SKULLS AND BONES AND CARNIVORES

166. SKULLS AND BONES AND CARNIVORES:

Skulls and bones and carnivores and Jane Goodall looking through the bars watching great apes go to and fro and she wants to speak of Gombe but says nothing of any import as I try to realign the senses to make sense of something near me and the weather has taken some fierce turn for the worse twisting trees and ripping them from the ground like corkscrews in reverse action and water is everywhere lashing windows and drains and streets are clogged with water while cars and trucks and people wait and I watch the secretaries rushing home with umbrellas held open as they leap or try to over puddles and the all old solid men with their determination head forth looking down across acres of plane and ocean - do they wonder where they are or are they imagining a sea? - and as much as I'd like an answer there is none and the cathedral along Fifth Avenue remains gray in the rain and mist while everything seems reflected in a somber springtime light in some awkward double-vision of movement and distortion : yellow taxis in a rippled effect and big buses seemingly made of wavy clay both enormous and wet and I'm still trying to remember what I heard about Charles Whitman but can't recall whether the tower or Austin was more important to what occurred : Dallas Tacoma Ft. Washington Tarrytown Albany Paterson and Troy : they're all the same in a little way and some meaningless parody each of a hot dog stand and a bakery like some Allentown on the Seine if ever that could be : I want to be cured I want to be sane I want to listened to I want some gain I want a name and each of those factors walks with me wherever I go along these old streets and avenues built of dredge and doubt and the two men with signature gloves are smoking cigarettes in the alcove of some building near where the doorway to their tavern sits and some girls are just then walking quickly by oblivious to what they are - all beauty and grace under pressure without comment or note - and a loading-dock worker is standing idly by maybe awaiting a truck or wasting his final moments on a long and dreary shift and there are department stores and expensive stores jewelry stores and make-up stores beauty and clothing in one fell swoop as an anima to the eye of all the beholding masses - nail stores and hair salons candle shops and sporting goods : one insane world of commerce 'midst the vagaries of wants and desires but who can stare back and who can care that everyone has everything they need but they just don't know it yet and I wonder if it's ME who is consoling time or time which consoles me (neither has a need nor reason neither) and had I the chance I'd just as swiftly walk away and enter another realm - the more magical one of chiming doors and rhyming notions in some twenty-six letter kingdom of goodness : the flower shop itself is drooping the nightclub is shuttered for day the barbershop bears no customers for trimming the bookstore has had its day and people are walking in two's and in three's speaking someone's name or chattering in that amiable way which shows how sublime this negative feeling can be - the world is a sordid place an assorted place an assortment of grace a sort of a trace and a soaring base from which to trace the nature of GRACE (which is all we really inherit) and the dooming light of the Sentinel the Devil with the flaming sword is the only figure we get to meet before we greet the horde who've met the Lord and by such means are great books written page by page and one by one and word by word until we're done (and like the drilling-master says : 'there's nothing more boring than boring')...
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I met a man who had no face he was wearing the wind he had rivers for hands and mirrors for nails and mountains for feet his intentions were meaningful though a mystery to all and where he came from no one knew and he walked along the Bowery and up to 17th and he headed east for the river well past the tanks and the power-stations and when he got to the shoreline he crouched down low and disappeared amidst some glade of pine and myrtle and the last I saw of his nothingness it was gliding back to water - people watched in awe a cop nearby said his oaths and swung his stick at chimeras and ghosts nearby while trees swayed violently in the sudden wind and white snow seemed to start coming down and covered the ground - steamboats tugboats barges and floats all went by and from the far other shores where the insane asylum was a crowd seemed to surge with a cheer from their lungs so deep it all seemed to arrive new from another place and as one the island engulfed what it saw and SUDDENLY there was NOTHING no more : and time itself passed THAT quickly and removed all traces of that which I'd seen - now paving and building and roadways and ramps covered everything over - a dreary simulacrum a sorrowful trait an awful traipse to the 'other' side of our minds where everyone now is trapped - there is no forever no more there is no perhaps any longer - the five men by the icicle canyon are setting a trap for the wolf and starting a fire so as to keep themselves warm : it's like that everywhere now - and nowhere too (there's a line-up of blood somewhere that's mine).