Chapter 2
A bottle sits menacingly on the table -- a universe on its own, imagine her little water droplets the key to unerstanding a woman firm to the grasp bare-shouldered, lips to the moon in twilight.
A coin stepped on in the street perhaps a sou, a centime, centavo a petty return for rusting bells wedding the pavement, a centotaph alluding to sacrifice or toil in the fields to gain one circular disc.
Bring a case of wine those Puerto Rican girls are dying to meet you, the tune belts out and I see a yacht riding emerald waves, think of swimming out to greet her, my skin opening the water like a lizard's tongue,
Page 37 a sheaf of leaves pressed back, a rock pitched to dislodge a noisy cat.
Who tempers desire in the tropics when the air is to eat, sand golden griddles a harvest of warm wealth piled as a miser's hoard, green & more green skirting the city, experience my sacred vessel of purity. Think or cliff vines mucous, little curtains then pathways up to the final alley psychologically taut.
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Page 38 THE CABLE CAR
The Haitian effect of stars grinds the blue firmament like a cable car by night. transfixing energy.
One hears myriad tokens falling into a collection box, then the twitter of bells before the trolley steps round winds near Russian Hill
The night sky is a reservoir, a cistern stored with disturbing elements prickling the unknown in a man.
To watch as life forms, more intricate than lavender curls, so hushed their tones produce melodies like "Castor and Pollux", "Leo", "the Three Sisters", seizes any boarding pass along the remaining train of thought.
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Page 39 IL GIARDINO
Cloves on the table. (jardin parfumel are like ladyslippers with the jargon of their sweetmeats preserved in aromatic slabs about a garden wall.
Spanish ivy is the pastrami of this terrace -- thick, white walls, Hispanic style, unite with prim elasticity to quicken Picasso's sunshine like a ukulele strumming the grave.
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Page 40 EVERY MAN'S HAND
raised against them hussars, cossacks, zouaves the renegade janizaries and corsairs in for an indeterminale stretch assorted soldiers of furtune, never-do-wells or just low brows duelling crusts of bread scarce precious little else when for pennies more, (Wellington's phrase) the scum of the earth enlists for drink.
Too harsh, I think, of imagining the Foreign Legion, kepis of scarlet the near requisite haggard looks moving in waves across the desert pitting date palms with bayonets. the occasional fellow ravaged by French pox.
Then dunes where water should be -- storms granulating blown particles twice the perimeter of a camel train from whence decent men become driven (as the desert fox) to crouch beside themselves with poor material, loose flintlocks and cartridge belts rotting to the touch,
Page 41 The pitched camp (I see brackish oasis glare) stars big as pebbles in potato white Napoleon before Cairo his soldiery and ragged tents flapping like tongues of pillaging Arabs (or later battlefield carrion wolves) on the run from Allah and sweet date wine, their torpid hooves sound against rock matching wits grown sluggish in still more drifting sand.
Noon and blood purring like a two minute egg over and over the spitting, curses mandatory flies and sweat trickling on sandbags from manured lives little to eat-- C rations a century away, the good populace begrudging meals to vagabonds and trash anyway.
See the last desperation in classic terms betrayed by finite trength
Page 42 brisk elements raise the odds a measly temperature climb, a few more driving winds to stir the pot animal suffering dancing like stretched canvas on thin frames.
The leading roustabout unflinching, waves a stony mutineer's salute. And somehow it always manages dawn and the heat of the day wicked, oblong in an empty stretch forever, it seems, before bullets open graveyards mow the brigand down, take the corpse for its own mummifying with precious hands about the contours of her desert body, and firm cleavage oscillating between curvatures of desiccation, blanket heat.
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Page 43 ENDING UP
reads like living down -- a coconut arriving with the tide, bottles perched in sand the blue glass colour or imprisoned dreams genie of a bottle cap.
Ending up. the brow or a gondola overturned sees memories squared away -- the window of the envelope an all too foggy membrane.
Turning out like ending up no check-out time or non-existant room service in a flea-bag motel.
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Page 44 OFFERINGS (A Movement in four Parts)
The night is folly without the moon, trees blank space against a frontal sky where lattice work from a bled fish reveals skeletal markings will not administer the red jack of hearts to a mistress sea.
Most fickle, the ways of a cockroach (I don't recommend them) to offerings of white linen, cold squares atop a stone diamonded floor.
Palaver shacks drone in ghostly light communicating some message about eel runs up the black river, the equivalent brush of tombstones against dark nightsoil.
Tiny bars open as cubicles. proverbial flashes of the coming evening, haciendas to count every blessing.
The road to such places snarls a dusty pleasure and will heat thin blood to boil in the daylight hours.
Page 45 II
Sweat corrodes the cork's emplacement about green bottlenecks, its azure breath tossing back pools of sparse liquid.
I picture ships placed within such bottles as bannisters along corrugated highways, seawater rusting from within the steamfitters's tonsorial edge.
Haze thickens as sails blur to an artist's brush, then squiggles in the oilpaint of memory -- her sides fashioning red wounds as pigment surfacing from robotical crustaceans lancing the bottom of a deeper crevice.
III
My steps clank to the gaoler's key to become, within, handmaidens to thorned plants acting as fuselage along the building's exterior. Afar, a white seagull sits as a bespectacled tourist gracing a buoy like a madras shirt.
Early stars in an afternoon sky are expansive in Chateau Lafitte finery, the Rothschilds of the universe playing a cosmic baccarat.
Page 46 A girl in a brandy snifter of a dress -- dark, sensual, runs through tomes of my mind.
It's a hall of mirrors there; the radiating glass of the sea, twilight splendour in tall grass, the hands of thick mahogany chairs grimacing against perspiring walls.
I sponge water like a good midshipman off the brow of a leaking vessel. Nowhere are there signs of more than partial seepage though smoke in the back corridors exists from the fiery aguandine.
IV
Green palms unfurl as flags to the accordian of my eyes, blinking back the strong belt of sunlight that precisely floods the room.
Sailors jostle this crowd of memories, some surly lipped with broad tattoes.
A naked mermaid presses her thighs 'gainst memory door, then winks as the stellar crust of oblivion takes me.
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Page 47 In sleep, waterfront toughs are transformed to storeowners that smile, exchange pleasantries in Saba. (French gendarmes embrace on the other side clustering like starfish on the twin breasts of a beach.)
I devour cups not of riverwater in this cell but the best pink champagne at the captain's reception.
With hatfuls of intermittent rest, blurred outlines recede into mists thin as General Winter's treasured April snows.
The bony M of a hatpin, the passkey to better redress of fortune -- the turnstills, concealed within lavabeds of bladegrass. beckon upon the return voyage home.
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Page 48 REGALIA
If the rich are different they show it with the clarity of their table as Scolt FitzGerald decreed, the breathless hush of their regalias, the manner in which wedgewood & crystal are cleaned to a polished exactness -- the shimmer of expensive china no less repetitive than the hulking boys waiting in window stops; monsoon rain pelting the upper Punjab plains.
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Page 49 SAN CRISTOBAL
A gypsy sits in a taverna joking with a sailor who has left bridges and maidens along islets connecting many a storied sea.
Ducats tumble from a cloth bag the way the gypsy remembers caravans and the remembrance of gold steeled against warm flesh in moonlight of his native Umbria.
Lavender is the coat of dreams along navy blue hemmings the colour of the gypsy's eyes, the blood's colour progeny whose men of wealth both are related to.
Page 50 The gypsy stares at the taverna wall and the ducats gleaming to outside rain.
Men joke at rail depots where in a like fashion water splashes mud into little arches up a riverbank.
Neither has the shallows of minnows at his command. Bunched up stubble in the wind cannot fathom lies or gender hope -- it is lhe province of the mind, the coinage of perhaps a Spaniard on discovering San Cristobal, one's own sieglo oro in fortune squandered in sunlight with only the sweating Appolosa still straining on this, the last taverna ride.
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Page 51 GUADALQUIVIR
In a pleasureless world, pure pleasure exists. Particles of sunlight, exquisite with nightdrops & leaves stringent with dew, persuade tributaries with inset eyes to depart down foible breast, sticky fingers up delightful steps.
And taking pleasure with an earthen spoon -- sipped long and hard down tubes and winding entrails; soft relief canyons swollen blood vessels.
For your brow shines like olive branches, Guadalquivir's river or nectar drawn from golden wells and, as such, unfolds loveliest eyes out from fond embrace not hedging lies.
My darling, amongst flowering cherub trees a moment shared with you is pretty mirth accounts all Arcadia's treasures, the angelic breath off passing wings.
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Page 52 LEAVES OF THE CECROPIA TREE
And what of privileged things mur & frankinscense or sandlewood -- yes, teak, ambergris or skies of indigo blue -- I cite these gifts, caravans offered as treasure Christopher Wren putting the domes of St. Paul in place like worn spectacles over a cherubic face.
The last gargoyle pops in sight near Notre Dame such cathedrals are whitened sepulchre stones in "stately pleasure domes decreed".
I see the Taj Mahal where Mahatma Gandhi might have trod.
The utterance of a tulip in every parable Christ talked; rosebuds gleaming milk on the breath of lilacs their shields of lilies shone where Solomon walked.
Page 53 Song of Songs is none other than the poet's heart, water across stones. a warm sun working double shifts as a pitchfork stacking memories on a summer's day shooing aside leaves of the Cecropia tree; old Walt resting on a bench mumbling his prayers.
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Page 54 SOUTHWARK
I noticed a bust of Shakespeare, an effigy in stone with latticing to mirror the ages. In the same cathedral a notation commented John Harvard was baptized here.
Outside, rain fell on tombstones scarcely readable, their letters frail imitations of what each man considered important in life.
The church itself breathed renewal. We learn John Gower, epic poet to the court of Richard II, worshipped here. I thought of translucence, then muir and gems the wise men brought the Infant Christ. Prayer candles glowed and fell into a lap of pyre. The crypt held Edmund, brother to the Bard.
A handsome altar betrayed sentiments Gray used in his elegy to another courtyard. My thoughts continued onto nearby Tower Bridge, steel and energy dynamos before steps of the multitude released at five.
A sign read no alcohol was to be consumed on church grounds.
The very name of the place visited was poetic, half twist of muscle, more pull of silent breath.
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Page 55 KUBLAI KHAN
The Japanese are coming! Now there's a fresh twist and just when Pearl Harbor seemed poised to become another Asiamerindian household word amid electronics, megavision and technological hoopla.
Surprise. They're outslugging us. We're cannon fodder amidst cunning economic wiles. The "sneaky" Yellow Peril (updated and given a newer "slant" from that 19th century prejudicial posturing) has gone awry. No death march at Bataan. No G.I. blues. Old Cornpipes General MacArthur at ease; Inchon still years away. Where is Emperor Tojo when we need him? Who remembers the Aryans of the East? A Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere?
Is SEATO still intact? If Korea, Formosa, Singapore and Hong Kong are "little Japans" does that mean we're to become, by default, the new coolies?
Tha land of the Rising Sun is broader than a battleship listing in heavy seas -- it's the New world Order. Is North America being prepared as hewers of grain and drawers of petroleum? Alas, co-existence brings dilemmas: the Toyota outwits even a "K" car. And them outpacing our GNP at 6% per annum. It's enough to rethink the whole scheme of things. They're obviously in the forefront of the New Economic Policy. More than just "Nippon" -- that's simply a bad press release from the dark days of a misunderstood, but euphemistically labelled "second global conflict".
Page 56 Rubber and fibre sanctions will do it every lime. The Arizona and Oklahoma will testify to that. Feudal Japan would never have tolerated it, either. Who's to say the Samurai are caught up in splilting hairs? Admiral Perry should have stayed out of Tokyo Bay. The Earthquake of 1923 just made things worse. Land's End means more than Manchuria and resources.
Industry and wily opportunism have broader vistas. The Kuril Islands are a No Man's Land hut so are the Ainus, a primordial white race of Asia.
What's red and white and comes in with the tide? America. Compared to the Japanese miracle, it's all washed up. It's hard to contemplate N.Y.C. as a suburb of Osaka, but try. The Japanese believe in communal bathing, so will North Americans when the recession hits full stride. Remember, shower with a friend.
Japan is a land of aura. Of mystery. Genghis Khan never got there in one piece but sent his legions anyway. Flotsam and jetsam. A bully vanquished. 1066 in reverse.
Britain was the workshop of the Victorian world. Japan is the Britain of the universe. The whole cosmos is borrowing her tricks. No one does things so efficiently. No one has developed cooperation to such a fine "T". Nowhere is individualism shepherded to the goal of the "greater good".
Page 57 Pierre Trudeau would be pleased. "To each his own according to his worth." Sounds impressive. Does that mean Jaffa oranges are safe to eat -- mercury and cyanide poisoning notwithstanding. Will the Levant acknowledge the supremacy of the Orient?
What's new about mulberry leaves? Are silk worms interlopers, too?
Shogun is too realistic for the narrow orchestration of facts. The difference? They play to win.
Hands down, Kirin makes a wonderful beer. Sushi bars are all the rage. Leyte Gulf was more than a tempura explosion, Corning Ware or "Made in Japan" labels produced in bulk.
Coral Gardens is a real and legitimate extension of the Rice Factory idea.
Cipangu. As you like, what you will. No race has undergone a swifter transformation in the world's eye.
They deserve more than groping admiration. They deserve our admirals, too. Who else outfoxed military victory reversing it from the insides cadaver out? The peter principle enshrined. The victors don't enjoy the spoils.
The Lion's Share is as it should.
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Page 58 HOMUNCULAR FORMS
Cape aux Morts. Cape Diable, Points of Massacre Rocks and Island a plethora of Wreck Bays.
But on Funk Island, nothing matters. Brahmsian rhetoric could describe the island Prokofievian, the sound of Mars homuncular forms; an imperative monotone.
Murrelings fell from cliffs into the sea, rose and floated in foam, screaming. Olivaceous puddles. Murres and gannets, kittiwakes, sun splashed white & pitiless light on rock -- argon, radon, krypton seasons of millennia suffocating in the original gases of earth: xenon, neon. Granite intestines with its outer edge lost in the darkness between the stars.
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Page 59 ANTARCTICA
Perhaps it is needed to balance the planet: to provide employment for penguins, or that ice in the form of crystals calls forth tiny sleighs.
That the orange hibiscus be associated only with deepest tropics ...plankton learn to feed Baleen whales And iron hulks, off ships. submit to greater Masters. the elements.
SECOND THEORIES
Another supposition projects... snowy wastes are but vapour trails of jets and tatter sails. Sleet comes only from cannonized rain, galvanized by inclement ironmongers.
Yet a third hypothesizes frozen energy is stored in the form of ice caps and that the lost amongst departed souls are reborn with every powdery breath.
Ptolemy knew of a southern polar continent. Cook and Shackelton attempted separate conquests. Ships voyaged as early twentieth century probes amid frozen stellar space nudging Earth's feet.
Footprints the size of muskets where left as evidence. So were a few red flags. No oxygen bottles trailed the ascent like those that packed Everest. Amundsen as to Hillary across the South Sea face, yet this Matterhorn has a logic and bedevilment all her own.
Page 60 Norway and Russia claim exploration of her frigid body. The British in the first virginal thrust christened Queen Maud Land after a brilliant courtship. Shades of Spencer and his Faery Queen; the Kron Prins Olaf Coast, anyone?
Ice. South of the Antipodes. The floor of the world. Magnificant pack to the drunken global jaw, growlers or submerged ice packs. A cold porterhouse steak to ward off the combattive edge, the chronic boxer's inflamed orifice and eye -- the nosebleed's staunchest friend.
Terra Australis Incognita, the supposed southern continent; hoof of the Cenotaur stringing men like a bow across nipples like raw wounds. clotted hair and blood on a precipice for a chest.
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Page 61 BLUE*EYED GRASSES
Rocky shale, pale voile, sun lighting the clearness of the bay; come Moccasin Flower or Grass Pink unto Painted Cup -- big with primula eye, these septs off wild and inland seas.
The delights of success and heartbreaks of failure among the people in the land below Tobermory; the rocks on the cold hill, the lilacs by the doors...
And it was at their expense that this land came to be supplied with vitriol, camomile and liquorice, yea some camphor and jallop, oft'times basil, lemon or rhubarb --- all sent from Glasgow in wooden boxes stout as pioneer hearts.
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Page 62 MOCCASIN
Backwoods cabin, opera house from the pines awash with stars, skullduggery in place over spruce hills dredged to open revolt against invading plough -- where greenest leaves in a miser's hand part rotting gold bags all nugget strewn, step to step, with water speaking magic over the sound of countless woodland ducks.
Hocus-pacus, the flies are sleeves over the world, black granite pull-overs slung thru the air a twinkling of the eye invokes funeral trees, deerskin in colour, the rabbit in the hat behind rich birchbark racing thru the dark.
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Page 63 THE BULLFROG
He sat with no more compunction than an eel fish big-faced, bloated, the complexion of a beehive -- a dragnet of emotions crammed into a tumbler upended in water.
His eyelids wore the effort of horseblinders, a spongy leather masquerading as torpedoes and I saw him lonely at the crossroads matted grass, a strip of wire, cold current chasing flecks about his person, then lunging green exploded into rapacity -- caressed the awaiting fly strewn stick with emerald mouth & coffers of appetite.
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Page 64 ANCESTRAL MEMORY
Patrician to my plebian, aristocratic leaning versus unbridled backwoods feeling -- distinct Old World breeding countering rudest colonial lean-to; his carcass lay, roadworthy, blinking back cold starlight with all the forest as silent voyeur stretching for a look, black fur & quills in disarray like Crazy Horse's warpaint after the Big Horn, this roughneck Canadian porcupine shot clean with bumper & chrome.
Then little hedge-pig quaint as porcelain china cup half a world away greeting pints of milk in an English doorway half his scalp torn thru dirty, British lorry choking fumes the petrol in its tank loose.
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Page 65 ENTRY POINT
Ants colonized it -- huge abodes littered with the dead (leaves, sticks, the occasional granulated insect piled high, totemic-fashion) reaping a fortune in scenery, though probably not food Ojibways were next -- their tell-tale encampment by pocket-sized waterfall, inlets off a winding cataract & moss, loam-thick with black soil a future arboreal dream inching over rock, darling crevice for northern orchid, then kiss of red death the hybrid trillium & more sinister cousin, jack-in-the-pulpit for Indian foragers.
Animistic limestone shone hands, poked thru the forest with stealth, petroglyphic lava beds -- a cougar pouncing -- runic carvings the cold in the Giant's stone nostrils billowing off the lake like a presence.
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Page 66 BLOODCOUNT
My mind had almost died.
It had refused a game of tag on a common with surly children and they steadfastly took revenge.
My fate like Blondin's walk across Niagara saw cataracts looming large, hiss & foam, then visions of serpents, farawy monsters & inner tension of rocks opening.
The churned, brown water opened like a basket before me. Maurading bubbles took on elephantine shapes, my barrel creeked. Faraway, the edge & drop yawned in indifferent harmony. The brown walls of my fortress barrel became like palates & sutures of my skull imprisoning the brain; the trickle of invading water ever a reminder.
The close of the story? Nothing. What is there to record after a river passes? What remains of things unseen, of antelopes in flight?
The shroud of Monte Cristo tossed carelessly into sea did not fall open to the touch but was knifed with rifle force.
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Page 67 BLOODSTREAM
Camping out, a miraculous thing happened. The kaleidoscope of vision was focused on a precipice, caught endangered water about to fall under microscopic attention.
Moisture was shortlived; so, too, congealed lava sheets & bedrock over which the water flowed. The cabin in the distance seemed prisoner to mist while a rainbow gathered its wits for the next performance. Nowhere did leaves intrude though a fly made headway up a glass pane embedded in wood like antidiluvian plants have been known to seek amber.
In their chorus, other flies droned then ran up & down the ledge. In the iate sunshine of the day, a bastardized vision of dirt farmers, pioneers imprisoned in similar toil.
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Page 68 ROGUE AND PRIVATEER
The Squirrel, a corsair, rides the wind black arm of a pressing sea,
Tribal hostilities finished, she slinks into port.
Traveling lightly across open ground, a squirrel upends a brigand sapling.
Grappling the ragged ends of a thicket with riggings shredded by heavy wind and storm, the arboreal sloop ascends to the highest mast; a bush re-taken, the Crow's, Nest reconnointered.
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Page 69 THE CAMERA CAGE As a child, all common sense decreed pirates wore dear teeth -- enamel white, with tusks to rout an elephant (the result from eating carrot sticks, I was told) -- not a solitary doubt clutched my mind ivory mingled naturally with black cord and sash in the brain's Bluebearded eye.