ÿÿÿÿÿost habitable. I didn't like people sitting so near, but I let
her stay.

She looked like she wouldn't last the night.

Between stanzas of a bellowed ode to the abolished apostrophe, we carried on a desultory, disjointed banter. Such became our customary vis-a-vis. It didn't matter very much.

Somehow we both badly needed it not to.

Which would've been fine, except for the plague rain. The streets rippled with olivegreen slime. Attendance went down. Her poems carefully omitted all reference to that hue. One of us was certain to die.

I dreamed of stripped cars burning, lost in fields of broken glass where each particular faceted shard returned her image. The dreams did not progress. How could they?

I related how all the street signs had become for me jumbles of unpronounceable scramblegrams, & she responded by inviting me to share a raspberry-clove cigarette outside on the fire escape. Under a maroon plush sky the pullulating or abandoned quarters of the city seemed only so many clear or dust-shrouded star lanes, & a personage of several turfs, such as yours truly, could be seen as a sort of modern voyageur...

The pillar, crisscrossed with pinkish Xmas lights year round, equivocated as we departed the huge, gloomy echoing chamber of measureless apprehensions. Outside the chill bit into us. My fingers welcomed the tiny shell of heat emitted by the ember end of the saffron-yellow cylinder. The smoke, however, raked my lungs like an inhaled holly bush... "Tell me more."

Before us the lights of the city melted together & separated, in uneasy waves. I said, "We come here each to find our niche in a collective illusion that's different from the usual one. Nothing more." Her fingers brushing mine seemed colder than the cold.

I remembered a snarling two-headed angel statue I once encountered at the end of a dim blind alley in Prague. Its touch had been as unexpectedly cold. --No, its gaze: as unexpectedly intimate.

"Well, I'm not interested in anything so counterproductive," she muttered in a piercing monotone. Pushing back one lace sleeve for me to see, she unveiled a network of paler smooth lines that zigzagged the pale smooth flesh. I couldn't tell, in that crepuscular pinkgold flutter, whether they were souvenirs of suicide or vicious needle tracks or, just possibly, something worse.

"One does not renegade religion. You only end up inventing your own," I slowly answered. If she recognized my quote of Graywyvern, she gave no sign.

We went back in without further word. The kretek glowing balanced on the black iron rail. Someone was reciting a drab list of atrocities onstage. Our tables were as we left them.

Two weeks later, after a harrowing day involving the towing of my Oldsmobile, I had resumed my station in that corner of vantage. Almost without realizing, I had come to require the other table filled. Cassandra came near, her tattooed scalp raw in a new place. She stood a good distance away & addressed me. "That new chick is strange."

"Oh?" I said, & laughed. "She listens to everything. She watches all of us. But she never does give anything back." "What do you mean? She goes up there. We all do." I felt evasive.

"You know. In her poems. Not a word about anything we recognize. Whatever world she's in, it's not ours." She shifted stance, crossed her arms, which were also tattooed, in vivid cartoon characters. "That might not be so bad," I said. "Think again," was the automatic reply.

Her name, as it transpired, was either Belladonna or Archaeopteryx. The smells of the city excited her; she told me so. Where did she emigrate from, that such a thing could be true?

"I am from Southern Roumania/ I was a mogul there," one of her poems began. "I was a peasant/ Who made good..." This I very much doubted. Another time I inveigled her into coming home with me; the upshot of which was finding, on the drafty mezzanine that led to my garret room, my neighbor Grue Juliette already knew her & greeting us then, the shadows pressing close & the smoke of incense staining our poet-garb, she called for a spontaneous threesome, which ensued. Not without hilarity, bongs, & a device I had never seen before, but grew to appreciate; & the night gave way to a dawn of colors, through the broken windowpanes, like rags left by a circus. Skin dead white, the feel of sheets that needed washing; an exhaustion beyond movement, & an amity prior to words. These would have been good days, if only we could have forgotten the unpleasant sense of imminent doom that hovered over every table, every bed. I stood on the next landing down, shivering, with a sudden touch of mortal acuity. Juliette only tolerated me when she was chemicalized; clearly, my date had been the lure & I feared less for the rivalry of a better poet, than for the sanctity of her secrets I had a right to, more, as one who had also suffered strangely.

"Where are you, Puckster?" called a croaking voice from above. I wanted to go back, felt it in my marrow like a craving for candy. Instead I continued down.

When the night returned, our true game resumed.

Warmth dispelled, & even its possibility seemed inscrutable & fantastic. "You were quick to skedaddle," however, was what she said. Her fingers interlaced above a glass of something turquoise. It was early, no other poets or few had arrived yet. "I couldn't think of what to say. Does that ever happen to you?" I unfolded the sheet of paper I carry on my person at all times, & began to write. "You have words now," she said.

The walls were covered with bad paintings crookedly hung. I thought to myself that they were like images of the dreams we would have been having if, instead of this closed, dim half-life, we had chosen another; one of sunshine & night diamonds. The one nearest me depicted a purple dog behind an executive desk, in a meticulously rendered office, but the dog itself seemed slapdash or cartoonish & its expression signified little beyond doggish good-humor. I turned my gaze to the next one, but there wasn't enough light to tell even if it was an abstract or a picture of something. For some reason my eyes remained riveted on the cloudy square. "The hare has lost his spectacles," I finally blurted.

"This poem is about the smell that old vacuum tube televisions from the Fifties used to have/ A sort of clotted, hot dust smell," I was reading from the stage.

This was another night, or the same one later on. Cassandra & Speed Racer waited their turn from the edge. I saw Belladonna, or Smoke as I'd began calling her, far in the back, staring intently. It was as if she knew I was writing about her (now that we no longer spoke); & this connection, tenuous & precise, we both understood to be the only one possible for Whigs such as we.

Her secrets had become mine. Her poems simply told the life of things, from those things' own perspective; & this telling took the form of intervals & positions, juxtapositions & the nearness of absences. People did not figure in them at all except as passing shadows. When I finished reading, she listened just as raptly to the next person. Even the intensity of my fear had not touched her.

I found I could only maintain normalcy by the pretence she was dead. I wrote elegies for her. They were the best things I'd ever made. Outside, an abandoned car was burning. Orange & green flickers lit our eyes. It was hard to go back in.

Brokendown bodies in brokendown cars. And these words, helpless, feral, like maggots.


PART 2

Her funeral caught me by surprise. How many of us had gone, flailing & raving, into the fell beyond, while behind them remained that sempiternal chorus of malingerers, these compeers of avid illness? But she did die. I was shaken, though i strove not to show it.

Glistened the raindrops, ever augmenting, fast on her lustrous ebony lid; rose our keening voices above the tumult of traffic. "Let this end our dazzling numbness," said one eulogist. "Nay, we shall never feel anything ever again," chimed in another. I took my place, shivering. I never got used to these things.

Even at my twenty-seventh.

I had ceased to declaim, as you know, at Open Mike. Tonight i knew better. "For awhile he rocked with his yard inside her cunny," i read, "till /Fearful of dislodging the glove, he desisted. Her/ Hand closed on his around the moistened knurl,/ As together they withdrew it." Applause.

Lies. This had happened instead with a stranger, whom i'd met at the funeral & implored with reddened eyes till sighingly she acquiesced. Later we'd sent out for artichoke heart pizza.

The club, unchanged & immutably rank, bathed us in its rich squalor vibes. If anyone could be said to be happy, we were. "He watched the droop, as awkwardly he scrambled/ To the chrome basket next to the bed. It/ Seemed to signify the passionate futility/ Which passes for our lives, but also/ Merely a length of flesh, needing to be/ Washed."


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