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As
I
walked through the wilderness
of this world through the city with the loud electric faces and the crowded
petrols of the wind dazzling and drowning me that
winter night before
the West died.
I remembered the winds of the high, white world that
bore me and the faces of a noiseless million in the busy hood of heaven staring
on the afterbirth.
They who nudged through the literate light of the
city, shouldered and elbowed me, catching my trilby with the spokes of
umbrellas, who offered me matches and music.
Take away, I told them
silently, the flannel and cotton, the cheap felt and leather, I am the nakedest
and baldest nothing between the pinnacle and the base,
an alderman of
ghosts holding to watch-chain and wallet on the wet pavement, the narrator
of echoes.
I have Old Scratch by the beard, and
the news of the world is no
world's news, the gossips of heaven and the fallen rumors are enough and
too much for a shadow that
casts no shadow, I said to the blind beggars and the paperboys who
shouted into the
rain.
They who were hurrying by me on the narrow errands of the world,
time bound to their wrists or blinded in their pockets, who consulted the time
strapped to a holy tower, and dodged between bonnets and wheels, heard in my
fellow's footsteps the timeless accents of another walking.
On the
brilliant pavements under a smoky moon, their man's world turning to the bass
roll of the traffic, they saw in the shape of my fellow another staring under
the pale lids, and heard the spheres turn as he spoke.
This is a strange city, gentlemen arm-in-arm making
a rehearsed salute, strange
gentlemen with strange ladies.
For them in a friendless abode in
streets of pennies and pleasures a
hundred ladies and gentlemen move in bed.
Time still as
night, moon passing over the
hot tin roofs.
Grim
policemen stand at each corner in the katabatic wind.
0 mister lonely,
say ladies forlorn, we shall be naked as baby mice, loving long in the short
sparks of the night.
We are not ladies with feathers who lay eggs on the
quilt.
As I walked
through the skyscrapers, where
the lamps walked at
my side sparking like an electrocuted man.
Trees of a new scripture
jostled the devil at
my elbow.
Dogged
under the arches lust led me down blind alleys.
Now in
the shape of a bald girl
smiling, a wailing wanton with handcuffs for earrings, or the lean girls
that lived on pickings, now
ragged woman curtseying in
the slime, the tempter of angels
whispered over my shoulder.
We shall be naked but
for garters and black stockings, loving you long on
a bed of strawberries and cream, and the
nakeder for a ribbon that hides the nipples.
We are not the finely
decked out ladies that eat
into the brain behind the ear, or
feed on the fat of the heart.
I remembered the sexless shining women in the first hours of the world
that bore me, and the golden sexless men that cried All Praise in the sounds of
shape.
Taking strength from a sudden shining, I
have Old Scratch by the beard, I cried aloud.
But the short-time shapes
still followed, and the counselor of an unholy nakedness nagged at my heels.
No, not for nothing did the packed
thoroughfares confront me at each cross and pavement's turning with these
figures in the shapes of sounds, the lamp-chalked silhouettes and the walking frames
of dreams, out of a darker allegory than the
fictions of the earth could
turn in twelve suns' time.
There was more than man's meaning to the
bare skull bogies thumbing the skeletons of their noses, to the marrow-merry
snackers scratching their armpits in a tavern light, and to the dead man,
smiling through his bandages, who laid hand on my sleeve, saying in no man's
voice.
There is more than man's meaning in a stuffed man talking and
more in the horned ladies at your heels than a pinch of the cloven delights and the tang of
sulphur.
Heaven and
hell shift up and down the
city.
I have the God of
Israel in the image of a painted boy, and
Satan, in a
woman's shirt, pisses from a window in Damaroid
Alley.
See now, you shining ones, how the tuner of harps has
fallen, and the painter of winds like a bag of henna into the gutter.
The high hopes lie with
broken bottles and
suspender-belts, the white mud falls like feathers, there out of Pessary Court
comes the Bishop of Bumdom, dressed like a ratcatcher, a holy sister in
Gamarouche Mews sharpens her index tooth on a bloodstone, two weasels couple on
Shiva-Nataraja's altar.
He who played the sorcerer, appearing all at one time in a dozen
sulphurous beckonings, saying, out of a dozen mouths.
We shall be naked
as the greased lightning of a serpent
striking from within the nest holes at the
bases of the cathedral
pillars, tracking the margins of four cindery winds.
A mouse tailed
woman and a holy snake, the symbols of the city writher before me. But by one
red horn I had that double image, tore off
the furry stays and leather jacket.
We shall be naked, said Old
Scratch emerging, as a Jewish
girl crucified to the bedposts.
We are all
metaphors of the
sound of shape of the shape of sound.
Break us we take
another shape.
The snake
and the woman stroke a cross in the air.
I saw the star fall that
broke a cloud up, and dodged between bonnets and wheels to the
ill-lit streets
where I saw Daniel Dom lurching after a painted shadow.
We walked into the Seven Sins.
Two little girls danced
barefoot in the sawdust.
A
negress loosened the straps of her yellow frock and bared a breast.
Buy a pound, she said, and thrust
her breast in Daniel's face.
He faced the women and caught the
half-naked negress by the wrist.
Like a woman confronted by a tower,
You are so
strong, my love, she said, and kissed him full on the mouth
Before
the sea could circle us, we were out through the swing-doors into the street
and the mid-winter night where the
moonlight, salt white no longer,
hung windlessly over the city.
They were night's enemies who made
a lamp out of the devil's
eye, but we followed a midnight radiance around the corners, like two weird
brothers trod in the glittering web prints.
In their damp hats and
raincoats, in the blaze of shop window, the people jostled against us on the
pavements, and a gutter boy caught me by the sleeve.
Buy an almanac, he
said.
It was the bitter end of the year.
Now the star fall had
ended, the sky was a hole in space.
How long, how long, lord of the
hail, shall my city rock on, and the seven deadly seas
wait tidelessly for the
moon, the bitter end the last tide-spinning of the full circle.
Daniel lamented, trailing the midnight radiance to the door of the
Deadly Virtue where the light went out and the glittering web prints faded.
We were forever climbing the steps of a
sea tower, crying aloud from the turret that we might warn us, as
we clambered around the spiked
maiden in the turret corners.
Make way for Mister Dom and friend.
Walking into the
Deadly Virtue, we heard our names announced through
the loudspeaker trumpet of
the wooden image over
the central mirror, and, staring in the
glass as the oracle
continued, we saw two distorted faces grinning through the smoke.
Make
way, said the loudspeaker, for Daniel, ace of Destruction, old Dom the toper of
Doom's kitchen, and for the alderman of ghosts.
Is
the translator of man's manuscript, his walking chapters, said the
trumpet-faced, a member of
my Virtue?
What is
the color of the narrator's blood?
Put a leech on his forearm.
Make way, the image cried,
for bald and naked Mister
Dreamer of the
bluest veins this side of the blood-colored sea.
As the sea of
faces parted, the bare-backed ladies scraped back from the counter, and the
matchstick-waisted men, the trussed
and corsetted stilt-walkers with the tits of ladies, sought out the darker
recesses of the saloon, we stumbled forward to the fiery bottles.
Brandy forth dreamer and the pilgrim, said the wooden voice.
Gentlemen, it is my Call, said the
loudspeaker, death is in my house.
It was then, in the tangled
hours of a new morning, surrounded by the dead faces of the drinkers,
the wail of lost voices, and the words of
the one electric image, that Daniel, hair-on-end, lamented first to me of the
death on the city and the lost hero of the
heart.
There can be no
armistice for the sexless, golden singers and the
sulphurous hermaphrodites,
the flying beast and the
walking bird that war about us, for the horn and the
wing.
I could light the voices
of the fiery virgins winking in my glass, catch the
brandy-brown beast
and bird as they fumed before my eyes, and kiss the two-antlered
angel.
No, not for nothing were these two intangible brandy maids
neighboring Daniel who cried, syringe in hand.
Open
your cocaine white legs, you ladies of stainless steel needles,
Dom thunder Daniel is the
lightning drug and the doctor.
Now a wind sprang through the room
from the dead street; from the racked tower where two men lay in chains and a
hole broke in the wall, we heard our own cries travel through the fumes of
brandy and the loudspeaker's
music.
We pawed, in our tower agony, at the club shapes dancing, at
the black girls tattooed from shoulder to nipple with a white dancing shape,
frocked with snail-headed rushes and capped like antlers.
But they
slipped from us into the rubber corners where their black lovers waited
invisibly; and the music grew louder until the tower cry was lost among it; and
again Daniel lurched after
a painted shadow that
led him, threading through smoke and dancers,
to the stained window.
Beneath
him lay the city sleeping, curled in its streets and houses, lamped by its own
red-waxed and iron stars,
with a built moon above it, and the spires crossed over the bed.
I
stared down, rocking at his side, on to the unsmoking roofs and the burned-out
candles. Destruction slept.
Slowly the room behind us flowed, like four
waters, down the seven gutters of the city into a black sea.
A wave,
catching the loudspeaker in its mouth, sucked up the wood and music; for the
last time a mountainous wave
circled the drinkers and dragged them down, out of the world of light, to a
crawling sea-bed; we saw a
wave jumping and the last bright eyes go under, the last raw head, cut like
a straw, fall crying through the destroying water.
Daniel and I stood
alone in the city.
The sea of destruction lapped around our feet.
We saw the star fall that broke
the night up.
The glass lights on iron went out, and the waves grew
down into the pavements.
Dylan Thomas |
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