green, faintly buzzed by the dragon-fly and the threat of mosquitos, crawfish scummed the base of his throat and moss-backed turtles tipped out their snouts along the gumline, “by the feel of you, I’d say your sin was substantial, yet, judging by the cut of your collar, inconsequential,” and his breath turned aquamarine, “welcome, mi Spatz,” spraying foam and brine and the caw of the gull and the scream of the lion, “welcome to the psalmody, for Man, in his thirst for contingent knowledge, gave up the river of eternal life, so my crook of Inverness praises those who would slake the keen betraying thirst, from our capless fra who captained both waters as he navigated the three eternal spheres, though what sin this is I’ll only adumbrate,” and he cupped his hand around his ear as if seeking counsel or charade, “or explain by way of valerian illustration, and to this I’ll add emphasis and

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the ghost of mark twain, to the hymn who took his laysure by the haysitant adverts of the riven lifey, widdo whiskey and hel-lo noise, to the one in one who englobed the world fore and aft and forever entailed shade and substance, the one in one whose I ayed the eye and so dies sorrow, and so dies ire, man dies in inches, and so never expires,” and as he spoke, a living hologram appeared between us of the seven eternal ones, dressed in navy blue jackets with tags that read Hello, my name is..., affixed to the right tit, from Aleph to soda cracker, they looked at me and spat, so I spat back, gobbing the jaw of the blind man, right where he’d missed himself shaving, and the blind man touched the bubbled stubble and smiled, “beautiful pinenut, there you are, with your theologia mathematica and your idée fixe, I only wish we’d a flat tire to spare, for I’m sure we could jack our whip on the kilt of the matter, then book out of here, our laps full of sentimental whores and the urge to propound,” and he paused and looked at the walls, which I saw then were made of coarse stalks set so close together a man could not insert the tip of any digit between them, and which, now that I studied them, were not conformed four-square, but went in and out of prominence, so that a section would ascend, then seem to retreat as another portion advanced, some appeared to double back, while others clearly looped before stacks of harvested stems, I realized we’re at the center of a great labyrinth, grown of corn, for the tasseled tops of the stalks were as familiar as majesties and the ears, like the widow’s late husband, jutted from the trunk, his were harvested, dried, and kept like apricots in Ball jars, according to the custom of the kernel that captured him, and the blind man blinked and whispered, most conspiratorish, “I came here to be alone, seul to seul, but there’s twenty-two more of me, I’m a pretty Dutch girl, zum gali gali gali,” and I saw what he meant then, for to my right, the toe of a boot was clearly visible between the stalks, and at my left, a cufflink glinted toothlike, and there was a general rustling I’d taken for wind, and in the plants’ dark sutures, a pair of eyes rolled whitely, which I’d taken for cartoon eyes, some form of

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background animation, but which now took on more sinister aspect, looking left, right at me, so I snatched up a fistful of dirt, full of pebbles and scraps of glass just as the blind man explained, “we’re looking for one more, we need twenty-four,” but it was too late, for I’d made my occecation, hurling the studded earth into the eyes closest me, which snapped shut like a seal upon receipt of a sardine, followed by a scream of such sustentacular dimension one could have set a white toll booth with a yellow and black arm along its length and charged silver trucks bearing crates of truck parts and tomatoes to traverse the Freiburg, whose swollen waters are well known by locals and tourists alike, one could hire an ivory pontoon with alabaster nets to putter up river, keeping the family nestled in their orange lifejackets and munching bags of ruffled potato chips, romantics nuzzle in a long black gondola, poled by a similarly sightless gondolier, who runs ashore repeatedly but sings Tenderly so sweetly, but either way as one slips under the scream, one will slow to admire its arch and span, penny a measure, penny a pound, whispered the sommelier, it’s got staying-power all right, stock as a slapstick cop and a rude awakening, this clapper-bridge, and those of us tarring the bomb-ketch will roll our sleeves into quarters and get our freak on, for the keystone’s made of caramel and the jigger of gin and still the caissons keep scrolling along, no, Johnny, don’t think a second about it, coughing-fits’re to be expected, they’re as natural as transcription, unadulterate as iron panties, normative as the bit of night cupped in your eye and lung, albeit, I should say, albeit indefinite as the one I blinded in the mantle, the sightless old man paused, looked fleetingly distressed, then broke out a great smile, shaking my hand in fraternal frenzy and handing me a suit of amethyst, embroidered on one sleeve with a small Pegasus, and on the other, the words electric light, “welcome,” he said, “to our pool, reglamentos de la piscina, please shower before entering, no running or diving or glasswear, no lifeguard on duty, keep the gate closed and don’t urinate, by eliminating your predecessor you’ve proved yourself rash as bacon and eagerly pro-ovum,

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you’ll be perfect to incomplete our panel, jointly and severally, we shall adjudicate mind over matter and all manner of slander, true and false, and what is not true, we shall work to bring about, for it’s all true, mon petit effréné, as the Germans say, alles ist wahr, tout fait, for is not the tongue the creator of the Word and was not the Word the coddled egg, seeded with pits spat from a mother tongue, tongue of man and his meted member, thus and therefore can it not fairly be said the tongue is then beginning and end, Aλϕα καì ʹΩμεγα of the whole kit ‘n kaboodle, aqueducts and arcades, bridges and barricades, cook’s champers and champerty, lardy & Jones, ejecta and elevators, three families’ carphologies, etc., all built from the lilylivered tongues of ladies and their culled gentlemen, for fact is fleishig, truth’s made of meat and meat is moider, nyuck, nyuck, and the only answer to quand es dies is a fistful of fondant, to which you are welcome and to wit we must insist, it’s part of your jurist’s johnnysack,” and so saying, he gestured towards a nearby haystack, adding, “help yourself,” so I, still fearing a cosh in the mouth, crawled slowly over to examine the heap of wilted stems, which proved a more arduous journey than one suspects, for the ground was spongy, slightly slick, smelt of baby oil and horseflesh, and when I paused to catch my breath, pressing forehead to floor in the manner of a sesquipedalian supplicant, the blind man chastised me for halting, “press forward, boy, never hesitate, for heaven hates a censor, though the same might be said of hell, if I can be of some illustration, for I myself saw the world fully conjured as if mine eye lies in mine mind, half of this meant none whole, so gentlest wind spun me fiercest, I conceived only the substance of things and the things they substanced, and my mirrors caught my heartless amazements and many adored the objects featured in my rudderless expression, function latched to form quick as Nature herself, still, as day will betray night, so sight failing sight, fancy belies fancy, and I woke unable to discern any but the muzziest morphes, and glorious Creation, everso maculate and mandarin, was shaped plain and spotless as an infant’s ruddy cheek, and when my

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devotees crowded me and asked to be delighted, I gave them a desert instead, a hob-nailed parable delivered right to left, a story stripped to the blind bones as if set upon by wolves, but I stood by it and swore it was meated with truth, but my truth was deplete, as I could no longer see mountain or tree, and beggared the cape of the dauphin,” he trembled at this confession, and I, made brave, lifted my head and shouted, “then you’re shittier than those shits below, for you turned blessing to curse and yes to no,” at this rebuke he peered upwards as if stars pressed there instead of stone, and moaned, his trembling more violent by his woe, and he was unable to speak for wailing, and I turned from him in disgust and stood, stepping through the marsh with the purpose of a gander to a haystack, only to see that the thatch-pile was a horror of tongues, unrooted, tossed together like leaves in an infernal compost, tongues greyly flaccid and rigor’d lilac, still tongues and tongues still slapping, blush tongues of every form and dialect, stripped tongues of all stripes, the gross timber of the preacher, the seeksorrow’s uncinate curl, a small girl’s budded sweet, a good Berlin Zunge, breaded and cordoned blue around the charred Hebrew cancering its neighbor, underneath a greenbrass langue rudely abuts a lily-white parole, a bitter ribbon of jargon laces liverish cobs of what once was something but now smelt latinate, cirrhosis had set in on the solicitor and the snollygogsters were wan as prisoners’ palms, though color was no mark of content, for there are weak yellow graves and lengths of ribald plum, tattered tan hanks and half-chewed knobs of pearl, blood-red pads wrapped in lacy nets of peach fat, which I take for Russian, well-sinewed Hispanards with root-hairs the size of thumbs, and a creamy slip of foie gras, silk-pure and swimming in calories, high rhetorick to be certain, of some nowunknown origin, a coven of pear-shaped bottleflies swarms over a pat of gilded Latin and a shimmering puddle of Greek, nettleweeds wend through the Netherlands as bright buttons of mercury stud the bands of Serbs and airy tufts of downy mildew mute the Croats, the widerspread tongues, such as English

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and Cantonese and unkind, pinked with lard, overlap the smaller dialects, bearing the dim stripe of a japanner’s bootlick, and, tucked neat beneath this bottomless logomachy were the tri-tipped tongues of my own histories, shot with verdigris, smelling of absinthe and hickory, schuldig as Apfel strudel, hinged in the middle deux par deux, so the tip of the tongue stings both morn and moon while dear mither’s lap cuts kin to cain’t, chancing the lot of her litter like a tree-clung cottonmouth, and the poet’s plank’s a pizz-whistle, bearing the mark of a copper catling and a hot tin cup, I reel away from this soundless piper’s nest then stumble to avoid crushing a cloche of slinktongue, pierced through with a strip of sharp grass, and the lengths of them were as horses, and the horses’ heads bore men’s faces, and they were bundled and bagged like kittens for drowning, not standing for nothing, falling for nothing more, I hie aside and am in it, swarmed over by tongues thick with betrayal and thinned from forgiving, tongues forked, tongues spatulate, tongues silvered and suspicioned, tongues rendered fast together and far apart, tongues coiled close as marble ears and the brown shells of sidewalk snails, tongues dauncy from the hot tar of confessions poured into them and the full hearts that bled out the mouth, tongues slow and sulky from Copernican happiness, infernal and contemned tongues, every one, they sucked the firmament and licked the tilth, but were nourished by neither state nor statelessness, tasting of the cast-iron skillet and scraps of hopping john, the appellants have glossy green backs, versus the respondents, who’re cased in a rash of sandpaper, both parties wreathe and wreathe, alternating their pleas, so ‘tis turns ‘tisn’t, mayn’t to may, dictamen dicta, forming a stout widdy to hang all the men of Ulster and the gangs of East LA, this mortal tangledness, this stew of pothers, interested as a stomach, this guttish obtesting and obtending, bold maggots cording through fine grained wits as white drub worms filigree the catkillers’ speech, a fierce heat radiated from some of the slacker glossae, scorching and blistering their counterpoints, while other shoeless flaps were brittle and blue, and likely to snap, and all

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these lapped obscenely at my legs, beseeching my trouser-seams, flaying my unshod soles, wresting a curse from every blessing, and the odor from these fornications was the high smell of death once dead, roasted lamb, arm-warm, salted and stuck with spearmint, I held my nose with one hand and stuffed fistfuls of mouth into my pockets with the other, culpat caro, purgat caro, flesh sins and frees from sin, if I remember my matins, so I plunged my arm into the thairm like a man calving, seizing tongues of fire and tongues of glass, tongues made of thistle and soaped steel wool, I tasted all scourges and found them equal sweet, and, having stuffed my pockets, I’d’ve done, what, I wonder, for the gristled fact is I felt a hand, perhaps it was yours, Ian, or its whittled effect, and was pushed thievelessly from the left, whereupon I fell from the fetch as if I were a pitchpot duly tipped through a machicolation, or a little teapot, short and stout, not that I gave a mirror’d fig, my darling, my dessication, they could hang me and I’d boast the rope like a lady’s choker, coo-me-doo, my love is real love, my love, it’s true, what’s a dash of death to me, when my love lies, he lies new, ever my bronze-eyed baby, I’ve a walletfull of speech to attest to our imperviousness, we’re deaf to dying as the sun itself, taking Saturday in the shade, duly resurrecting come the dawn, speaking of which, Eoin, do you note the pinking of the dome, heaven’s pate’s beginning to blush, as well it might, for tomorrow’s babe is born of the rank shame of today, and all men’s crowns’re skinned in her blood and sullied by his authority, we’re each of us christened Posthumous, certain as the river runs, and as the arrow’s fletched, as noted, I was demobbed, falling, I could not tell north, south, east or west, though I suspected the first set, for Captain Windsor, heretofore sequestered in the Zone of Objurgation, a calumniate quarter, appeared shaken and refragable as a figure eight, really, well, you’ve the arms of a skater, and the back of a battercake, his head full of conk and his whiskers becottoned, he was a whitehaired boy, a primo example of cephalization, polite as a pirouette, or serviette, as you like, Johnny, I’ll grant you that, Jack,

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that and two more wishes, there’s no sense wishing once when thrice’ll do, though I’d caution you not to fool away your hankerings on a clutch of bluebacks or a creel of constitutional liberties, and while a slice of ho’cake would certainly cut the tension, it’s a fleeting pleasure, fleeching silver fountains from mud, though if anyone could do it, it’d be you, Jakey, you’re a one that could coax meat from a potato, you will woo from woe, you’ve the lutarious touch of a Prometheus, or at least a wheeled potter, as indicated by the gladderrit state of your fingers, don’t bother looking, they’ve been gone for hours, if not hours, pretty digits, they were, as I recollect them, benailed with divots of red clay, graceful as a glass cardinal, adroit as Sweet Mary from Loch Leven, do you remember her as well, replete with all her parts, including the milktooth she lost at two and the tip of her pinkie, sliced off that summer she worked at the pickle factory, her head was seeped in salt and vinegar and she had the thirst of a god, or at least Henri, pardon my Hebrew, and she took one hand off the slicer to mop her pleated brow, when zut, it was gone, the tip of her, what’d you call that, Jean, I’ve forgotten, en français, le doigt, perfectly so, it’s got the ring of right, and what’s that our fingers so oddly annex, la main, ah, another stroke of predictation, by Fides, you’re a fine teacher, if you don’t mind, sir, what about the elbow, the arm, the shoulder, too, le coude, bras, l’épaule, why there’s rigor to it, isn’t there, mon cœur, a general’s hank of gold-braid and close-razor’d hair, a spare loveliness, like a desert motel, the Knight’s Errant Motel, swimming pool, color T.V., continental breakfast, kids stay free, another round, if you please, neck, nose, eyelash, toes, le cou, le nez ou le bec, le cil, les orteils, again, one can see the core kerneled within, by silent addition is the first subtracted from the headless state, a slitted snuffling truth, a smeared sill such as red-rimmed dreams and pig-nosed gluttons perch upon, dangling their legs dangerously outside, that is the fabled equality among us, though the truth is truth is most often spoken in English, or at least this makes us least suspicious, so, go on, what of the foot and leg, sock and hock, step

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and brace, kick and scrape, that verse and complaint which I do sorely miss, having suffered a double-coup such as would’ve turned Achilles to a wan footstool, but my bootlessness suits me, why, if it were day I’d’ve asked you to contemplate the ground I’m seeped in, for the true measure of a man is the length of his shadow, and I cast a goodly shade, and if I could trouble you for just one other one, my cotton rose, what would you call the eyes, were you to signal them so senselessly, oui, les yeux, si une, c’est un œil, so they are, unguinous pats in which we put, nothing, true, something, you, cured in sorrow’s salt, curled in perpetual surprise, peeled back in egged terror, the omo scratched from the mot, half a moment’s hourly proof of that, our time in our footsteps too-briefly spent, deaf to the fire at our feet and blind to gravel beneath our cheeks, why if I had a pipe, I’d smoke it, and if I had a crow, I’d stroke it, for the hour’s delay each would provide, for if one says tomorrow, one need not suffer today, but I’m stemless as a sundial, unlike the brave Captain J. Windsor, who appeared quite suddenly with his servant, one del la Peyrére, a small man with a nose that crooked to his chin and a head thatched with pancakes, he handled china like Japan, but bootlicked like a courtesan, and the one he sirrahed, Capt. J. Windsor, as a boy, Capt. J. Windsor was known for his love of silhouetting and his habit of clutching anxiously at his hands, as the boy fauned his flesh into a man, he managed to stay his hands till it was time to sleep, and as the dark stole the face’s features and the lidded hours shrouded the sheets, the day’s deeds would creep from head to hand, weighing too hot, too heavy, too coated with decay, and he would try to ease this nervous burden by rubbing one hand hard on the other, grasping and twisting, wringing secrets from its pillows till that hand was unskinned and near-fileted, whereupon it would turn upon its brother, providing the same antique rebuke, thus the young Windsor would wake with hands weeping from unwitnessed wounds, unlined palms piped with sluttish rubies, his well-heeled parents brought in a specialist, whose manner was famously pointed as his beard, and the great doctor suspected

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nerves and prescribed swathing the afflicted appendages in thin cotton bandages, first anointing them with a compound of gelatin and bull’s milk, spiced with nutmeg, clove, and cinnamon, and in three or four short months, including February, this regimen unpandied young Windsor’s suffering hands and eased his aggrieved mind, and soon thereafter the boy turned his tension to the generaling of painted lead soldiers, a command continued daily until this very night, if I’m any judge of disquiet, for Captain J. Windsor, scented hands unruffled as a silk sheath, had a new set of orders in hand, did you say marching papers, ho, the pip plucked from the Captain’s collar goes to you, my tacket-soled darling, we’ll place it on your tongue, where it’ll keep cool and dry and we’ll see what hatches, what rusty eaglet peeps from that antique egg, I’ve a feeling you’re going to commence telling the truth, and what a rare aver that’ll be to boot, many will scoff and several avert the eyes, there’ll be a palpable dearth of air, the wind layered still as a conch, and breath will come, if it will come, in short marked measure, one, one, one, but despite your audiling, you agree we shoulder the same yoke, don’t you, Johnny, having come wrapped in white streaked with red, it’s proof of our avidin nature that we stay this way, coddled in our cuppishness, look around, if you could, and note the chicks still and shelled, this pecked and furrowed country weeps with their indeterminancy, which, combined with a drop of earwax, will assist the pious in alluminating the Holy Word whilst stopping its receipt, for there’s no gasconade more vaporous than the crowing of Mother Mary’s hens, save the constant ca-ca of our grand parliament of rooks, we’re awash in a sea of our piss and their salvation, and the jactitation of the neighbors will foam the swollen waters, their spirit will spirit us, down, that is, unransomed and rindless, till our eyes’re pearled with oysters and our impure thoughts salt-cured, preserved, that is, in the hell of another’s heaven, just as we were no longer kept from the heather as we were no longer in the donjon, me with my pockets rude with tongues and you with your brace of Fig Newtons, both of us doomed to a single

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truth sure as iron arrows’re earth-bound and the sky’s the coiled limit, we’ll leave the rest of them be, divining palms and waging belomancy, for you and I know truth’s unvarnished as a nose and accurate as a fiddlestick, and must be told, and told again, that was the order tendered in the newly minted hand of Captain John Windsor, to tell the truth in all its brutish baptizes, Capt. Windsor looked at me, truly, and said something to that effect, he may have said guises or perhaps cap sizes, he was slightly spirituel, and I cannot whisper one with certainty without hearing the sympathied other, but as Christ to me is life, to you, too, I’ve not forgot, though it’s up to you to forgive such pretty hurts as this and this, and death my great advantage, the Captain was to be taken at his word, the most parabolic tasks the most privately assigned, the most arduous demands susurrously slipped into the deepest-pillowed ears, such as a husband propounds his wife, or a wife rides her husband, to put his hand or back to this task or that, but I’d sooner unsluice the fluentest wake, and by your leave, my trotters shake, than set on the sowing of truth, for there’s ne’er good harvest, though I’m no theosophist, but seems to me it’s a bum overseer who sends the handsomest summer bucks to seed de winter’s frozen fields, their thin-batted sacks strung over one shoulder, knowing the cotton won’t lie where the verglas’s spun, but maybe those men’re better footed than I, they see the ground candied over and hear the crack of spring, where to me, it’s constant summer, even in the pitch white of winter, it bakes beneath, this earth, and the cool about the back of the neck comes courtesy of L’Hôtel Deux, as does the ring on your finger, I’ve got one too, and the fellow over there, we’ve all got the same silver circle around our fourth finger, each wedded by silk thread to a single silver bell so we can ring for attention in case we’re not dead, later they’ll install telephones, next closed-circuit television, though what good that’ll do, I’m not certain, for there’d be no proof our resurrections weren’t mere reruns, up and into perpetuity, despite the prohibition against such contracted obligation, though as I’m hobbled here awaiting the day’s cropped light, the

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lewd thought of unending, of wanton Nature uncorrected by gentle Time, becomes in time more odious and in time more appealing, and isn’t summer the eternal season, we’ll revisit old friends and twice tell told-tales, we’ll sit in our Adirondacks and stew, awaiting a new night, thirsty for its cool crush and the courted sounds of hobbledehoys, and wait we will, there’ll be no defusing our longanimity, why in the north, it’s said, summer nights are bright as middays and even here in the hinge of hell the sky’s sickled over with the threat of light, and the pot bubbling before you glows with augury, but felo-de-dés as Miss Scarlett would say, we’ll ponder that mañana, for there’s certain to be a morrow, don’t you think, Johansen, and shouldn’t your last name be Scriblace then, born of Faith Kelvin and husband Emerson, if the sun’ll come up, it’ll catch us square in our nidification, then the call will come to the boneyard, the call to stand-to, I expect I’ll’ve been docked for oversubordination, while your sail’ll’ve been waxed too short and your face augmented with bits of borrowed flesh, in fact, even that black fan you sport at the base of your neck isn’t your own, but was put there before you before the last lean-to, no, it’s yours, then, the King will be pleased, and the prime minister giggle and grow wheat about the knees, the President will commission an etching, just of your name, in brass or marble, something commonly balled and nominally reflective, and we shall swear by St. George himself, King of the Turkeys, that yours was a life worth living, no addition proportioned its subtraction, your spare days stuffed to splitting with shiny trinkets and bars of chocolate and bags of roast chestnuts, a blood orange swelled the toe, bunioned by a small lump of soft coal, sunset seems so far away, but the morn will be worth it, we’ll scamper towards the morrow like small fry to a Yule-tree, and peace will descend momentarily, and we’ll sing together, dear John, finally, there, give us the buttertooth, dearest, so you’re happy then, then I’m happy too, whatever you feel, let me at once agree, our hearts in constant correspondence, measure penned to full measure, cleft to cleft cleaved, we’ll celebrate our complete conspiracy,

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put on our highest collars and polish the bracelets, I’ll strut my new spats, and you, shoot your cuffs, starched over-stiff and linked with leaded opal, we’ll wax all our mustaches, if we haven’t forgotten to grow them, and part the hair on the back of our hands, then step gaily into the street and commence to promenade the great boulevard, tipping our hats to every passing lady and nodding cordially at each loose gent, we’ll toss a penny to the tow-headed tot and buy boutonnieres from the old woman with green elbows, tankee, tankee, she’ll crow, quite toothless, and we’ll call her Madame without irony, convoking the dust between her mothmilled petticoats, which will rabbit white and watchless, as we move on, you’ll make a bonny mot about my pinafore lacking petals, or at any rate, stems, and I’ll riposte that you, my affection, come up twice short-handed, being a man without multiples, yet duly doubled, and we’ll laugh merrily as we enter the oak-paneled bistro, a bit demi, as you might say, pointing out the abundance of occupational females and louche accordions and the bloom of vin rouge on the cheeks of our Host, we’ll shiver at our jouissance and order à la carte and the waiter will bow slightly as he takes the plastic menus, he will have a small piece of sticking-plaster on the side of his neck and an air of contingent sandalwood, slightly Occidental, you might say, and I would marvel at your preceptivity, we’ll all be most agreeable, our conformance will seem a unanimity, not unlike the horizon, we’ll slip from our native tongues to the langue d’o.k., affirming everything on the spot, and what a charming spot it is, we’ll sup on clear soup and recollect the Scotch broth you made this evening and how handsome you were in your gussets, how blue quite becomes you, or was that me, no, I was the one in the pearl blouse, but in either event, we’ll tell how your casque came to cushion your head like a bed of cress, and when the salad de mer arrives, I’ll remind you of the Saxon sunburst emblazoned on my emerald helmet, though we will good-naturedly debate whether it’s a rising or setting sun that backs the bend sinister, mox nix, you’ll quip, digging into your œufs in aspic, it’s the work of a mad hatter nonetheless, and I’ll gratefully

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agree, trenching my langouste gratinée, saying Mein Bein tut verdammt weh, then happily set to coaxing meat from a baked potato, think of it, Johnny, we’ll eat steaks the size of hams and feast on peas smothered in untried cream & unbelly’d baby carrots, we’ll call for more pain, fill the brot basket, and we’ll crown each piece with butter cream-pure as an abbess’s breast and cheese stinking rich as the Church herself, we’ll drink wine and beer, milk and cherrywater, we’ll finish with wedges of juncate, the sugared curd o’er-gilded in crème anglaise, and thick cups of strong coffee, and the unshaven maître d’ will approach with the most cattish of footfalls, and we will assure him most assuredly of our utmost contentment and his decorous asperity, and you will insist on paying, but I’ll leave the gratuity, and we’ll exit armin-arm, walking in the ablative sublime, in streets of gold glass, that will be a day, Ian, a day worth remembering, but now we have our marching papers, to wit, to tell the truth, to herald over the jorgle of broken bones and the clamor of our confederates, what insufferably is, here, skipping the last beginning and the truant end, and I tucked the Captain’s orders into my breast pocket and saluted him prettily, whereupon he grasped my elbow and looked me keen in the eye, overstaring like a man spooked, though he was only self-possessed, and he hissed best wishes to me, his and mine, though they lie opposing as thumbs, for he was a man of history, and I’m its adverse witness, my breast perjured by shrapnel and a suit of ticks, these hair-bows and nipple-pinchers’ve bled the milk of kindness so I’ll not spill a drop, but the Captain could not know this, he was an honorable man, his allegiance pledged to mud and the all mighty, and with this Onein-One, his union was complete, such coarse honor demanded absolute victory, mine would have been as gifted by taking the trick, truth’s worth two of those, but I took his good wishes in its place and pocketed them, and the earth quaked then, rattled from its determination by a blast that removed the ramp leading to the donjon and exchanged Captain J. Windsor for pink mist, and made his man, the one with the nose that crooked over his chin, into mutton

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chops, with pearled onions, and as I sit here, Jean, bloodied by my honor, and yours, and as you lie crammasy with your salute, and mine, I heard no trumpet, saw no standard, just the piggish fleer of a rocket, scoffing at our best wishes, best wishes, Jon, are tossed into wells like bagged kittens and towheaded taedies, best wishes are senseless borne by satin pillows and birthday cakes, best wishes are sticks thrown to rivers and rivers turned to stick, your best wish’s a porgy and mine’s a pudding pie, if ye had a king finger, ye’d put it heavenward, in the direction best wishes fly, like the fluff of dandelions and skulls blown sky-high, capped by the best wishes of others, the battle for the donjon was on, my johnnylove, and the noise over-bore our ears, it starts as mere thunder, then picks up pace, the claps grow fatter, petaled with smaller explosions, becoming a great booming carnation, a single and multiple sound, not thunder but Thor, his goats’ hooves cracking and burning the earth, or God’s constellate Heartbeat, throbbed to burst Heaven’s breast, the black bleeding tattoo untwists a man’s guts and flings him back, down, into the dirt, till he clutches the ground like a babe to the tit, rockets howl around him, coupling with piping shells, as hissing missiles service heavyspending machine guns and swords ring with loose shot and timber shivers with the smack of pistols popped like a boy’s proposal, all dry-mounted as death, and as glottal caught, such rendering ones and unones one, cleft by carbine screams tenored with light whistling balls and the beetling of iron bullets into bone, the basso profundo of coal-boxes and dumb bombs and Big Berthas as the howitzers and the heavies roar their mirrored torture, and into this unkilted calumny rolls smoke, smoke up the field, where it cloys the cotton and blackens the sack, smoke down the field, where it anoints the neck of the novice and the smoker’s cat throat, smoke tied in the lashes of the muleteer, smoke laid in the stripes on a sergeant’s khaki shoulder and a boy’s green flank, smoke riming the bloody burst ears of a volunteer, caressing scattered teeth and unencumbered gums, smoke solid as flesh, smoke bitter thin, evil veils,

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point-pierced with white, thistles and swathes, spotting and searching, starry flared skirts and yellowbrown cobs, muzzles of major batteries, red-raging up and down the line, minor visages punch into view via irregular rockets, French, that is, and bottle, too, seething blue rifle blasts and the scrawling tunnels of trench mortars, bombs clustered and precise, high and low shot, red and silver millefeuille, puissances turning red, silver, and orange orange, no, green, a greedy green as’d trim the devil’s tree, and we hurl ourselves on the grillage, trying for sanctuary without mercy, some dig for purchase, paddling their hands and feet as they dip their heads like ducks dabbing for minnows, some root with nail and tooth like a pig ferreting a turnip, some unceasing screamed and some bit their lips to bloody foam, some run off on all fours, rocking back and forth, shuddering like hogs, some squat and wait like brooding hens, some stand like gentlemen, shitting in their leg mail and crying, for what, you wonder, and rightly so, some made noises like baby birds, and others puked into the mouths of others, brothers, I should say, or was, before being diskiltered, some saw their blood run in their blood gutters, and some ate gobfuls of dirt, those ones’re done for, returning before they’ve begun, the rest of us nuzzle the muck like pups, scrabbing the pia mater till we’ve tossed up a soft parapet, then we sluice her in earnest as the shells pot her back, she’ll soon be pox’d and whored, well-heaved, fit for any discharged private, and she’ll’ve a slew of manfill, even now corpses’re taking their shape, I raise my head a little and find Suçon’s been unplucked, gone missing where his heart and lungs and liver would once were, he barely disorders a breath before falling, his mouth pluming a puddle of gunoil, another man, grenade in hand, charges, but I cannot cognize him, for a round catches him in the collar and his head retreats as his body advances, a plume of blood bubbles and jets from the neck, unnatural as a public fountain, but still he forwards, and when he falls, a yard or so ahead, the grenade in his hand exploded, subtracting by addition two bay horses and unhitching the face of a sergeant huddled in the hollow between their haunches, a

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sparrow hawk flew east and I begin to run, I ran and run, saw-toothed bayonet at the churlish ready, I hurled grenades at the fog in front of me, hoping to shape shadows from the smoke, I ran, surrounded by my tovarich, I ran, and there was Schöpfen, ears extruding under his helmet, helmet jauntied as a Sunday boater, he runs beside me and we fall into a pace, just for a moment, that right left right left right right that even the new recruit, what was his name, he had the face of an angel and the arm of a widowmaker, took up, unthinking, then another fell in, then another idem, syncopate familiars, forming divisions and brigades, it’s a conspiracy of uniform plurality, contained by its own command, the untamed cadence of ten thousand feet and the jag jag jag of gentlemen, but the spell was broken for they were on us then, and us, on them, and Schöpfen got one straight off, bayoneted some blunt bastard clean through the belly, the trick, if you’ll recollect, is to thrust in and twist, this unsticks the steel, Schöpfen gave the body the boot to boot, which is, if you will, the most fashionable way to dislodge a fellow from one’s spit, and the new recruit had equal luck with a man who’d faltered as he raised his rifle, his eye ambushed by inconsequent youth, putting his heart to war, heart and eye thus opposed, the steadier one blinks, and falters, and the green recruit has his ripening and plugs the man square, clearing his throat completely, as one of ours, a poet, or at any rate, one fond of fancy and the hyperbaric chamber, he would weep over verslets plucked from a purple-bound book, fragged in an early blast and painstakingly recollected, finding in stray doggerel his best self best impounded, the unleashed bark and snap of poppets of past rhymes were, he claimed, cut purer from the pack, unglued from the constraints of form or thesis or time’s lascivious perfection, he said thesis like a farmer, our poet, who I wish had a name rather than an appellation, suffered sorely, for he had the misfortune to trip over a pair of footed shoes, falling through air which had stood for someone, landing just as a percussive lands nearby, his back blown open and his lungs exposed, they flutter like uncaged butterflies, their

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quickness a triumph of will soon contracted to won’t, the earth pulls and pulls, there’s gravity for you, and me too, though there’s that spate of incrassate mechanical grace, do you remember, when the wound maws white without aching, that sweet summer afternoon when one can rest one’s cheek against the ground and be glad to be, feeling the heart halved and the halves conjoined and in this fresh duality, one feels the seam sewn between and keens over its imperfect stitch, and so our poet smiled at his own solidarity and the disquiet of his lungs gently settled and ceased, whereupon I was grabbed from behind, and an attempt made to introduce the point of a knife to my chest, but my won’t won over his will, for I would not be pricked, not this day, and I drop and shot, up, my dropping easy as a dime, my shooting equally genuine, I catch my enemy under the chin and unman the front of his face, from such bloody smoothness, there’s no way to measure a man’s surprise, I’d imagine it considerable, to be did so directly, he fell on me, and though I don’t naturally cotton to corpses, I’m not above donning their mantle, and this one provided a royal pallium, purple and gold, cloaking the hack and thread of my throat, I play dead, was that a chuckle just then, Ivan, or just a gurgle, I’ll take both for tokened appreciation, I collapsed in a tacked heartbeat, for there’s none so quick as the dead, and lay there happily bearing the weight of the faceless fuck riding me, reckoning my blessings manifold, as I count, time unspooled, wound round me like an iron mainspring, so nearer events crept closer and those farther away appeared uncircumferenced, in the thick of this sunless copernicus, I cushion my yellowing corpse and watch my friends and enemies ally in righteous slaughter, you could tell by the helmets and the hoods that heaven was on some side, commending and censuring, hand to jamb, that’s modern wisdom, John, to know which line leads to the roast and which to the roaster, to cull pearl from pituite when one and two are commonmucked, and I was proud of the pair, though I confess I found little difference between the dew-draped and the got-forsaken, save the tins of cut pork that fell

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from their packs, or did not fall, for these were lean times and leaner men, men with eyes reliable as eyes and less so, remember François Crever, the miller’s son, he fought not far from where I lie in equipoise, and his eyes were already shattered, dazed by light death, he seized his partner and dirked for a heart, and I’d avow he found it, for the dancer in his arms yelped once and died and François cried bitterly at this abandonment, for no matter how he contemplated preservation of the King of Kings, the state of the States, and the unpricked lock of his dark-kneed sister, a life’d been uncogged by his fortunate hand, its days and dreams collapsed and collated, fixed and pinned for further study, but such augering luck’s an ill-win that does no body no thing, the wheel’ll rise and all will fall, though not by the one François had cored, nor by those who bore him, before and after, but by a queller more terrible than any cutthroat, for light touches soil and remains untouched, tapping everywhere to map nowhere the screams and scrapings of all unmodified hearts and their fickle fellow nations, and all will knows all will rise and fall and still you’re left with the feeling of putting a knife through the bare tit of another, a feeling that pits the butcher’s hand, it gives too easily, this flesh, eyes pop from sockets celebratory as champagne, and like grapes underfoot, fingers spill torn and bleeding from mouths reckless as fresh curses, heads, unshouldered, roll like gun-stones, wobbling through the flower-bed, bothering the bee, and breasts divest, whole trunks split themselves open like casques dropped from a cart, the gutters run with our vin ordinare and rotgut, rich offal ranks and pots the road, and Hell’s tickled pink by these high tributaries, or Heaven, take your pick, it’s taster’s choice from here on out, there’s no parsing the ack-ack or a soul’s modest dissection, François, to his horror, would survive, and his hand remain appended to his arm, and his arm to his shoulder, his shoulder to his breast, and the heart within would lob right left right as has been from time immemorial, his hand throbbing in reflection, he and the one he’d so sorely disheartened forever equipace, like me and Schöpfen, to tell you the truth, Juan, I still

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feel his footfall alongside mine, a dual ghostly thing, bussed with was and would-be, that poor plinking intimacy, and I tossed off the gluey gutbucket husbanding my back and ran, I pass a man running on a pair of splintered calves and another hopping along, his leg tucked under his arm like a demi-baguette, a third’s screams stopped by his lopped lower jaw, I run, stepping into the cool slush of another gentleman, the stoutness of his heart measured by the thin greenish slick I slipped in, ankle-deep, it was, the ankle attached to the calf, the calf to the knee, the knee to, well, you get my meaning, now, that is, then I ran, and as I ran, I smelt the sweet clean smell of gasoline and felt vented air warm from a dryer, and I put a grenade in the crook of a passerby’s arm, a square-shaped footballer who took my handoff as habit, bringing it bellyward, then looked surprised, then suspicious, then disgusted, all in a fingersnap, whereupon the petit bomb boomed and he become an empty set, finite and infinite, yet full, as you note, of rank regret, I ran and passed another man holding his intestines with the delicacy of one cradling a newborn son, wet and unroped, tunnel-bruised and mouth-gaping, he sat cross-legged on the ground, waiting patiently, tenderly brushing the dirt from his casings and as I pass, he looks at me and smiles, only a small wiggle of the chin belied his calm ministrations, I doubled back and shot him behind the ear, it was the least I could do, to cut him off while there was still hope, for we are God’s substitutes, me and you, Monsieur Monfrere, as duly subscripted, and this is His golden guilt, and our duty is to insist and persist, we are the noble cockroach, brown-shelled priests beetling through rubble and earth to go on, we must go on, complicitous and irrefragable, and in our goings on, evidencing the treble disregard for skulled mortality, we sup on the throats of others and stuff our own with sawdust, we will live forevermore, you and me, Johnny, we’re perfumed proof of this and the punishing that, why look how long our night’s lasted, there’s but a shuddering bit of pink on the horizon, and you still in your ebony dress, they shall remember this day, my love, with plaques and parades, and of course a fine

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picnic, spread by the spreading red lake, spread for the other cockroaches, who shall scuttle over our stew as I scuttled over this, I shot the man and ran, and, running, saw our darling Carl, who I’d long since wished dead, struggling with a mustached man, the mustached man had managed to stick Carl where the arm gently pits and it was exactly arterial, but brave Carl got off two rounds with his service revolver before converting, a deuce coup which missed, so I come up alongside with my Ka-Bar and caused the man’s head to liberate itself from his neck, it was not serrated, whoever said that’s a liar, but no matter, we’re beyond the quelquechose and kickshaws, triangular bayonets or oil-quenched steel, Carl, it would be said later, and truly, Carl held the severed artery between his teeth till he reached a field hospital and lives thereafter to tell his tayken tale for the price of a pint, how he’d uncapped the capillose bastard, till they’ve heard it all before, leaving Carl alone at the far end of the bar, his mouth shrunk to a keyhole, his chin and nose meeting in constant consolation, they left him there till they’d all forgot why the old man lifted his bitters with his left hand, leaving his right arm lapped, impractical as a toy poodle, though the day came when Carl stopped coming and they did recollect to place a tricolor over the box and mention his medal and the wherefore of the withering limb, but I’ve no way of knowing this, for I wiped my sawblade on my pant-leg and reassumed running, and I see Winfred and Black Jack and the twins, their dusty heads smelt soft and sudden as cinnamon, all fighting tooth and nail, for they were already dead and thus had nothing to lose and everything to gain, the dead, once dead, happily die again, believing the ultimate affirmation of the double negative, so that to fall anew, they’d rise afresh, like men from a burning fiery furnace, our popping fresh doughboys, their bones’d battered their wives’ ovens, their marrow soup for their sons, their names their daughters’ just deserts, are you smiling, Jack, or just seeming more skullish than before, it’s hard to tell with you gone that color in this uncolored light, but isn’t this the orphan hope of a fusillade, that our wrong bodies will

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rightly be roasted and served to Jupiter, served on pewter platters with sprigs of parsley and planks of garlic potatoes, they’ll stuff our mouths with ham and cheese and call us machines, and we shall be translated to heaven as is our tempered due, you look as if you beg to differ, but I disagree too, do you not dream of your home, Johnny, well, so do I, and do you not miss those you loved and those you despised, well, I say likewise, and do you not weep, if you could, over your lost limbs and the pretty plans that slipped through your fingers, well, by my boots, so do I, and if I were to crack you like an egg, would I not find, in the white of you, a golden sun, true and bright as any that graces the sky, well, I whisper, so’ve I, we’re one, my love, singular as state itself, give me your hand, brother, ah, got it already, while I tell of that last blast, I was running, and suddenly flung myself down, for there was another explosion, though I could not tell you I’d heard it coming, but rather felt the foreshadow, if you know what I mean, John, and I think by now you do, it was a trench-mortar, the devil’s own handclap and applesauce, it percussed the eardrums to bursting and I was bleeding from both ears, those were my second and third wounds, and the ground under me cracked and heaved hellward, men were dropped, tossed and buried, saving Time, who was serving his sentence somewhere else, the mortar aborted many where they stood, such a castling’d’ve sprung envy from my own mother’s unfixed eye, one yob cleared, yanked clean through as if by a buttonhook, another blown to warm rendered bits, dear Schöpfen unappeared, at least temporarily, while the new recruit, reaching the west wire, reached out instinctively, the blast put his smooth hands in a cat’s cradle, but unbore the rest of him, so his body fell, cut from his hands, hands hung in the wire, pierced and praying, pale as an alabaster ash-tray, and so they were, supplicate hands strung next to another man, thievishly impaled, six inches of cold steel protruded from his belly, while the six warming within pinned his conscience to his liver and he looked sorry at that, there’s a high scream of blood and dirt, followed by a storm of hot parts, a tapped skull comes down just ahead, white as a fresh-laid

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egg, and a freckled hand and wrist, wrapped in chaplets and decades, a forearm tattoo’d per fi, diadems of the poor who await the Final Triumph and by their waiting lie, trumpeted and trumped, you hear it, too, my darling bud, and you’d nod if it weren’t for the simplicity of our fresh agreement, there was a hairy hank of thigh, badly butchered and cooked worse, one side rare dealt, the other, black with bubbling yellow fat that hissed and spat at what’s left of passersby, up in the tree perched poor Schöpfen, blown clean out of his clothes and part of his carcass, the top half of him naked, the pale of his upper arms and chest, graced with a small gold cross, doublechained round the neck, hope, that’s the thing, embarrassed by his flush farmer’s face, he wept tears large and soft as earlobes while his bottom half went altogether absent, his sudden fortitude sweats black blood and green shit onto another man cambreled on the tree, I don’t recognize him at first, or the branch that forks his pelvis, though the man draped to that man’s left seems a powdered comfit of that shallow shit Sergeant Something, the one who ate only broken meats and eagerly petitioned for thirds, them that clogged the canals, the blighters, the bloaters, the ratfaced popinjays, those poor shits now stinking rich, each fish a fisherman, each one a three, and the supparasite bastard’d lost his nerve but juggled an extra member, and in the hail of raw men and the swelter of their undoing, I vomit chunks of flesh and bone, some my own, and could no longer recognize anyone, not even the twins, though they lie under the shade of that infernal tree, their arms about each other tender as in the nursery, but death had begun to sink and shift even these gentle faces to waxy determinacy, persons becoming persons, and names, John, names but tags to toes, most noticed in their unanswering, silence, John, silence, that’s the price we pay, and I’ve got a battery of tongues to tell it, tongues unstrung from their instruments, for angels play on empty harps, and as each tongue is rendered uniterable, unribboned from its spindle, fate would set it on fire, and these tongues of flame will prove our great illumination, fuck the dawn, John, we’ll live forever by the light of

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ten thousand tongues, we’ll be amaranthine as velvet cake, perpetual as wind and wave, our surfeit of tongues will be our wonder and prove our time immemorial, so our shoes will come double-tongued and our dreams, bilingual, you and me, Coke and Pepsi, liquor and licorice, us auld agonistes, they’ll give brass speech to us and erect a brass statue and affix a brass plaque with two sets of brass tacks, they’ll be a parade, and a goddamn picnic, and small children, flags in hands and mouths full of tonguelets, will play Monopoly as summer promises to set in, I was standing by the twins and a great cavity was born before me, I could not hear the explosion, but felt the ground labor as the missile dropped, as if she was delivering rather than being compounded, the bodies that are surrounding me are mystified and I’m marked by bleeding earth as my clothes are torn from me, I hurl myself into the viscera, knowing man rarely double-plants a seed, and into this smooth hollow, you came, but didn’t see me, not till it was too late, and I questioned you, and took what you offered up in surrender, and again I questioned, and unswore your answer, my knife short and unkind as your memory, or am I being unkind again, John, I took your hands and tongue, but not your understanding, you alone see the situation, and you’ve been endlessly patient, still, you do not speak, John, why do you not speak, to hold your tongue at this late date is sheer contumacy, tell me off, Johnny, give me a tongue-lashing, a slap on the hand and a kick in the seat, curse me, John, curse me so you can forgive me, for you alone imparadise the pair of us, you know we’re deep confederates, you and I, I’ve seen it in your eyes, we’re manquelling motherfuckers who both deserve to die, otherwise we couldn’t, isn’t that the workaday way of the hereafter, the path of righteousness lined with crushed peppermint and the cemetery by the sea graced with gray rabbits, after all, your mother’s name was Faith and mine must have been Charity, and they spat us out as if they’d nursed milkweed, we were never truly born, John, do you see, for how can one have been and then not have been, that which was once enwombed is warranted form and consideration, you

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cannot unkeep the kept, yet we’ve gotten nothing for ourselves and are ourselves made of nothing, war is a nothing, Johnny, don’t you agree, speak up, or at least raise your hand, as I was saying, war is a nothing, for to be something, something must have as its cause its own effect, water causes waves, waves water, wheels set rolling become wheels, seconds tap themselves into time and faith, why faith’s its own reward, but men cause battles, but battles prove men boneless, they root and gnaw our indeterminate flesh, but are themselves born of nothing but brass plaques and marble monuments, such angled eternities are favorite tricks of Time, which bends itself back but briefly, yet soon enough to seem a circle, such circles as we’ve seen are the awful mouths of screaming men and the empty houses of their appalled eyes, we’re the sword dancers, my love, covered in flinders and ash and blood and mud, we bear black boot marks across our throats and white burns lace the backs of our hands, our ears run red with real weeping, our arms pricked by bouquets of barbed wire, rosy petals of our skin are strewmeat for Creusa’s wedding march, and our sweet ribboned hearts perfume her first breakfast, we are God’s mirrors mirroring God, the first two sons, we make and unmake in our own image, murderer and victim, and ever this and ever so, my dear, and in our charred and homely paradise I sing to you, Johann, my Jean’s aubade, ‘tis of thee, me Johnny, my enemy, mine Agnus Dei, I sing and dedicate my denial of the morning, for it is still the gloam that shrouds us and not the shade of dawn, the nightingale still nurses us to sleep, sleep, darling, but first speak, will you not speak, dear John, not once, not a word, just one word, a small word I could slip on my finger and thus be wed to my one to one and my one in a million, though we’ve no need of rings, do we, Johnny, for what’s not alive cannot be, in turn, dead, and we shall rise, you and I, hand in hand, man in man, to walk between the dead, unpitying the dying, unblessing the blighted, unbleeding the bleeding, we will love them like dogs, the murdering saints, the raping do-not-touch-mes, the abortions that are all our babies, the parts and bodies all, dying, and still will you not speak then,

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John, open your mouth, that lovely empty maw, you’re too silent, my sweet Madelon, that stinking stump between your teeth runs black and unbecoming, still you shall speak, for surely you’re aware of the rule of corpus delecti and the consequent ineffect of my confession, though you’ve no finger to be pointing and no voice to register complaint, though I suppose that cool crimson ribbon running between your lips could be fashioned into an indictment, sealed with a kiss, and though I’ve disarmed you completely, I find your manner still chill and solitary, poor boy, even in this nip of light, I think I see the trace of tears on your cheek and the nose you left unwiped, I will wipe it, and blot your tears with the back of your hand, I will hold your tongue, and keep it in salt, I will keep you steady, steady as the sea, steady as you once breathed, in and out and in and out and out and out and out and sweetly out, exhausted, there, it’s done, and here I am, one and once alone, beheld to witness what comes, the dawn, but not the dawn, for if I put out our eyes, we’ll stay the sunrise, we’ll live forever, what was you and I, speak now or forever hold your peace, object, otherwise, I’ll pluck yours like so and then mine, there, what’s undone is done and they’ll call us both posthumous, for only in death is the body equal to the soul, we’ll be born after the morning after, and there’s no mourning what’s come to pass, for as the butchered lamb is cause for Christmas dinner, let’s not nigger our mortality, but spread it rich and thin as the soup you’ve been making and if you won’t lend us a word, love, give us your ear, that darling shell, that wax cup into which I’ve poured my consolation, there, it unshutters easily, and I’ll pocket the sweet peach alongside your savory tongue and the pearled onions of your eyes, my heart, my one, alles ist wahr, and I for you and you for me for forever and for evermore, my love, my own, for our hearts shall shatter together forever and for ever after.

Los Angeles 2001, 2004-2005

(p+r)n

Vanessa Place is a writer and lawyer, and a co-founder of Les Figues Press. She lives in Los Angeles. Susan McCabe is Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film (2005), Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss (1994), and the poetry collection Swirl (2003). Stephanie Taylor received her M.F.A from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. She is represented by Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne, Germany and by Daniel Hug Gallery, Los Angeles. She has exhibited her work in Berlin, Cologne, Kraichtal, Hamburg, London, Vienna, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami. Taylor lives and works in Los Angeles.

â&#x2C6;Ž Les Figues Press PO Box 35628 Los Angeles, CA 90035 www.lesfigues.com

TRENCHART SERIES OF NEW LITERATURE TrenchArt is an annual subscription series of innovative literature published by Les Figues Press. Each series includes five books situated within a larger discussion of contemporary aesthetics, as well as work by contemporary visual artists representing additional aesthetic explorations. All participants write an aesthetic essay or poetics, separately published as the series’ leading title.

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TrenchArt: Material Series TrenchArt : Material aesthetics ISBN 10: 0-9766371-0-3 Dies: A Sentence by Vanessa Place Introduction by Susan McCabe ISBN 13: 978-0-9766371-1-0 Grammar of the Cage by Pam Ore Introduction by Ingrid Wendt ISBN 13: 978-0-9766371-2-7 Requiem by Teresa Carmody Introduction by David L. Ulin ISBN 13: 978-0-9766371-3-4 A Story of Witchery by Jennifer Calkins Introduction by Amy Gerstler ISBN 13: 978-0-9766371-4-1 Material series visual art by Stephanie Taylor

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