GARAGISTE (2)

... which is to say that for all the density of my teaspooned words, for all that the nothing was curved precipitously to your void, that god's trigger-finger had been ripped from the hard hand which feeds, that the resilient vacancy of your centre was bound more tenuously than language between the molecules of the word spleen, which is to speak by halves of your holeness, for all my spat polish and my tuesday suit, I was the inept shoe directed vaguely at a cold hearth. I was a needle taken up against the fire.

AND SO BEGAN

and so began the rest of his life. here was the coffee-shop table, wristwatch, two measured spoons of sugar and-a-bit-for-the-spirits, broadsheet crossword with the old unsolved seventeen blank blocks: the appurtenances of an older man... breakfast in observatory. four-seater, void of finger-wagging gods, un-get-thee-hence-boyed, small beneath my sight, and a slice of urban roadway which you know begins dead and ends dead and entertains angels between with the old the ancient threats and the uncommon blessings and so began the next of his life observing angels and no angels and the shit of observatory dogs softly softly moleculing away down black sidewalks westward blackriverwards under april showers sooted black to the looned river the full-mooned the ultimate dumb bay drubbed guguletu-sooty-black… newly-coated saint-patron of the peri-urban slice through which pass but once the no-good do-good any-good-therefore-that-i-can-do prophets of prosperity and indolence, the negligéed and the negligent, weird bearded queer seared holed-soled scrabblers for the colonel's secret wingspan's radius the sacred ulna the four-leafed unbroken breastbone of the groundbound trill-streeted orthogonal each-man-in-the-cell-of-himself free range fowl among eagles wheezing stealth-machines through blistered stratospheres… get thee hence, boy, and snag thou eagles for thy trophy-room. snare thou eagles and angels and fairies and tooth-winged mice for thy specimen-cabinet and all manner of wingèd thing and every any beautiful beast hovering sootily over the dark hearth of this your day. be thou. be thou the air about them. be thou, cloaked in its smoggy lining's stealth, the hound of these heavens, sound thou the horn of the heavens' beasts' hound, the leavened breast's unbroken groundbound horn's sound… and so was a beginning, newly-cloaked in the forbidden alternative, newly-armed... in your left hand a neither, in your right the nor… don thou the eagle's harness, boy, and feather your fingers into the tree-rat's sign. resist, new-plumed, the cigaretting of the sun and the winestaining sea.

308

three hundred and eight words for the son of thunder. and when, upon st catherine's heath, do we dare meet again? on anne's, or emily's, or fleance's waxwinged, charlotte's harried, web?... but wait! flies lindbergh through the eastering sun, or snag his healing righteous wings on crosswinds breathed by mountains in the night?... yes, wait, for eight-and-hundreds-three of words do no da vinci make. nor he, unmade, his ornithopter cause to sail black-rigged, cliff-clear, heath-hovering through a kittyhawk dawn bronze-fleeced and dry while roundabout-and-not-a-drop-to-drink affianceds fly and barrel-rolling banquo's boldly bank… hail to thee, and every glamorous cloudburst be upon your unumbrellaed cinderellaed jack-o-lantern. damned be him and damned be he: may sons of thunder blessèd be? accused, arraigned, condemned those are who spurn the rock to kiss the star and hail and hail and hail to thee, appropriating destiny. in thunder, lightning, reign you still, pandemonic gristle-mill… but, barber-basined knight erroneous, keep the vigil, burn your books: don quixotic cardbox vestments against these post-socratic crooks… and reign and reign and reign thou meekly ever, sweet heir of dulcinean weather…