From Dr. LaSalle’s Notebook
The magician found her last night digging on her knees near a bush under a street lamp.
She seemed in a trance. I noticed a harp was playing some distance away, up a hill, coming from an old deserted house whose front screen banged slowly in the wind.
In her trance, lips mumbled with longing. Digging at the dream spot. The next moment, she spoke directly to me. She said it was her source core that she had seen shinning silently “below the surface:
“Numbers in the ground.”
The girl. She had been walking in those stacks below sleep and spied a silence surrounded spot up ahead. Neon harps appeared. Five, six, maybe seven, up on the curb at Dale and Selby, the old, black, Saint Paul ghetto crossroads. She made a vow, then and there, that she and I would spend our days together in the South American rain forest. Her days and my days have become one.
The magician and the Digging Woman still one, behind their hut, of a certain evening, with harps misting promises from a small tape player just inside the door, they buried that silent cylinder where no one will ever know.
Even I disremember the exact spot.
New York Subway Soliloquy On The Subject Of Filth I Shall Not Ever Forget
Hidden from an early age under army
Blankets in old Times Square theatrical
Hotels; undaunted by the mediaeval pabulum
Of Alcohol, of Art, and of Broken Hearts, I became
A life. I recall looking out from my attic
Pied-à-terre above the 72nd Street station.
Panorama: drizzled smoked glass men shoving around,
As though farts, urban fruit boxes; the baying of
Dogs in combat. I would stand in
My Manchurian silk robe watching, wondering:
'What will they think of tonight alone with their thick
Fingers around a beer bottle not saying much
Of each reminisced mugging's alogic?'
Each hooker's “Do you want to go out?” starts
Sounding like “...get out?” Not far
From Lennon's tomb I walked, to a subway car –
Wear-shined tracks like two over-tight dirty guitar strings,
The busted birthday instrument — I found my seat across from her.
She began. Her Ode To Filth
Was orated extemporaneously, shrouded in thick brown,
Army blankets
She extolled like Cicero, (at once prosecuting and vaunting Cataline);
She held forth — John Gielgud reading Tennyson's Ulysses on TV,
She, for the Union Bank of Switzerland in 1995;
She inside me, she subway commander, she: the sum greater than the
Partings, resonates still.
© Wallace Darwen Brindle 1982 & 1997 - all rights reserved
piano concerto/Blue Velvet poem
A Robert Lowell Poem, Link Oddments of 4-10-99
425 E-Cargo Sunwalk Revisited Now!
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