in the tumbling of mid-afternoon
drunk as it was on the wharf
their coats were all properly stamped with the official seal of September and affixed with regions unexplored—
terres
inconnu.
Were they perhaps curious about the body being inspected inside the rectory, out across the charcoal? Inside, they undress the corpse and under the cave of ribs discover a parasite, suggesting to them that shortly before its death the body had to have been infected with aestuans animus & that the wise gardener had merely taken the necessary precautions pertaining to disposal in such cases. They all retire to the innkeeper’s for grog and ‘bacca.
Sometimes there remain traces of extension, in or out, the bubosa offers a gift of water rushes bound three by three, received by the parson and the minister with flubs and misses of Byzantine staccato, an array of meat thrown into the potluck for good measure, sometimes, weather permitting, a Bolshevik is devoured even before the main course has had time to rise above the yawning proscenium into line of light, an offering to savages of all colours and classes.
Benjamin Franklin is asleep by the fireplace and has spilled his Irish coffee on a stack of memos and matchbooks left by the bearded woman and her strong man. When Benjamin Franklin is asleep the secret service gather around the garden waiting for the sounds of speech in the Rocky Mountain sky where words cannot hide and where a whisper is carried for many miles in an inconsolably many directions. There will be no talk of Mohammed nor his Koran. There will be no talk of the thirteenth Dalai Lama or of textiles going to the French in Indochina. There will above all be no talk of any isms whatever, not during these dangerous hours when America lies asleep beneath Canada, asleep from brainstem down to the toes & ultimately the soil.
In the winter of jihad, at the dawn of the Muslim raids, things will no doubt be different for the German Nationalists. There will be less time for sleep or tenderness under blanketed youth. We will surely defend the garden, for the secret service has already seen to it, in a manner of speaking, the very manner of all our speaking. But our struggles may prove fruitless because in the winter of jihad one must renunciate [yip! yip!] the heathen with the sabre and then the self with the same, the garden will fill with bodies, and the profits will flourish on the Vines of Franklin.
Lenora is in the garden, confused to finds no pansies or infidels neither, and her dress glistens on the haunches, knowing that growth in the third world will never be divorced from an excess of American seed—that if Benjamin Franklin doesn’t wake up soon she may very well have to sell plasma to the Soviets for a stale Baguette and a glass of wheatgerm. Her face looks to the ground and droops awfully, a waif-like dispossession as though sucked at indifferently by the earth, gleaning, waiting to be devoured by the plants the package said would take only five years to grow, & that was fifteen years ago—around the time Mr. Franklin fell fast asleep by the fire.
It is the hour of birdcalls and Lenora finds the hole in the garden of profits out of which the body was removed only hours before. The mud moves slowly under her, very disgusting imprints and a sort of magnesia pulse back, and she lays against the mud slowly slipping down the ridges into the empty grave without a whisper of prayer, vines pricking at her spine and chutes entering beneath her fingernails, a levy breaking as tear ducts creak and coo & there are worms.
The ambassadors, prone against the fence, thinking they see George Marshall approaching the garden across the charcoal with hammer and sickle sewn to his cowboy shirt, wearing also blue jeans, as the jets mount the crest and duck slenderly under clouds apologizing profusely with an excuse me sir, beg your pardon or quite sorry, I’m sure. At liftoff the crop is thrashed to death and the garden strains to hold itself to the earth, this the very earth that devoured Lenora before she could even close her eyes to the shadow of the Wermach tree.
The German ambassador receives a premonition on high and follows the fences of the pen back to the engine room to receive his chrome lunch of grease and further orders. The Russian ambassador remains by the fence staring off at the bronzed stable doors and shudders to realize that there is agriculture in the Americas and not just factories. Beneath the mountains set to clocks biologic there's no thought of Lenora or the body left to the vicar in the rectory, nobody and nothing is swayed by the snoring of Mr. Franklin, there is no meat or egg in the church for the laity, and General George Marshall done gone & drunk all the wine.
The free world invades Franklin’s lucid dream of a ten shilling note and seethes in the basements of the estate, under the garden, the floorboards bulging like exploding veins beneath the elm and lowborn carpet, while a geyser stirs at the base of the stem of a reckoning. And soon the reader, just in time for winter, will awake in the arms of the vicar, panting on the table, alive despite this frozen end of September & very lengthy burial in the garden of profits.
No comments:
Post a Comment