Narratives of New Netherland

Narratives of New Netherland 1570—1970 by Sean Farragher

" I am the viridian swell and the vermilitm tempest. I am surly beast and have will to rectify murder: my death and other happenstance makes for ironu with miniatures painted without sight in a golden locket never opened and not lost memories of those centuries before whatever instant diseased

and bent with pock marked face to how anger stalls without any pleasure or even the protest of strangled fowl. You can watch my stance without eyes and make me move without legs as I am only flood and tempest unbounded my schemes ser down as blasphemed physic and truth. " John Colman (15851664)

Preface

Prose Poem based on Robert Juet and Sources drawn from the history and environ of New Netherland including that magical land of Human Beings between Ackinsack and Great River in Pavonia.

Personas and Documents

As essential contradiction Edward Wyman, John Colman, Ska Nee, Lord Simon Colman Seymour, sons and daughters and many others speak unfettered as to the layers that time construed from and within the years 1970 to 1570 with reversed spinning globes and fool jugglers with blessed twisted hands. Every voice is luminous: layers of character without particular history struck bells to reach the last comma dividing centuries and millennia. Chronology was old song without intervals just as we cease to breathe - while habitual schemes dry in our mouths when water lost cannot be had to make red water piss against brown leaves or some beginning reconstruct so we may leap that terrifying wall of birth afier death without obvious conceit drowned too young when spars broken and all the fine gobs driven to starve. Such my daily speech as folly writ as it could last until perdition waxed our skull with vermin.

8 May 1607, Tuesday General Description of That Part of the World Called New Netherland.

Sometime in my country at the outward part of river wild flowers so fragrant I stand still not knowing what I am meeting; so many and rich the birds I can scarcely go through them for their whistling. Light can hardly be discerned where they fly; the fox chases them like fowl: Their notes salute the ears of travelers with harmonious discord, and in every pond and brook, green silken frogs warble their un 'tuned tunes to hear a part in this music.

----November 2, 1585-1621

John Colman Swims the Great River Divide now Called Hudson.

Before New Netherland

When I was a child, I felt murder. There was blood on the stones that leaked through the streets into a great flood. TLW/32

I felt waves and I wanted to die and fail. Mother murdered as l wept.

Vermilion clouds treasured me. The dagger did not cut my head clean. The heavens opened to protect my life. My Lord Jesus saved my opinion and directed the colors of the winds from ancient space to keep my breath whole as I fell down to the rough gray stones by my homely street.

In my lights Viridian sunset open my doors. I could not let my life fall down and become one of those awkward strangers hanging about the shore and muddy streets for an axe that struck off the head of my mother as she watched the vermillion waters of the great river quit.

It was a fever. Mother had died five years past in Delft. She was ample vision here as the shadows of her red sand colored eyes loomed on the horizon so 1 conjured.

Savages covered me. I saw the face of murder. I remember how he was struck down by a rock. He would die laughing and I would live. I did not drown. Stuck to the slime caught in the muddy noose I was buried in the earth when l was shaken by furious storm that blew through my spread hands as I held back the surge as only light

that is earth green and salmon red can contain on the edge of the bush that borders Great River on the East. That city will be born there. It will strike us dead. I live in all my past escapes as a future specter ready to roll my calm, damp body white with death, and my red eyes alive when I am resurrected in 1970.

Day Two

The tempest struck; the rocks moved. They shift as I spin and I wished for a brief second that the rocks of littoral of this flooded river drove out all the sea demons and bring us back home safe. I know when I drink

how anyone is safe if they do wish their own end before they are struck with shot, or the axmen or the executioner shows fate to the end may you wish other oaths to keep you safe at least until your teeth are gone.

If I had died, how would I have watched Ska Nee give birth? She had entered before my enlistments,

Great River had swallowed up and I would never join the circle where wise men talked with their hands and hearts more than words. I understood it all; every flood drowns the man who swims the passage from the isle across to the tall red stones shimmer as antimony.

My leg heal. My arms stretch from the sails behind to the ones in front. I get stronger. She who heals stirs at my back and Ioins with her fat rubbed hands and catches my shiver. She works my legs and sacred parts. She makes me move as she breaks me out of death. When my flesh blackens and I with fever shriek to other savage gods my denial and then yes, I do accept.

Curses shift underneath the river of hands. The rain pounds my head slows my stroke.

Caught by the cold water I made me tight when the mist rose from the fire. Fish will be boiled. I entered the brook and soon it was hot and the heat slowed breath. The woman moved her breasts to my mouth slowly and holding my jaw, she feeds me that white blue broth. I am eager. She knows that I cannot exist with civil people. I get stronger every day.

Red rolling fire branded clouds before sunrise drift against the back of my hands take them into my lives but I did not hurt. I made it to the broken rocks and lifted my sore shoulders up to drape my body on red moss.

One small beetle wore his half shell turned over and drifted I realized and found the brown rocks rose above the stumps of a forest of drowned trees. I rushed the shore. I couldn 't stop. Waves pushed at my head. I left Bristol.

I left the skin of streets. I left my older first wife wondering if she would jump up when she heard my steps up the path close to the smoke house where

we cured the bacon her father fattened. Stones were thrown. The wake of the ripples caught my hands and I was frozen in the water

Follows missing pages to the tale kept by his descendant Simon Colman and published in London in 1767

Narratives of New Netherland

The Rage and Dreams of John Colman

On 11 April 1611, the yacht Restless caught the flood and leaving Bristol moorage, my eyesfixed to the rolls and sway of the hot coals of the morning sky that wept black and gray ascolor stripped became the texture of a terrified dream recalled. I knew it my every day a breathdiminished. Every night I stopped to dream the terror of my mother ' s murder. I saw widestartled eyes descend from his killing hand to the lever axe and with TLW/36

one downward stroke myown fate as witness. My sister would almost drown in the blood as she nursed from tit and spit back red froth.

Mother dragged to the ground by Murder who had gone mad became the template for the wooden ships I would fashion as I lived every day thereafter. I would never forget that deathly face. Mother and Murderer became the same scream. His mouth and eyes stretched from past to present. Terror would become the maps of my discovered land as I forgetting their coordinates became thoroughly trapped by that need to right the wrong that made lust mayhem an anthem for my child eyes and voice.

Now, I am long past that day, a man with eager arms and back strong in the lifting of the sky and the mocking of God. I cry as in the murderers hall, as now, when I face my own last breathing, everything became black to mold with green and yellow peals as putrefaction crept through my throat to make my dreams scream again as they hit by that calamity become the foretaste of terror made and unmade as oath taken for revenge.

Now, back on the docks as we uncoiled the last of the loops that kept us moored to this final place, I stepped up to the clouds and found myself by magic ten leagues above the deck of this ship. I could see myself from that deck as I floated both high into that heat and drawn down I fluttered into the limp, cold decay of my own grave.

As I spoke softly to my feeling my bones stretched my legs to discover by their recoil the magic source that unmakes life as we curse dying we assume before our time.

As I lifted up, my dreams froze as tar does oak. My body as circular cask unraveled into its steel rings and palsied steps.

As I did every night I again live the theater of my mother ' s murder. The troll used an axe. He cut her skull into twin parts and a smaller third while I gathered in her wake watched her fall as the blood ran down her arms. As she screamed quickly stilled, her blank face death before death caught the rings of my eyes, I was no more after that motion of iron into bone. I walked backward down the close docks towards the marsh where flowers could be gathered. There I made my mother a wreath and bringing it to her bed, as she kept to it in death, the colors of the violence raped by her dishonor, so they said, kept still the muddy waters that would in my dream bring me to my downing.

We are forty-two men in the company of rats and our own pestilence. Many will suffer that perdition of death on this journey to the East. Does this dream signify that we will fail to know the pathways to riches and the east?

Short Bio: Sean Farragher, Life long writer of poetry and fiction, As I write down this speak I count three silver coins and one bronze piece. They were my inheritance. They became with melancholy my breed of knowing. I forget it all as I am covered with the dank sweat of drink and the heat of. I live inside that mask of my mother. I was nine when murdered by demons or as most say a human beast without mouth or teeth. He was flame that fire she said that burns from the inside. I will strip the heat from life. I will keep it out of reach. I will preserve the madness so it can be released as quiet dust or ashes from the dead.

In this year of our Lord, 16| l, I chart our following winds and tack easy through the Restless sales as this yacht points West by South West towards the end of the rocks and the beginning of the sun. Here now, as we gather in our hope, at that space above that last cloud the English land falls away into the shoals. So many rivers have no bottoms. So many last words before we murder our self on this great adventure. Perhaps now, I can forget the dream. Every calm night I suffer its recoil. My father gathers wood for a fire. Mother speaks her Dutch tongue cursing the night in her drunken fervor. As I watch her kiss strange hands and opening her eyes, she leaps the fires. Suddenly, caught, this man, this demon strikes her skull with an axe. She bleeds that face that murder caught. I cannot forget his scowl. He is a leper of words. His meanings forget themselves and he escapes into the back farms of Bristol and is heard no more.

As I watch the sea rise up in a storm that would cost us on this first night two of our crew, I wrote down what I heard when I dreamed or did I dream.

I sleep in the crease of her tawny skin. Her hair is thick with fat covering its base to show the strength of her neck. She breathes and slowly I can smell the ocean as the flood rises against those antimony cliffs that stagger down the river towards the bay. Every heron mocks my shadow as they peek at my path. My legs stronger every hour I rise faster up the short cliff and standing inside out looking out over the island where wild beasts keep company with the natives of this place. I am of this place. I cannot leave. I will die here. There is no ocean lefi to cross. I saw it disappear in that dark dream bred from my mouth when I sucked at that tea she made from some unknown hemp that they gathered as flowers.

Tempest

Every storm has no eyes. How can I see past honorable journals crafted from memory and distances we shift when melancholy stuff us stopping as desire leaves.

We age even as we young raise up our hard arms and waving our instrument strut to keep the passion as some past stupor falls down into its own pail to denature as fetid stools beguile the beasts and mock the insects again rides the other stair well I am a stranger to myself. I did not drown. I caught the skin of the rocks and cut, my hand burned I lifted my heart up and pounded Ska Nee as she opened her wings and flew like that crow captured from the fantasy and let down into a book where the chronology of ship and being are charted for some noble restoration of the wood. Can we plow our lives back into that life work where as stretching our bowels we find that our aches are not changed by rich rooms to fornicate as we quit again those maids with empty skulls that breed death and pestilence as we speak ourselves to murder that which has no name but the black spots and yellow eyes that freeze the jaw into its death and prize.

Any private place can rise up out of waves or born fi' om a lance drive up the back door and make certain we can do this all again swimming from disturbed thunder to bare brook and standing there naked we repeat again in some sexless birth. I do not lie.

Narratives of New Netherland 1570—1970 by Sean Farragher