HONG KONG SINGLE - GREENER THAN GRASS

25. HONG KONG SINGLE - GREENER THAN GRASS:

“Great comedy insightful decadence he writes with a cigar in his mouth and both hands on the easel he looks straight ahead while turning to watch the purple martins at the feeder follow his every move he makes entire beings drool the end is always near when he’s around he makes me proud to be alive he’s a man’s man in a world of women it’s a shame they have to cut him down but never is there justice beneath the sun and just thinking of alternatives can break the bank” as the man in the tent nearby is watching the sidelines for the shadows of girls and some distant silhouette which moves across a screen but donkeys bray and horses are laughing and some clown I SWEAR turns back and says “if not – Winter” as if it were an alternative or some sort of choice we get to make and the campfires bellowed back “you aching fool you come from nothing and go to nowhere” and just as simple as all that Mrs. Waldron was on the phone to the senator from Commingulatus singing “you gather what glittering sunrise is scattered far the ewe to fold the kid and nanny home but the daughter you sent wandering from her mother” and when she was done I walked over and asked her what she meant and she lit a cigarette and put up her legs and said “it’s an ancient farming song by nomads who roamed the plains and it manages in a few verses to capture the idea of wandering and loss and farm animals and family and the loss of a daughter to some other tribe yet even though that is it I can never get it right for it’s supposed to end with everyone coming home again but it never works that way for me” and she said that swiveling her wonderful hips to the tiger in the cage (and for once even I wanted to bite) and before I knew it she too was gone and all I was left with was scheduled appearance of the Katzenjammer Kidz in Western Grove and the sound of a lonesome hammer doing something wild but no matter how much he hammered THAT MAN never built anything to completion and before long the ‘rosy-fingered moon’ was at the backstop again crying plaintively for someone to listen and DAMNED if it wasn’t me again but all I heard was “fire is racing under the skin and in the eyes no sight and drumming fills the ears but in the hearing no sound and the light had no goodness and nothing – as usual – was what it seemed and GREENER THAN GRASS I am and dead – or almost I seem to me” and with that it was over the night-gauze vision of all that was had left me and tinkered by chance was only a ringing bell at the ninth-out moment of end (‘this would be hard for you if you were weak but you’re not weak’) and dissembling left the gruff man wild and a posse of fumes struck the sky and the land together at once and I started talking back “I’ve got nothing but the memories of lime and lemura and the manifest is finished wherefrom I’d come before but I never had a mother and the father was revoked and the sister less benign than what before was running so if you ask me the last demon on the riverbank was the one who did it all” but before I could finish really finish I thought again of what was spread before me and where I was (oh say Washington and 13th or over by Canal under the wheels of a truck ON CANAL STREET) and the old subway tubes the Beach Street entrance the Ericsson Dam the electrical generator with big baffles to the wind and the awkward astrolabe upon the roof they ALL confused me each for (listen) this is where cars crashed before me and the train hit the wall and three horses pulled a carriage filled with mail and (‘Station to Station they left NOTHING to chance’) kids had lined up at the doorway wanting tickets to something or other BUT I TOOK OUT my steed and wrote them a pen and checked with myself in the mirror (at this point the Hong Kong Station was iced over Archibald MacLeish was no help at all and even Carl Jung was as helpless again as a baby).