Pearl Divers
We’ve crossed two states to be here
on this shiny, blue Saturday afternoon
of hot cosmic winds and A.M. radio crackle,
chrome, clouds and melting tarmac,
eye to eye with ears of corn,
drunk on beer and pollen.
And way over there, on the side of the road,
is the U.S.S. Chevrolet, looking like it’s been
run aground and abandoned somewhere
off the coast of what surely must be Nebraska
(the captain and crew very possibly searching
for native girls or scavenging for food).
Yes, here we are, sifting through someone’s cornfield,
as if we were pearl divers, perhaps, diving capped
and flippered, swimming in a sea of yellow and green
(confessing our sins to crows as we go) recalling again
and again what surely must have been an ancient
Chinese maxim, that a man’s soul is a pearl.
Everywhere around us is the sound of the friction
of the wind filtering through this field of tall corn,
an all-encompassing hiss like the electric crackle
of static, haunted with distant whispering or the dry,
dusty rustling of a million newspapers
that read nothing but old news.
Madame Laveau, Fortune Teller
and Police Psychic, Has a Vision
And this time,
for some reason,
there’s a Charlie Chaplin of a scarecrow
standing in the middle of a crossroads,
staring, blankly, up at the sky, arms outstretched
with a pipe-bomb in one hand
and a bottle of Pernod in the other.
And the sky itself is a living, breathing,
billowing fishnet of a tapestry woven of starfish
and moonflowers, star fruit and banana peppers
and little jade lions with smiles
as wide as the seas of time.
In the bottom right corner of the scene,
there’s a pile of rictus-ly grinning carnival masks
blooming with cherry blossoms
and someone’s spare change
(some kind of foreign currency, it seems).
And just to the right of that (and down a little),
we can see your classic hoary country preacher-type,
with a rainbow variety of snakes crawling from his
pockets and sleeves, shirt-collar and pant legs,
staggering his way towards his unsuspecting flock
(not shown here).
And, just a few years from this very spot,
there’s a hobo clown with a hernia
and a stove-pipe hat,
smoking a clove cigarette
and sipping, solemnly,
from a bottle of Applejack.
And he’s sitting atop an aging rhinoceros
(that, by the way, is just about to do its business
from a steel I-beam, thirteen floors up
on a swaying skeletal structure
which, the locals say, will one day be
the federal memorial something-or-other
dedicated to some fancy so-and-so).
And, finally, there in the background,
just behind (and up to the left)
of the Night Blooming Cereus,
if one squints hard enough
(as if peering into a painting by Van Eyck
or maybe one of those Where’s Waldo dioramas),
one can almost see it …
Life, itself (portrayed here
in some vague, anthropomorphic
manifestation), lurking unnervingly
beneath the pale orange glow of the streetlamp
and the churning cloud of Death’s-Head Moths.
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