18
What is most original in a man’s nature is often that which is most desperate. Thus new systems are forced on the world by men who simply cannot bear the pain of living with what is. Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique. If Hitler had been born in Nazi Germany he wouldn’t have been content to enjoy the atmosphere. If an unpublished poet discovers one of his own images in the work of another writer it gives him no comfort, for his allegiance is not to the image or its progress in the public domain, his allegiance is to the notion that he is not bound to the world as given, that he can escape from the painful arrangement of things as they are. Jesus probably designed his system so that it would fail in the hands of other men, that is the way with the greatest creators: they guarantee the desperate power of their own originality by projecting their systems into an abrasive future. These are F.’s ideas, of course. I don’t think he believed them. I wish I knew why he took so much interest in me. Now that I look back he seemed to be training me for something, and he was ready to use any damn method to keep me hysterical. Hysteria is my classroom, F. said once. The occasion of the remark is interesting. We had been to a double feature and had then eaten a huge Greek meal in one of his friends’ restaurants. The jukebox was playing a melancholy tune currently on the Athenian Hit Parade. It was snowing on St. Lawrence Boulevard and the two or three customers left in the place were staring out at the weather. F. was eating black olives in a disinterested fashion. A couple of the waiters were drinking coffee, after which they would begin to stack the chairs, leaving our table, as usual, to the very end. If there was an unpressurized place in the whole world, this was it. F. was yawning and playing with his olive pits. He made his remark out of the blue and I could have killed him. As we walked through the rainbow haze of the neon-colored snow he pressed a small book into my hand.
– I received this for an oral favor I happen to have performed for a restaurateur friend. It’s a prayer book. Your need is greater than mine.
– You filthy liar! I cried when we had reached the streetlamp and read the cover, . It’s an English-Greek phrase book, badly printed in Salonica!
– Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered. Study the book.
– And the English is execrable. F., you torture me purposefully.
– Ah, he said blithely sniffing the night, ah, it’s soon Christmas in India. Families gathered round the Christmas curry, carols before the blazing Yule corpse, children waiting for the bells of Bhagavad-Santa.
– You soil everything, don’t you?
– Study the book. Comb it for prayers and guidance. It will teach you how to breathe.
– Sniff. Sniff.
– No, that’s wrong.
19
Now it is time for Edith to run, run between the old Canadian trees. But where are the doves today? Where is the smiling luminous fish? Why are the hiding places hiding? Where is Grace today? Why isn’t candy being fed to History? Where is the Latin music?
– Help!
Edith ran through the woods, thirteen years old, the men after her. She was wearing a dress made from flour sacks. A certain Flour Company packed their product in sacks printed with flowers. There is a thirteen-year-old girl running through needle pine. Have you ever seen such a thing? Follow her young young bum, Eternal Cock of the Brain. Edith told me this story, or part of it, years later, and I’ve been pursuing her little body through the forest ever since, I confess. Here I am an old scholar, wild with unspecific grief, compulsive detective of gonad shadows. Edith, forgive me, it was the thirteen-year-old victim I always fucked. Forgive yourself, F. said. Thirteen-year-old skin is very beautiful. What other food besides brandy is good after thirteen years in the world? The Chinese eat old eggs but that is no comfort. O Catherine Tekakwitha, send me thirteen-year-olds today! I am not cured. I will never be cured. I do not want to write this History. I do not want to mate with Thee. I do not want to be as facile as F. I do not want to be the leading Canadian authority on the A——s. I do not want a new yellow table. I do not want astral knowledge. I do not want to do the Telephone Dance. I do not want to conquer the Plague. I want thirteen-year-olds in my life. Bible King David had one to warm his dying bed. Why shouldn’t we associate with beautiful people? Tight, tight, tight, oh, I want to be trapped in a thirteen-year-old life. I know, I know about war and business. I am aware of shit. Thirteen-year-old electricity is very sweet to suck, and I am (or let me be) tender as a hummingbird. Don’t I have some hummingbird in my soul? Isn’t there something timeless and unutterably light in my lust hovering over a young wet crack in a blur of blond air? Oh come, hardy darlings, there is nothing of King Midas in my touch, I freeze nothing into money. I merely graze your hopeless nipples as they grow away from me into business problems. I change nothing as I float and sip under the first bra.
– Help!
Four men followed Edith. Damn every one of them. I can’t blame them. The village was behind them, filled with families and business. These men had watched her for years. French Canadian schoolbooks do not encourage respect for the Indians. Some part of the Canadian Catholic mind is not certain of the Church’s victory over the Medicine Man. No wonder the forests of Québec are mutilated and sold to America. Magic trees sawed with a crucifix. Murder the saplings. Bittersweet is the cunt sap of a thirteen-year-old. O Tongue of the Nation! Why don’t you speak for yourself? Can’t you see what is behind all this teen-age advertising? Is it only money? What does “wooing the teen-age market” really mean? Eh? Look at all the thirteen-year-old legs on the floor spread in front of the tv screen. Is it only to sell them cereals and cosmetics? Madison Avenue is thronged with hummingbirds who want to drink from those little barely haired crevices. Woo them, woo them, suited writers of commercial poems. Dying America wants a thirteen-year-old Abishag to warm its bed. Men who shave want little girls to ravish but sell them high heels instead. The sexual Hit Parade is written by fathers who shave. O suffering child-lust offices of the business world, I feel your blue-balled pain everywhere! There is a thirteen-year-old blonde lying on the back seat of a parked car, one nyloned toe playing with the armrest ashtray, the other foot on the rich interior carpet, dimples on her cheeks and only a hint of innocent acne, and her garter belt is correctly uncomfortable: far away roam the moon and a few police flashlights: her Beethoven panties are damp from the Prom. She alone of all the world believes that fucking is holy, dirty, and beautiful. And who is this making his way through the bushes? It is her Chemistry Teacher, who smiled all night while she danced with the football star because it is the foam rubber of his car she lies dreaming upon. Charity begins alone, F. used to say. Many long nights have taught me that the Chemistry Teacher is not merely a sneak. He loves youth truly. Advertising courts lovely things. Nobody wants to make life hell. In the hardest hard sell exists a thirsty love-torn hummingbird. F. wouldn’t want me to hate forever the men who pursued Edith.
– Sob. Sob. Whimper. Oh, oh!
They caught up with her in a stone quarry or an abandoned mine, someplace very mineral and hard, owned indirectly by U.S. interests. Edith was a beautiful thirteen-year-old Indian orphan living with foster Indian parents because her father and mother had been killed in an avalanche. She had been abused by schoolmates who didn’t think she was Christian. Even at thirteen she had lovely freakishly long nipples, she told me. Perhaps this news had leaked out of the school shower room. Perhaps that was the underground rumor which had inflamed the root of the whole town. Perhaps the business and religion of the town kept operating as usual but every single person is secretly obsessed with this nipple information. The Mass is undermined with nipple dream. The picket line of strikers at the local asbestos factory is not wholly devoted to Labor. There is something absent in the blows and tear gas of the Provincial Police, for all minds are pursing for extraordinary nipple. Daily life cannot tolerate this fantastic intrusion. Edith’s nipples are
an absolute pearl irritating the workable monotonous protoplasm of village existence. Who can trace the subtle mechanics of the Collective Will to which we all contribute? I believe that in some way the village delegated these four men to pursue Edith into the forest. Get Edith! commanded the Collective Will. Get her magic nipples off Our Mind!
– Help me, Mother Mary!
They ran her to the ground. They ripped off the dress with the Company’s raspberry pattern. It was a summer afternoon. Blackflies ate her. The men were drunk on beer. They laughed and called her sauvagesse, ha, ha! They pulled off her underwear, rolling it down her long brown legs, and when they tossed it aside they did not notice that it looked like a big pink pretzel. They were surprised that her underwear was so clean: a heathen’s underwear should be limp and smeared. They were not frightened by the police, somehow they knew the police wished them well, one of their brothers-in-law was a policeman, and he had balls like everyone. They dragged her into the shadows because each man wanted to be somewhat alone. They turned her over to see if the dragging had scraped her buttocks. Blackflies ate her buttocks, which were dazzlingly round. They twisted her over again and pulled her deeper into the shadows because now they were ready to remove her underwear top. The shadows were so thick and deep at the corner of the quarry that they could hardly see, and this is what they wanted. Edith peed in fear and they heard the noise of it louder than their laughter and hard breathing. It was a steady sound and it seemed to go on forever, steady and forceful, louder than their thoughts, louder than the crickets who were grinding out an elegy for the end of the afternoon. The fall of urine on last year’s leaves and pine needles developed to a monolithic tumult in eight ears. It was the pure sound of impregnable nature and it ate like acid at their plot. It was a sound so majestic and simple, a holy symbol of frailty which nothing could violate. They froze, each of them suddenly lonely, their erections collapsing like closed accordions as their blood poured upward like flowers out of a root. But the men refused to cooperate with the miracle (as F. called it). They could not bear to learn that Edith was no longer Other, that she was indeed, Sister. Natural Law they felt, but Collective Law they obeyed. They fell on the child with index fingers, pipe stems, ballpoint pens, and twigs. I would like to know what kind of miracle that is, F. The blood streamed down her legs. The men made coarse jests. Edith screamed.
– Help me, Saint Kateri!
F. urged me to make nothing of this connection. I can’t go on with this. Everything has been taken from me. I just had a daydream: I saw the thirteen-year-old Edith suffering under the impotent attack of these four men. As the youngest kneeled down to examine better the progress of his sharp twig, Edith seized his head in her arms and drew him to her bosom, and there he lay weeping like that man on Old Orchard Beach. F., it’s too late for the double feature. My stomach is jammed again. I want to begin my fast.
20
I see it so clearly now! The night of Edith’s death, that long night of talk with F., he left a whole side of his chicken and barely touched the barbecue sauce. I see now that it was deliberate. I remember a saying of Kung’s he was fond of: When eating beside a man of mourning the Master never ate his fill. Uncles! uncles! how dare any of us eat?
21
Among the curious items I inherited from F. is a box of fireworks packed by Rich Brothers Fireworks Co., Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It contains 64 sparklers, eight 12- and 8-ball roman candles, large pinwheels, red and green fire cones, vesuvius fountains, golden jewel, silver cascade, oriental and radiant fountains, 6 giant parade sparklers, silver wheels, skyrockets, comets, handle lawn fountains, snakes, torches, red white and blue cones. I wept as I unpacked the pieces, wept for the American boyhood I never had, for my invisible New England parents, for a long green lawn and an iron deer, for college romance with Zelda.
22
I am frightened and alone. I lit one of the snakes. From the little cone a writhing ribbon of gray ash bubbled in coils on a corner of the yellow table until all the cone was consumed in its own extension – a hideous little pile of skin, gray and black like a blob of birdshit squeezed like icing. Carcasses! Carcasses! I want to swallow dynamite.
23
Dear God, It Is Three In The Morning. Aimless Cloudy Semen Becomes Transparent. Is The Church Mad At Me? Please Let Me Work. I Lit Five Of The 8-Ball Roman Candles And Four Of Them Delivered Less Than 8 Balls. The Firecrackers Are Dying. The Newly Painted Ceiling Is Burned. Korean Starvation Hurts Me In The Heart. Is This A Sin To Say? Pain Is Stored In Animal Skins. I Solemnly Declare That I Renounce Interest In How Many Times Edith and F. Fucked In Happiness. Are You So Cruel As To Compel Me To Begin My Fast With A Stuffed Belly?
24
Burned my hand badly while holding a red and green fire cone. The smoldering hull of a skyrocket ignited a sheaf of Indian notes. The sharp fragrance of gunpowder has cleared my sinuses. Lucky there was butter in the icebox because I refuse to go into the bathroom. I never liked my hair but I am not fond of the blisters bestowed by the silver cascade. Cinders float and stick like blasted bats in whose torn wings I detect exact gray-blue replicas of candy-stripe and comet-tail designs. I’ve handled so much charred cardboard that I leave my fingerprints on everything. I look around at this mess of a kitchen and I know that my life is coming true. I care more about my red watery throbbing thumb than your whole foul universe of orphans. I salute my monsterhood. I urinate anywhere on the linoleum and I am pleased that nothing happens. Every creep for himself!
25
Pigskin crackling on my thumb, nummy, nummy, I hate pain. The way I hate pain is most monumentally extraordinary, much more significant than the way you hate pain, but” my body is so much more central, I am the Moscow of pain, you are the mere provincial weather station. Gunpowder and semen is the only research I intend from now on, and look how harmless I be: no bullets after hearts, no sperms after destiny: nothing but the radiance of exhaustion: the gay little cylinders collapsing in ordinary fire after multiple belches of shooting stars, rainbows: the viscous blob of come in my palm thinning and clearing, like the end of Creation when all matter returns to water. Gunpowder, ball-sweat, the yellow table starts to look like me, ugh, the kitchen looks like me, me has sneaked outside into furniture, inside smells are outside, bad to be so big, I have occupied the stove, isn’t there somewhere fresh where I can tuck my eyes in a clean bed and dream new bodies, oh I’ve got to get to a movie and take my eyes out for a pee, a movie will put me back in my skin because I’ve leaked all over the kitchen from all my holes, movie will stuff pores with white splinters and stop my invasion of the world, missed movies will kill me tonight, I am scared of F.’s firecrackers, I hurt too much in my burns, what could you know about burns? All you’ve ever done is merely burn yourself. Steady, old scholar! I’ll turn off the light and write in the dark a résumé of tomorrow’s Indian chapter that I must get to work on. Discipline. Click! “Triompher du mal par le bien.” St. Paul. That will begin the chapter. I feel better already. Foreign languages are a good corset. Get your hand off yourself. Edith Edith Edith long things forever Edith Edie cuntie Edith where your little Edith Edith Edith Edith Edith stretchy on E E E octopus complexion purse Edith lips lips area thy panties Edith Edith Edith Edith knew you your wet rivulets Eeeeddddiiiittthhhh yug yug sniffle truffle deep bulb bud button sweet soup pea spit rub hood rubber knob girl come head bup bup one bloom pug pig yum one tip tongue lug from end of bed of lips multiple lost sunk gone rise girl head small come knob splash sunk lost-lick search nose help wobble hard once more lurk up girl knob bob bubble sunk in normal skin folds lab drowned lady labia up up appear pea bean brain jewel where where hurt hiding bruised? come up hard as brass bubble from hair swamp little leather love pimple form solid lump for tongue mess mess message oh unhood unhide unhair undrown or teeth hounds I warn you tooth spade teeth dogs unleashed unloved lashed form form you bead you small blunt boywise girlcock form command tiny periscope from foreign female lost sub no man can fathom ever come u
p come up from women ocean period mecca egg farm mystery beds come up come up from where I don’t ever go from profound clam stretches from breathless gill yards from gray broadloom oyster floors of girlsoul far far amazon sex control rise rise here clity clity clity from amazing forbidden protoplasmic amoeba fulfilled woman gla gla galaxy please appear in small helmet of hope lap lap oh pearl pink precious radio crystal marvelous fruit pit of whole bumcunt harvest appear form develop unfold unshell unskin look into cocklove lead dykeplug prickgirl nrrr grrr bridge entre men woman so I can do you pleasure my lady deliver unto me thy downtown brain un-puzzled from cunt labyrinth for I may never join you in the seaweed nets in the sunk hotels in the spongey jungles passive womb tubed mudlined herbal cast closet vast as Mrs. God what? you no come up? splash splash hidden for a newer tongue? for a nobler tongue? for dirtier tongue? for F. tongue? for stranger? any stranger doing this to you would be more honored any stranger how strange therefore therefore I go down maybe where I meant to go like a snail this automatic tongue slides down the aquarium moss shoot there is a ridge tender and yielding as the casting join of a hollow chocolate bunny I ride it down don’t be ashamed all smells are alchemized tongue goes ring around a rosy lifesaver flavor mud candy this is a better common button we both have we must kiss assholes because we each poor one of us has one we cannot kiss it is ringed with minnie bills they Bible dance it is ringed with stunted petals tongue dives petals open shiver petals tighten in a rubber knot I talk stiff now dig dig dig bump bump bump thud on hills of petal knot get in there hands pull cheeks apart pull apart cheeks of Edith’s fabulous private hers hers they give squeeze they yield like halves of ripe peach like very cooked chicken perfectly lovely blood balloons this is Edith its virgin pink brown hairy same as mine same same as us all poor charmen who flood the world on our knees this is solid prose this is mystery of everyday thus I insert cuneiform face mouth to sphinx for my tongue was only a test game on rosy sphinx hole I focus my mouth for pure talk gnawing suck adoration shit danger love bravery open close open close goes the surface petals closing to feel its own little cliffs of muscle opening in terrible abandon red desperate as baby robin throat oh Edith ass membrane gasping all my flock of mouth bathing pruning fluttering in the sunny bird bath on a pillar of charity bowel where am I now now don’t go way here I am simply with my face between her buttocks which hands have drawn apart my chin does automatic good to cunt now I let cheeks go they squeeze me in I squeeze me in I squash my nose sealing juice infant shit games in my brain listen Edith listen to me smother listen darling love it is thy hairy hole I suck are we not joined Edith are we not proved Edith are we not breathing Edith are we not awesome lovers Edith are we not filthy postcards are we not good meals Edith are we not conversing miraculously darling pink evil fartrisk terror position darling I swear I loved you Edith grab grab jumps the little crater kiss kiss kiss kiss Edith Edith do the same to me do the same to me pull my withered bum on your face I make it easy do the same to me do the same to me do the same to me Edith lilacs Edith Edith Edith Edith Edith Edith turning in our sleep making spoons of ourselves Edith Edith Edith Edith please appear as mushrooming dream from this poor Aladdin cock Edith Edith Edith Edith in your sweet skin envelope Edith Edith thy lonely husband Edith thy lonely husband thy lonely husband thy apples thy run thy creases thy dark lonely husband
Beautiful Losers Page 6
