The slow overture of rain, each drop breaking without breaking into the next, describes the unrelenting, syncopated mind. Not unlike the hummingbirds imagining their wings to be their heart, and swallows believing the horizon to be a line they lift and drop. What is it they cast for? The poplars, advancing or retreating, lose their stature equally, and yet stand firm, making arrangements in order to become imaginary. The city draws the mind in streets, and streets compel it from their intersections where a little belongs to no one. It is what is driven through all stationary portions of the world, gravity's stake in things, the leaves, pressed against the dank window of November soil, remain unwelcome till transformed, parts of a puzzle unsolvable till the edges give a bit and soften. See how then the picture becomes clear, the mind entering the ground more easily in pieces, and all the richer for it.
It's a jazz affair, drum crashes and cornet razzes. The trombone pony neighs and the tuba jackass snorts. The banjo tickles and titters too awful. The chippies talk about the funnies in the papers. The cartoonists weep in their beer. Ship riveters talk with their feet To the feet of floozies under the tables. A quartet of white hopes mourn with interspersed snickers: "I got the blues. I got the blues. I got the blues." And . . . as we said earlier: The cartoonists weep in their beer.
It is later than late, the simmered down darkness of the jukebox hour.
The hour of drunkenness and cigarettes. The fools hour.
In my dreams, I still smoke, cigarette after cigarette. It's okay, I'm dreaming. In dreams, smoking can't kill me.
It's warm outside. I have every window open. There's no such thing as danger, only the dangerous face of beauty.
I am hanging at my window like a houseplant. I am smoking a cigarette. I am having a drink.
The pale, blue moon is shining. The savage stars appear. Every fool that passes by smiles up at me.
I drip ashes on them.
There is music playing from somewhere. A thready, salt-sweet tune I don't know any of the words to. There's a gentle breeze making hopscotch with my hair.
This is the wet blanket air of midnight. This is the incremental hour. This is the plastic placemat of time between reality and make-believe. This is tabletop dream time.
This is that faint stain on your mattress, the one you'll discover come morning, and wonder how. This is the monumental moment. The essential: look at me now. This is the hour.
Isn't it lovely? Wake up the stars! Isn't it fabulous? Kiss the moon! Where is the clock? The one that always runs ahead. The one that always tries to crush me with its future.
A child wakens in a cold apartment. The windows are frosted. Outside he hears words rising from the streets, words he cannot understand, and then the semis gear down for the traffic light on Houston. He sleeps again and dreams of another city on a high hill above a wide river bathed in sunlight, and the dream is his life as he will live it twenty years from now. No, no, you say, dreams do not work that way, they function otherwise. Perhaps in the world you're right, but on Houston tonight two men are trying to change a tire as snow gathers on their shoulders and scalds their ungloved hands. The older one, the father, is close to tears, for he's sure his son, who's drunk, is laughing secretly at him for all his failures as a man and a father, and he is laughing to himself but because he's happy to be alone with his father as he was years ago in another life where snow never fell. At last he slips the tire iron gently from his father's grip and kneels down in the unstained snow and unbolts the wheel while he sings of drinking a glass of wine, the black common wine of Alicante, in raw sunlight. Now the father joins in, and the words rise between the falling flakes only to be transformed into the music spreading slowly over the oiled surface of the river that runs through every child's dreams.
Summer, red violin, bright cloud, a buzzing of saw and cicada precedes you, your sky is vaulted, smooth and shining as an eye, and beneath its gaze, summer, fish of the infinite sky, pleasing electron, lazy, lethargic, rounded bee's belly, fiendish sun, terrible, paternal sun, sweaty as a laboring ox, parched sun pounding on your head like an unexpected clubbing, thirsty sun trudging across the sand, summer desert sea. The sulphur miner drips yellow sweat; ray by ray the pilot flies the celestial sun; black sweat slides down a forehead into eyes in the mine at Lota, the miner wipes his black forehead, sowed fields blaze, wheat rustles, blue insects seek shade, touch coolness, dip their heads in a diamond.
Abundant summer, wagon of ripe apples, strawberry mouth in the greenness, lips of wild plums, roads, of soft dust layered on dust, midday, red copper drum, and in the afternoon the fire relents, the air makes clover dance, invades the desert furnace, a cool star rises in the somber sky, in the crackling though unscorched summer night.
Posts
