- ...And Baby Makes Tea
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- Otherguess: An English Picaresque
-
-
- 1. the sub-atomics of Paddington
station (scene-setting)
The InfoDex
Valhalla stands where diners sip the foam
- of that
neuropathic wash glossing their meager alliance brunch,
while – in the forest of calcified tuna veins (Sussex, Essex, further on)
–
- three well-tuned
businessmen cauterize roses in murky tills. Wives
-
- pre-colonized by
immigrant butchers, seduced by rubies and rockets
through the cane break to the lumbering luxury liner, or a tramcar,
-
- or an omnibus, a
pram, a pair of roller skates, a pair of socks?
- A port wine wind
catches up the security department documents
-
- detailing a coup
or two in the jungle's brightest gears, the hour's bruised dress
decorating the daughter who is always drowning herself
in the gold excretion of that lascivious station, the Iron Orchid
where the diatoms and dynamos nibble on the stairsteps rolling
through customs like a small woolen elephant, knitted exultation
on blue ceramic wheels whittling ebony gutters? Parliament speaks:
-
- "Dearest
Calcutta, we are presently passing shadows of stones
through cyanotic flues which have borrowed a collectivist shimmer
from the klieg lights hidden behind the asters, cantilevered eastward
to reveal the very tiny parachutists there. Or does the sloth crawl
-
- through a new and
palpitant union of shoes trees, their elegance forged
in the labour sheds and tented wharves of a drag Lord
whose peculiar girlhood was drugged in a Datsun, tinted scarlet,
- covered in
newspapers, and taken back to the ocean, to intermingle?"
-
-
- 2. the peculiar girlhood leaves through the book: adoration of girlhood
-
- The peculiar
girlhood leaves through the book, ribald sketches:
- aquamarine
ospreys on a white fence post, the drunkard’s Shaker chair,
- and that
meetingtime porch curving to the subject matter, warming to
-
- dubious struggles
for the title of maven, the one who softens
- complicated
mechanics of Darby daughters speeding
- past the
robot-boy’s post-war horseplay, the passion stitches
-
- on any of a
thousand paper skirts, the cool breakfast gods, a lion’s syrup—
- while the elder
fraud’s fedoras are spotted with complaint slips
- which rain upon
the Midlands Zephyr brushing the looming plots,
-
- rattling the
shut-in’s Beano tea set, 1952. She writes, (disarmingly)
- “There is an
hard-boiled egg posed on a grand piano.” A poem.
- A
romance novel: “Someone is tricking us with kisses.”
-
- Someone else is
tricking us, she means, randily practicing
- her Royal Teen
gestures, preparing to annotate, always pruning
- the sweaty roses
which pant at the room’s leafy fringes. “Mater,
-
- the kitchen smut
has obscured the Salisbury Salary Saver’s essay on death.
- Our house has
divorced its background, and signals for recompense
- from that
family-sized box, lettuce and lamb in the water closet,
-
- washing the music
hall costumes by the South American tidal pool.”
- “title” she
corrects herself, and drapes the peony sheets over an iron rod,
- thus padding the
fretful cranes in Accounting, amen. Still, there are Anglicans
-
- trapped in yellow
snaps of the enormous, isolated way station.
- She smiles in her
tamed Stetson, posturing “Chinese antelope”
- in a cherry
orchard theorized to exist im perpetuum
-
- for her anarchist
farmland parents. She notes them shepherding
- her forceful yet
grace-heavy media breakthroughs, bemused
- by her unfinished
manuscripts which harbor in the basement,
-
- directing the
national health ghost trains to the attic
- where a letter
from an undressed Brazilian – the ambassador’s “friend” -
- compliments her Marginalia
on Economic Artlessness,
-
- adding randy
descriptions of white pebbles weighting white dresses.
- All this wasted
upon the small library caryatids, and then Alex
- finds a rocking
horse in the quarry, and decamps to Persia to die trying.
-
- But those events
draw up a rag box of depressions,
- and we needn’t
dwell: memory is unrepeatable
- in the best of
circles. She finds the 2 o’clock rolling
-
- through the War
for Independence Room (closed for repairs)
- as its little
rice pudding passengers render full lip service
- to the oral
tradition. Literary agents clog the aisles,
-
- nightgowns cloud
their plans for the New Victoria,
- their arms erect
to bear the ceiling, dampened gray with “stars,”
- and that
impossible boy – Steerforth – heads for the dining car.
-
-
- 3. a sincere beauty (a philosophic excerpt)
-
- Does a sincere
beauty warn the beggar birds away
- from the seminary
students? Future heathens in cricket amazement,
- upon a mound of
lead-grey and bloated high sex, like socks
-
- which cover a
rose’s welts, and the black pudding of realism,
- and children like
passersby, and barristers and bobbies
- jigging on a
window ledge, reeling with their fortitude
-
- as the flag
(hideous lily bandage on a broken footstool)
- is encrusted with
mock turtle tears, the target turns,
- and there’s a
raven seated upon a conning for kicks.
-
- Alexander is now
our local brewer, disturbingly bright
- with his bayonet
and blue index cards, exuding
- the residential
aroma of debt, perhaps it’s patchouli,
-
- or blue
windflowers set against a thirst for ale,
- the burning copse
and the rainmaker finally rolling into Bartholomew Fair
- as Frau Elizabeth
nods, rummaging through her hair for herring coupons.
-
- And the rust
stalks lean against a lemon plaster wall,
- and the uniforms
are mothballed in underpaid rotation, ornamented
- with the dust
given off so generously by a lion’s-mane toilet seat.
-
-
- 4. restoration abandoned
-
- The dreariest
lark has been interred in steel terminals,
- so bring
acetylene orchids, and – as you dance – be careful
- of those
transparent veins secreted in the floor stones.
-
- Remember the
seizure of the farmers’ stars,
- the night’s
birch architecture, the cotton navy trapping
- the granite birds
in granite trees, this grant of middling Summer
-
- ascendent in
sheets of whale hearts with clove pins
- to freshen pine
stairs with a milky song, her stringent breast
- breathing out
locust like convalescents rocking
-
- upon a barbarous
surface, sunglasses and fish, the sea,
- a second-hand
vanity, a frieze of Babylonian rosettes
- to render tea
from the pulp of tyrants.
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- ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
- A cup of tea
is waiting for you at HOME