The Wovel

On Morning Edition today there was a piece on The Wovel, an audience plotted web novel. It is also a wheeled snow shovel, a device (judging by the number of Google hits), that is more familiar to people than the evolving literary form. The story presented it as an innovation, and a way for publishers to remain relevant.

The idea is hardly new. I’ve been familiar with it for 25 years. In earlier versions the idea was that a fictional universe with predetermined choices would be laid out. The reader has a choice between door number one and door number two. Behind door number one is a booze-guzzling man-eating lion and behind door number two is a gorgeous red head with big tits drinking a pink squirrel.

In the Wovel, the reader sends in suggestions of what lies behind these doors, and the author picks among the suggestions, and writes the next chapter on spec. As a writer I would find this process of writing to spec to be horrifying.

As a reader, my objection, 25 years ago as now, is that I don’t want to write the story or choose at narrative nodes between alternative plot possibilities. The pleasure I get from reading is not knowing what will happen next, or anticipating it. Now, as a poet I have always accepted the necessity of reader participation. A poem is an enigmatic text with several possible readings. The author of a poem does not totally determine the way the poem is to be read. Each reading of a poem is slightly different, according to mood and also level of consciousness. To read a difficult writer, an occult writer, you have to be up to it. If you read with your head too much you will miss the dream. If you leave your head out of it, you may not make it through. Reading a poem is a negotiation between reader and writer. Novels are like this too. But the reader doesn’t supply the content, the reader reconstructs its meaning. The reader brings time, voice, emotion, thought, to the text. The readers embodies the text. The reader imagines the characters as she will, he constructs unstated pasts, children for Lady Macbeth, conflict between Claudius and Old King Hamlet. But he does not write the text, supply the words.

The ultimate undetermined novel would be Finnegans Wake. Every syllable in FW has to be interpreted as to meaning and sound and its relationship to other syllables. It is in the nature of the pun to be undecided, but not undecidable. Joyce’s universe appears to be coextensive with the actual universe, and to be guided by the uncertainty principle. But unlike the physical universe the world of Finnegans Wake has been totally determined by the genius of its creator. The closer we approach to Joyce’s consciousness, to his genius, the more of Finnegans Wake we can understand and enjoy. The text teaches you how to read it. This is different from science say, where you do not have to be like Darwin, Einstein or Newton to understand their theories. They would be useless otherwise. Shakespeare doesn’t demand this either. He uses his genius to make available to the audience what it has divined of the world. Shakespeare had no desire to play god, he really only wanted to be a successful, rich, gentleman. Joyce wanted to sing himself into immortality.

Novels are created art forms, not partially undetermined realities; not totalities with a random element of mutation and chance interacting with a predetermined order to produce novelty and change, as creatures are. Part of the pleasure of reading is the apprehension of a slowly unfolding design; the collaboration in understanding between two separate individuals through the medium of language. So I have no desire to read a Wovel as it is conceived. But I am not saying that such a thing is doomed to failure or shouldn’t be done. Everything should be done.

A web-based, serially published novel is an entirely different creature. I, along with thousands of other authors, have been publishing The Last Bender in installments on this website. Every Wednesday there is a new chapter. When the Last Bender is done I will be publishing Endangered Species, a serious literary novel, in the same way. The Wovel is, according to the news story, an effort to keep publishing relevant. But for-money publication, like print media and music, is dying. Authors like me, who are unwilling to go unpublished simply because we cannot get the attention of editors and agents, or because our works are not commercially viable, can simply publish our works online and hope they find and audience. Once I’ve decided I don’t need money, once I’ve accepted that the day-job phenomenon is permanent (as it is for most writers, who teach after all), then I have no need of publishers, editors and agents. I will have to become a good proofreader; I will have to learn to control my ego sufficiently to be a good editor of my own work; I will have to cultivate a small audience of honest readers who will help me vet the work before posting it; but I will not need to grovel before MBAs with Hollywood taste. I can be free.

These are perfect sonnets by the master. His thought is crabbed, his metre a little eccentric at times, so that he reminds me of Emily Dickinson, but also of Sydney and Shakespeare, who contorted themselves to fit the little sonnet, and of Yeats, especially the first of the She, to Him poems, which I hear in Adam’s Curse, and When You Are Old (When you are old and grey and full of sleep…). He is as austere as Herbert, but in an unsavioured dark where even pagan monuments are mouldy and the stones of old cathedrals wiggle free and drop, crushing lovers with a godless, unrequited love.

REVULSION

Though I waste watches framing words to fetter
Some unknown spirit to mine in clasp and kiss,
Out of the night there looms a sense ‘twere better
To fail obtaining whom one fails to miss.

For winning love we win the risk of losing,
And losing love is as one’s life were riven;
It cuts like contumely and keen ill-using
To cede what was superfluously given.

Let me then never feel the fateful thrilling
That devastates the love-worn wooer’s frame,
The hot ado of fevered hopes, the chilling
That agonizes disappointed aim!
So may I live no junctive law fulfilling,
And my heart’s table bear no woman’s name.
1866

SHE, TO HIM

I

When you shall see me in the toils of Time,
My lauded beauties carried off from me,
My eyes no longer stars as in their prime,
My name forgot of Maiden Fair and Free;

When, in your being, heart concedes to mind,
And judgment, though you scarce its process know,
Recalls the excellencies I once enshrined,
And you are irked that they have withered so:

Remembering mine the loss is, not the blame,
That Sportsman Time but rears his brood to kill,
Knowing me in my soul the very same—
One who would die to spare you touch of ill!—
Will you not grant to old affection’s claim
The hand of friendship down Life’s sunless hill?

II

Perhaps, long hence, when I have passed away,
Some other’s feature, accent, thought like mine,
Will carry you back to what I used to say,
And bring some memory of your love’s decline.

Then you may pause awhile and think, “Poor Jade!”
And yield a sigh to me—as ample do,
Not as the tittle of a debt unpaid
To one who could resign her all to you—

And thus reflecting, you will never see
That your thin thought, in two small words conveyed,
Was no such fleeting phantom-thought to me,
But the Whole Life wherein my part was played;
And you amid its fitful masquerade
A thought, as I in your life seem to be!

III

I will be faithful to thee; aye, I will!
And death shall choose me with a wondering eye
That he did not discern and domicile
One his by right ever since that last Good-bye!

I have no care for friends, or kin, or prime
Of manhood who deal gently with me here;
Amid the happy people of my time
Who work their love’s fulfillment, I appear

Numb as a vane that cankers on its point,
True to the wind that kissed ere that canker came:
Despised by souls of Now, who would disjoint
The mind from memory, making Life all aim,

My old dexterities in witchery gone
And nothing left for love to look upon.

IV

This love puts all humanity to me;
I can but maledict her, pray her dead,
For giving love and getting love of thee—
Feeding a heart that else my own had fed!

How much I love I know not, life not known,
Save as one unit I would add love by;
But this I know, my being is but thine own—
Fused from its separateness by ecstasy.

And thus I grasp my amplitudes, of her
Ungrasped, though helped by nigh-regarding eyes;
Canst thou then hate me as an envier
Who see unrecked what I so dearly prize?
Believe me, Lost One, Love is lovelier
The more it shapes its moan in selfish-wise.
1866

Tim sent me this in February of 2008. I will miss him. He ‘tore through the iron gates of time’. My love to Zach, who lost a father. The rest of us lost a poet and a sort of human wolverine who refused to concede to disease or reality one quark more than they took by necessity. Every time he showed up in Ithaca, his bald chemo-head wrapped in a bandana, his eyes complicated by pain, I was stunned. ‘Still out walking, Congdon?’ Oh yes, and up for whatever he was up for. The last time it was smoking a joint in the parking lot before reading poems for the NOLA relief fund.

Kent. Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! He hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer
Edg. He is gone indeed.
Kent. The wonder is, he hath endured so long:
He but usurp’d his life.

Be well Tim. Wear out the rack of heaven.

concrete parachute (by Tim Congdon)

first time
I drove past the hospital
saw the start of a long cemetery.
it stretched out for blocks and blocks then
over a mile, just as deep
as long.
frederick douglas and susan b anthony and
a whole whole lot of others buried there.
but here, from the 8th floor
in the bone
marrow transplant unit
atop the medical center
I spend the days
on more drugs now than I ever was
even at the height
of the psychedelic
wars.

the doctor
gave me a 20% chance
shook my hand.
I asked him
with that big ass cemetery out there and
after a month or more of looking out at the stones
has anyone ever jumped?

this morning
a day after my first
infusion of stem cells
I walk the long corridors
past intensive care and surgery,
the family waiting room
to the end of the building that
looks out over the expanse of the cemetery.
through rain drops
held in place on the window
defying gravity
I take in the rows of graves
and before turning back for my room I
say out loud:

fuck
you.

          Every time I shut my eyes to sleep I saw exploding glass. Or felt the man’s blood rush down my fingers. I shook and chattered my teeth and soaked the sheets in sweat. At last I fell into a deep senseless sleep.

          So senseless I failed to notice the alarm, the garbage trucks, or the bickering rag picker who never did stop fighting the war in his head. Mr. Roxeronil’s emphysemic deliberations in the shower and Mrs. Roxeronil’s verbal abuse of their dog Jones raised not a hair on my ass. I slept through a highway wreck and a drug deal gone bad that people probably still talk about. Finally the telephone woke me up, all the way from the kitchen.

          At first I let it ring, but that was no good, I just kept chasing it in a dream. I knew Laraby. He’d let it ring till I either answered it or ripped it off the wall. Laraby sounded like a twin engine turboprop landing on a field of geese. “Bartell!” he said, “I want you in here yesterday!”–his sentence strewn with jet fuel and bloody feathers.

          I winced at the empty, food speckled walls of the fridge. There was one can of cola and half of a corn muffin. I opened the soda and felt the carbonated cold scrub away the dank pasty residue of sleep and then bit into the stale muffin spread with margarine. When his rant took to the skies I hung up and sat on the couch to watch the morning news shows.

          By now, everyone down to nonexempt departmental supervisors had been briefed. All associates were to take extra caution coming to and from the workplace. They were told to cooperate fully with police; but under no circumstances were they to discuss company projects with anyone. All product information, every idea in development, even actual job titles, were proprietary and protected. Clear it with the lawyers first. I got good at spitting it out. I knew what every piece of shit maneuver was supposed to look like. Internal Security Associates would conduct discovery dialogues with anyone who knew the victims personally, time to be made up later. More of the usual blah blah. That’s one thing I’ll say about the army. Things got terse in a fire fight.

          Public Relations held meetings with sympathetic reporters at the three major dailies, local t.v. and networks. This would quell some of the more absurd speculations of early press reports. We had not vaporized them with experimental rays. There had not been an outbreak of Human Intrauteral Transcryptaste Receptor Virus. Like the commercial says, ‘Get your old hArd-On back with rEcrO-vIr!’ 

          The night before, while Bunuel’s thug demo’d my brain, J.R. Ivers ran a long report on the evening news. What I watched now was the update to that report, on Hello Inania with Kelly Kelly.

          Ivers stood outside Monozone’s polished grey facade. He waylaid people as they headed out the forty foot lobby doors. They used one of the monumental pink columns as a background. In his hands, the microphone was a jousting stick. He felled them one by one, amassing a pile of tear tinted cheeks and puffy red eyes, panting with worry and sorrow. And they knew just what to do. Not one of them was an actor, yet they salivated on cue, just like anyone else on t.v. Come on, I thought, show the bored, angry faces of two blocks north, where the subway comes up.  

          “It’s my own, personal tragedy,” a man said, wiping his eyes. “We worked ten tough years together. Now he’s gone.”

          A woman in huge pink glasses with a synthetic wet-look poodle-do was angry: “It’s not even safe at our desks anymore.” She wanted more police.

          It went on. “I’m standing here at Monozone where traumatized associates question the ability of police to protect them on the job. Ten, that’s right, ten Monozone Lab Associates are missing since Sunday night and so far police have no leads. Security is high here today. There is a metal detector set up in the lobby and there are check points in every hall. Everyone has on their security badges. But the terror continues. I have Mr. Woolfer from Human Resources here. Mr. Woolfer, will you join us in a big warm Hello Inania!”

          “Helllllooo Inaniaaa!” the bearded Mr. Woolfer sang through his coniferous grin. “I’ve always wanted to do that, JR.”

          “Go for it then!”   JR made a fist and kicked the air with his foot. “Tell me, Mr. Woolfer. How are you able to nurture your associates through this difficult time?”

          “Well, the Monozone workplace is a people friendly workplace, and people are afraid. So we’re sending out squads of Monozone listeners to network office lUnchtImEs. I want to reassure everyone that the Monozone Family Feeling is intact, and it will see us through this transition time.”

          “Thank you so much Mr. Woolfer.” He stared intop the camera and said, “That’s our investigative report for tonight.”

          Kelly Kelly stared into the camera and said, “Wow, that was something. I would be so scared if I worked there. I mean, imagine what it’s like, to go to work and just like, disappear. J.R. Ivers does the most moving stuff. We’re going to follow that story very closely until it reaches its end. But right now I see that we have some pictures coming in of a warehouse fire. Look at all that smoke. Holy Moses mother of god. That is really some fire. It started late last night when there was an explosion in the Pechardine Warehouse, better known as Slaughterhouse Five. Man, hoowee, what a night of news. Scary scary stuff. Fires, murders, kidnappings, all in our city. I mean, forgive me if I take advantage of this time to editorialize, editorialize just for one second here? Do I have time? You guys are too much. Show the crew. O.K. Editorialize. I mean, I just wanted to say that, things aren’t right when this happens. I mean, it’s like worse than a heat wave, or a garbage strike because with a garbage strike you can just call out the the army but a crime wave not a heat a wave? Last summer I think it was a heat wave for what, ten weeks? O.K. Now we have a murder and arson at the same time as a major corporate kidnapping. I’m thinking crime wave here then. I’m thinking, Big News. So stay tuned for Sports and Weather. And remember, be calm tonight. Let’s all wake up alive.”

          I zeroed out Kelly Kelly, shaved, showered, and dressed in my best linen suit, which I picked off the top of the pile on the floor. I found a pair of loafers the intruders had somehow missed. They didn’t match the hunter green trousers and jacket but I figured they’d pick up the little brown turds on the tie and the burnt sienna stripes of the shirt.

          “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Laraby asked, his voice an octave higher than normal, a shock of hair pasted down by sweat across his forehead.

          “My job.”

          “You were working overtime at that. Blowing Pechardine like that was pussy. It gets pinned to someone’s ass, they won’t find mine.”   He chopped wood with his index finger and turned a deeper shade of red.

          “That’s cause yours is a scrawny little ass.”

          “Cause it ain’t so full of bugs it swells!” I didn’t answer. He said, “That’s only part of what I got to say.”   His voice dropped to its normal range and became soft, a sure sign of predatory feint. “What did you find out?”

          I said, “None of it happened, right?”   He nodded. “Stronghole’s cat saved the day. You don’t believe me? Listen. It wasn’t us who blew it. All we did was get our ends wet, poking around for the paper.  Then this duck shows up, just like that, and starts shooting. Well, we messed around some with guns. Then we try to run him down. But he jumps Stronghole on the stairs. He’s got him down, tickling his ear with the tip of the silencer. I creep up on them in the dark and watch.  That’s where Stronghole’s cat comes in.

          “Stronghole’s got this killer cat who hangs out in the back of his car. It’s bigger than a fucking dog. I’m looking around, holding my breath, trying to figure out how to spring Stronghole without getting him snapped, when I see this pair of yellow eyes shining in the dark. They’re looking right at me.

          “The duck’s yelling at Stronghole to give it up or we all die when the cat jumps down onto his head. The guy goes nuts. The cat’s digging its claws into his eyes and he starts shooting at the walls, screaming and shaking his head. That’s when I came up from behind, and unzipped his throat. But it was too late. We could hear his pals on the stairs. They came in on us and we just had time to blast our way through the trench coats. We weren’t even there when it blew.”

          “I see.”

          “Are you ready for more? Cause we found some names in there and I think we got a good lead on what happened to St. Claude.”

          “Names?”   he asked. He looked puzzled and then alarmed. “What names?”

          “Relax, its interesting. For one there’s David Watts, working in the lab. He’s boffing the boss’s wife. They met in high school. His father is that big shot, Hubble Watts. He’s in deep with St. Claude. Even the lab. They’ve got to be–”

          Laraby had heard enough. “Shut up about Hubble Watts. He doesn’t have St. Claude.”

          “How do you know that? You said yourself he liked the paisley set. Watts is all paisley and his kid is straight herring bone.”

          “You don’t understand. You don’t investigate Hubble Watts. He would squash us. You find where that egghead is holed up and don’t mess with anything else. Is that clear? No one doubts your abilities, Jack, your discipline. I know you’ll do the right thing here. Find the doc. Now, what about Bunuel?”   I looked out the window, over his head, then at the chair, then at him. “Go ahead,” he said, “sit down.”

          I sat and said, “Yeah, Lt. Det. Bunuel paid me a visit last night. He’s the one who broke my face up. The guy’s gonna be a problem. He smells scandal. He’s going for the bust.”

          “The bust!” It was all he could do to get the words out between his teeth and spit. “Who the fuck does he think he is? Lt. Det. Bunuel, that dwarf!  Show me the man without a price!  Go for the bust,” he wheedled. “He reaches out for the tit, and he’ll find a big wet pizzle instead. Find a man beneath him willing to get ahead. Let’s put some money where our mouth is. Dig up some dirt on Bunuel. We’ll make it so he won’t dare lift a leg in public. I’ll fix him. I want that son of a bitch’s balls in my hands! They can go in with the others!” he said, pointing to the cabinet behind his desk, where he claimed to keep his trophies, including the lights and jollies of his predecessor, whom they say he knifed in the corridor after meeting the directors.

          After the steam cleared I continued. “Bunuel will be here soon. He wants full diplomatic courtesy when he questions our people. I figure he can use the conference room in security.”

          He shook his head vigorously. “Nix that. The bozos’ll shit their pants and he’ll smell it. We’ve got nothing to hide!  Make it the one off the cafeteria.”

          “There’s no mirror in there.”

          “Bug it.”

          I left word downstairs that they should notify me as soon as Bunuel’s car entered Bartholin Plaza and went to my cubicle to check the morning mail and get rid of some of the bullshit piled on the desk. First I wanted some coffee and donuts, so I hit the big room, poured a cup of vanilla praline French roast, grabbed a carob honey brioche and sat down with the dicks, who were passing around a newspaper.

          “I don’t get it. It ain’t art,” Needles said. “And if it ain’t art, why should we pay for it?”

          Church said, through a mouth full of jellied rye toast, so it seemed like he was spitting missiles, “You gotta find the interest. Whose agenda does it serve? Who advances, who stays behind.”

          “I think,” Needles said, looking at the paper again, “that I’d rather have the pinky in my prick, than the bullwhip up my ass.”

          Cherry became suddenly passionate: “I don’t agree!  I don’t agree at all!”

          Church, his head nodding, balloon like, said: “I’m with him two hundred percent on that one, Needles. I mean, even though a pinky’s little, it’s big for a dick hole. With your butt, it’s just like a giant crap. So what.”   He shoved the rest of the toast in and guzzled some tea.

          “I bet more people would prefer a bullwhip up der bums dan a pinky in der pecker. I bet.”   Cherry, applying the full force of his reason, shoved the paper down to Stitch, who stopped turning her rings to turn the paper this way and that.

          “Someone’s always poking around me with their finger,” she said. “I don’t see what the big deal is.”

          Church spelled it out for her: “Not in your cunt, in your piss hole.”

          “Oh yeah.”   She squeezed her boredom through a concerned squint. “I gotta vote bullwhip over pinky then.”

          Sidestep regarded the company from his one dead eye over a magazine and grumbled, “You are all weird.”

          “Why you gotta say that?”   Church asked. “You always want to kill the life of the mind.”

          “Don’t let’s make a federal case now,” Needles said, rubbing his white curls and bronze pate. “Jack, which would you rather do?” Sidestep dropped the magazine and stared at me. Church sat up straight. Stitch turned her rings and opened and closed her tobacco pouch. Cherry dug at his teeth with his tongue and looked at me with his stupid green eyes.

          “Well,” I began, “it all depends. Are we talking pleasure here or looks?” When no one answered I continued.” Cause if we’re talking pleasure then the bullwhip wins hands down. Depending on how thick and rough the handle is of course. Cause if it’s a smooth handle with a good knob, then you can jam the prostate and ejaculate, whether your anus is eroticized or not. If, however, the handle is woven of raw hide, then the pinky, provided it is smooth and well manicured, would be preferable. Certainly as an image it is more arresting, counterintuitive, bizarre. Which makes it that much more erotic. Inserting things in the fundament is a commonplace that excites little attention these days, while urethral penetration is performed primarily by obscure fetishists who find medical procedures exciting. They constitute a hidden and despised minority, whereas the sodomite is a figure of fun, often found on television and radio.

          “As for the photograph, because the whip looks like a tail, it is merely conventional. As an erotic apparatus then, I vote pinky in prick. For sexual pleasure, provided the tactile criteria are met, I have to agree with the majority and vote bullwhip in butt.”

          “You see!” they all said at once.

          “Jack, you always gotta argue out of both sides of your mouth.”   Needles said.

          “Cause he’s smart, you shit-brained gumshoe,” Stitch said.

          ” I was raised an Albigensian,” I said. “And you know how you can never leave the church.”

          “I had a cousin once was Albigensian,” Church said. “But he died.”

          Sidestep slammed his leg with his fist and sort of lurched forward in his chair, “You see? What kind of a god damn religion is that then, huh?”

          “Hey!  Hey! A little respect,” Cherry said.

          “That’s all right,” I said. “Anyou guys seen Juice or Stronghole?”

          “Stronghole’s late,” Stitch said, to which Needles muttered uh-oh, “and Juice ain’t been around lately.”

          I asked her: “You got any free time to set up interviews for Missing Persons? Laraby wants to use the room off the cafeteria. He said to bug it.”

          She rolled a cigarette with her DaDDyLoNGLeG fingers and spit stray tobacco hairs through thin lisps. “Cherry, we got time for that?”

          Cherry scratched his patch of red weed and winced as the smoke from her cigarette engulfed his face. “What about we had to put on da rubber to hang wit techs? We gotta switch dat around.”

          “Good.” I drank down the boiled coffee, pocketed another brioche for the road and bought a box of Lemon Drop suckers. The cardboard package with the simply drawn lemon yellowed-in, K-Pareve on the side and wax paper lining made me feel at home in my feet, like my skin wasn’t about to leap off my bones and the air disintegrate around me. Everyone was far away, chiseled out of space and left to hang while I ripped the box top off and put two between my teeth, grinding the soursweet to sticky granules. They have done things. They know the worst of it. Greed, degradation, the kind of viciousness only a human face can wear. And they know the weakness too, the lies and loony optimism that make it all go.

A Midnight Thirst

A midnight thirst comes upon me.

The air between us burns.

We bend to the moon. 

Nocturnal shifting in the shadows,

Hiding from the high hoots of owls,

Patient steps of panther feet.

Faces pressed against the moss
Hearts like bats in circles. 

Robert Graves once wrote that a poet should neither follow nor lead. There is no flag for a poet. A poet’s only allegiance is to the muse, not to any nation, creed or ideology.

Kenneth Rexroth lived a poet’s life, dedicated to radical freedom, without flags, without followers or leaders. Kenneth Rexroth’s life was devoted to intense, constant and promiscuous reading, travel, romantic love, good food, good sex and good wine and meditation. The pursuit of money was beneath his dignity. He also famously said of the Beats, ‘An entomologist is not a bug.’ He and Terkel spring from the same world and are of the same generation. Rexroth’s Autobiographical Novel is a genealogy of radical conservatism, radical America. It is peopled with passionate eccentrics, autodidacts, hell raisers, abolitionists, feminists, hermits. He lights out for the one place left with no roads on the map. Like Whitman he is as dedicated to nature as he is to the city. He sees no contradiction there. Wherever there is life, there he is.

Stephen Spender, in his introduction to Under the Volcano, says that Malcom Lowry and and George Orwell share a belief in Anarcho-socialist conservatism. This is easy to parse. Conservative in the sense of a good country pub, of ordinary working people and their rootedness in place and tradition. Anarcho in the sense that all people should be free from constraint to pursue personal happiness, that freedom is a basic condition of humanity, that pleasure is good, that we need no religious or public authority to teach us to be good, that relations between people are adequate to the job. Socialist because wealth, profit, are a social product and should serve socially useful ends at the expense of maximum profit. Socialism recognizes that without a community, no individual exists, and that individual wealth despite appearances is produced collectively, and a portion of it belongs therefore to the collective. These three values held together are like the separation of powers, they serve to check and balance each other.

Freedom is in philosophy and theology by no means a self evident concept, it is problematic, it must be investigated. But from the point of view of the imagination, for the poet, it has no need of justification. The poet isn’t out to prove anything. We are constrained by gravity, by natural selection, by time, but the poet is free to imagine dark matter, propulsive, not attractive gravity; particles that move back in time; eternity.  

I write out of my own tradition. Its roots go deeper than Homer and its branches never end. I am a part of something that existed before me and will exist after me. To write a poem is to participate in the creative act of the universe, the one descending act, the branching mind, the being that becomes. To be constrained by the tao is to be free.

          Wet wind blew against the windshield. We got out and walked, hands deep in P coats, through the smell of boat fuel and tar and the distressed cries of cattle punched to their knees in the abattoirs. Then more machinery, then the bells and horns of freighters cutting the rain and fog.   

          The first floor of The Pechardine was two stories high, windowless, with armour-plated, remote-driven grates rolled down over the massive truck bays. Pink police tape marked off the whole block and the doors were padlocked. Stronghole walked the block to see if we were being watched and to look for an entry point. I went back to the car for rope and tools.

          We met up at the entrance. The first level was like a graphite cliff brooding over the abyss. Above that was an abandoned floor with missing windows. It was possible to scale the grate, roll up on the ledge and drop in. In theory at least. Every part of my body was broken or bruised and my stomach felt like I’d just eaten a plate of dead clams.

          “What do we do?”   I asked. There were cars driving around out there. Headlights crossed in the distance.

          “We could climb up and go through the windows.”

          “Why don’t you just flap your wings and fly there.”

          “You don’t think I can climb that?”

          “I know I can’t. I feel like puking if I take too deep a breath.”

          “That’s o.k. Jack. You wait here and I’ll open the doors.”

          Stronghole made it look like throwing pizza the way he climbed the forty feet with a rope strapped to his back. At the top he reached his hand over the ledge, paused, and lifted his knee up over it, dragging the rest of his body behind. In the same smooth motion he rolled into the black window frame. For a second I thought maybe there was no floor and then no Stronghole but his face quickly bobbed into place and he threw down the rope, which I tied to the tool box. It swayed and clanked, echoing up and down the street. He pulled it in and I sat on the curb to wait.

          I could not help but look at the streets. They were flat, jaded, harsh. One mistake and it would wear me.

Down here, a duck wouldn’t even have to squeal the tires driving off. It must get lonely. And the ease of the job over time would erode your sanity. Only the lazy sadists would lap it up. One duck goes by and I’m gunned into the big indifferent stain the street held up to the world. I lost my concentration and didn’t realize that I was no longer seated on the curb but was standing up against the building, clinging to the grate, fingers numb and whitened, like they were about to snap.

          That was when I lost my footing. My feet scrambled on the sidewalk but could not catch hold. I hung into the air, banging against the cold metal, vainly trying to breathe and not let loose. I felt like I was a hundred feet off the ground.

          Stronghole whispered loudly but I couldn’t make out what he was saying–all I heard was the air rushing in my ears. There was only one thing to do. I had to find the rope. I reached with one hand and missed. I let go and reached out into nothing and fell. I did cartwheels in space. The world opened up beneath me and my bowels pitched.

          The rope went eee-ugh eee-ugh as I swung back and forth. “Stronghole!”   I shouted. Something flashed. I thought it was a flash light. All his heart was focused in his face and beamed to me.

          “Bartell,” he shouted. “What’s wrong?”

          “Stronghole, I can’t hold on. Pull me in.”

          “What’s going on?” he asked.

          “Pull me in,”   I said. The emptiness swallowed me like a rip tide.

          It started to drizzle again.

          “Where am I?” I asked, and saw Stronghole. I was sitting in the middle of the sidewalk. He had raised the gate enough to roll under. “Before I go in there with you, I have to ask. Did you stool me or not?”

          “It’s not like you think, Bartell. Laraby put me on you, that’s true. He said you had your own agenda and I had to look out. He said you’d try to set me up to get me off the case cause you were in with St. Claude. He wanted to work you to get to him. I never squawked about the paper.”

          “How’d they know I’d be out if you didn’t tell them?”

          “What the fuck you talking about?” he asked. I couldn’t think what the fuck I was talking about. Drizzle and sweat ran down his forehead and back. His words burst out with rain and droplets. “I’m working with you now or I’m cutting you loose. Your choice.”

          “But I’ve got to know what side you’re on,”   I said.

          “Don’t I have to know the same? Let’s go to work.”

          I rolled on the cold, slimy concrete. We were in a dark hallway lit by emergency lights. There was a metal stair and an elevator. A cop car drove up. We walked up the stair slowly. The car was stopped out front, headlights shining on the grate, and nobody coming in.

          The ninth floor had fifteen foot ceilings and was subdivided. At the end of the hall we found Barker’s Wine and Spirits, the name painted in gold on the pebbled glass door. Stronghole jammed in the crowbar and tried to wrench the door off its frame. Then he went at it with sledge hammer for a while and got it off with the crowbar. The room was warm and smelled of cardboard and pine cleaner. Boxes wrapped in plastic, stacked on pallets to the ceiling. Signs hung from rope over head. Bordeaux. Loire. Single Malts. In the back was a windowed office.

          “Man,” Stronghole said, “look at all this booze. I’ve got an aunt who would’ve shot her nut here.”

          “I got an aunt who’d think she’d died and gone to the Ancient Thebes to get her brains pulled through her nose. So what. Let’s throw the office.”

          On the back wall was a freight elevator and a couple of parked fork lifts. Next to that was a shipping and receiving area. Spiked bills of lading and invoices were neatly arranged at the rear of a long workbench. There were postage scales and meters, an adding machine, rolls of tape and orange sponges for wetting the back, mat knives, folded boxes and a small calendar with an off-registered picture of a Pekinese dog, the company logo crookedly stamped above it. I picked up one of the mat knives and thunked it into the table top; it was the kind with a retractable blade, but long enough to slit open boxes, a couple of inches. I slid it into my pocket and continued checking out the pit of the flunkies. Various safety notices were tacked to the cork board, decorated with crudely drawn genitalia and guffawish comments on comments. There was a blow up pair of puckered red lips about three inches wide and a photo of the Pope blessing a crowd of dock workers with hairy backs. Further on was a photo of a nude man from the nipples to the knees, in profile, with the longest semi-erect penis I have ever seen.

          “There’s gotta be a rolodex,” I said.

          “Maybe in the boss’s office.”

          Part of the ceiling was damaged where the blood had puddled before leaking. A whole pallet had been moved and the wooden floor was stained. Stronghole shined the light on the ceiling. There was a wire hanging down. “What do you think?” he asked.

          “You mean the wire?”

          “Yeah.”

          “I don’t know what the fuck to do. It’s not attached to anything.”

          “So what. It’s got to be a blow job.”

          “We’d better hope not. Let’s go in and out fast.”

          We broke into the office and started going through the files, folder by folder and through the rolodex. McSorley’s wine shop was in both places as well as a hundred other little shops. He had standing orders and special orders. There was St. Claude’s Chateau Yquem, stamped canceled. Also in McSorley’s name and also canceled were standing orders from Burgundy and Bordeaux, each with a local shipping company.

          Stronghole spoke. His voice was like ice in my neck. I turned to him and blinked, scared out of my wits. “Look,” he said, holding up a loose leaf binder. “Look here. It’s the shipping and receiving log.”   He held the light over a page divided into columns. “These look like Watt’s companies. Steak and Bake is his budget line and Baron DeBoeff the high end. All highway joints.”   He flipped to the receiving part. “This guy Barker gives to receive. He got a bunch of packages from these Watts owned restaurants. And the dates are right around when St. Claude was shipping out his lab. Looks like we got a suspect.”

          “Yeah, I’m just dying to tangle with the Baron DeBoeff.” I poked around the office some. It was a small room, with glass walls and Venetian blinds, but big enough for two metal desks, a bunch of filing cabinets and a water bubbler with funnel shaped paper cups. Next to the bubbler was a Bean of Araby automatic drip coffee maker with some coffee cups and wooden stirrers, an urn of CreaMate, sugar packs and some liquid cyclamate, all arranged on a stained doily. One of the desks had a plaque that said ‘The Butt Squats Here’, a day calendar and some pictures of a woman in various stages of life, stuck in a discolored plastic cube.

          “Nice braces,” I said waving the picture at Stronghole.

          He grunted at me over the file. “She’s cute now, but later, watch out. Now, look at this. Watts businesses buy their booze from Barker. And Barker imports his wine on Watts owned tankers registered in the Republic of Champa. “

          “That old gimmick,” I said. “Like a string of pearls. You stick ‘em up your ass and pull ‘em out one by one.”  

          “I thought a string of pearls was drops of semen around the neckline.”

          “Jesuitical sophistry now?” After the braces she’s in a green stretch convertible with a silk scarf over her head and oval sunglasses. Next to her is a tweedy looking guy crumpled against the white upholstery. She’s flashing tooth like a howler monkey and he looks about as lively as a spent condom. “If you were riding in that boat with her, would you look like that?” I asked.

          “All depends,” he said without looking up.

          “On what?”

          “How much sleep I’d gotten the night before. Whether we were friends; things like that.”   He continued to flip through files and notebooks clucking and exclaiming.

          “Hey Stronghole, don’t you even want to see what I’m talking about?”

          “Maybe they’ve been up all night fucking and snorting MDA. Maybe he just felched her Bartell. How do I know?”

          “At least look and tell me you don’t think this punk has shit for brains.”

          He sighed and let me know in twelve different ways how exasperated he was and how I was wasting his time and breaking his concentration. Finally he put down the dogeared, shopworn tomes of commerce and deigned to look. “Those two are in high school. He’s been up all night spilling his little pee pee out into some high art diary and drinking instant coffee. She’s just had a swim and is dragging him to the country club for a dance. They’ve been going out for two years and he’s beginning to hate her guts cause she’s still a part of the tennis and sailing set while he wants to rip the world’s head off and drink its blood. He’s– David Watts.” He stared at it and then at me. “These families go way back.”

          I took it for a walk. So Barker’s daughter dated David Watts in high school. Barker distributes hooch to the highway Baron DeBoeff. He imports said hooch from gay Paree using Watts owned freighters registered in Champa. How does a warehouse dog who works from a steel desk on the ninth floor with a bubbler and tit shots on the wall rub buns with a big shot like Hubble Watts? Maybe Watts starts small. Maybe Barker sinks some cash into Watts. Maybe they come up together. Mowing lawns and such. So he’s the Marquis de Sod before taking over the world with his rusty buckets. I thought of Evalyn St. Claude. I looked at the picture. Behind the oval glasses and blue hair and scarf, the jaw, the mouth were the same and the attitude was all there, sitting in that $40,000 eight cylinder cream puff just like it was her couch, without the stogy and bad scotch and no six years of bad marriage. “I think that’s Evalyn St. Claude stretched out behind the wheel. And my bet is that David Watts is her mole.”

          Stronghole could barely contain himself. I could smell it. “What mole is that?”

          “Clara Turback said that Evalyn St. Claude had a mole. At first I thought she meant like a spot on her ass or something. But then I realized she meant spy. David Watts was dogging her then, maybe he’s dogging her now. Maybe that’s why people are winding up dead everywhere.”

          “We’ve got to find out who leases the upstairs,” he said. We returned the files and folders and books and tried to make it look straight and headed for the elevator, both fairly busting. The boxes were like walls and formed tight corridors. We stood there for a second in silence, looking at each other. All the ambient noise became magnified.  

          Then it happened. PINK. And then, pink-pink. Three spouts opened up on a box to the right, above my head, splashing me with a thick sweet liqueur. I fell flat to the floor and Stronghole dove around the corner. We had to see by exit signs and fire lights on the floor. Stronghole had the automatic in the tool box. I held my breath and listened. About two pallets down someone was breathing. I backed down the aisle on my stomach, pistol drawn, till I could crouch behind a pallet. He knew where we were. It was time to split up and stalk him.

          I went right and Stronghole went left. Just to stir things up I fired off three shots. They roared through the warehouse and ripped apart a case of Chambertain. The man didn’t move. I crept closer. PINK PINK. This time chest high, into a case of Gewurtztraminer. Stronghole had moved farther over and now we closed in. I faked right, knocking a box quietly and then moved silently back left. The exit signs clicked off. That was the moment, the long black quiet. No one moved. There were no sounds, just the lingering click of the switch. Then Stronghole knocked out a whole junction box with the automatic. The light exploded into sparks. The compressor coughed and cut out. Sulfur drifted through the falling dark. Footsteps headed rapidly away. I took off in their direction, shining the light as best I could.

          Stronghole yelled for me to cover him. He climbed to the top of the pallets and ran while I fired at the man’s echo, reloading and shooting again and again.

          “Jack, the stairs!”  

          We ran to the stairs. The gunman was just out of range, going down through the zig zag shadows. Down we ran, sticky with booze, hair matted, ringing on the cat walk metal, danka-danka-danka. The eyes shrink; Stronghole flies through the flickers down after him. I let go and fell down. I had to catch my breath to make the beating and pounding stop.  I waited till the air was still and black enough to drop down right behind them, on the stair. Stronghole looked like a beetle on its back. The man stood over him with his canon pointed at his head. They were both huffing hard, both scared.

          “Who do you work for?” the man asked.

          They didn’t know how close I was. I could almost push him face first down the stairs.

          Stronghole refused to answer. He just stared. But the duck was acting fearless now. His cheeks and forehead were pocked and the bones around his eyes had been broken once and badly set. On each finger was a ring with a different colored rock.  “Don’t be an idiot,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on and we walk. Otherwise, it’s smoke. Who sent you?” A drop of sweat rolled down Stronghole’s forehead.

          Stronghole asked, “How does a piece of shit like you stay alive?”

          I took out the mat knife.

          “When my pals come, that’s it. I’m giving you an only out,” he said.

          I Stepped into the air towards him. He dropped his arm slightly as he started to turn and I reached my hand around his eyes and nose and pulled him to me. Then I pushed the mat knife into his neck and cut his throat. He bled hot against my arms and I prayed he wasn’t diseased, but I held on till he stopped kicking. Then I let him drop to the floor. Stronghole had the gun. There were footsteps coming up the stairs. We lifted off the body like disturbed flies and turned. Two men in long grey coats with sad faces stepped into the door. Everyone was surprised, them more than us, and it cost them three pints each against the walls.

          We ran out the front door and to the car. As we drove ioff, The Pechardine blew. The air, the buildings and the street shuddered. We were engulfed in light and heat. A fire ball rose in the rear view.

          It was past midnight when I got home. Mrs. Stantborg’s head was slumped on her chest, snoring and soaking up the test pattern. Over all, I felt good. We were getting somewhere. But I needed a drink. Every cell in my body was a little pair of puckered lips, screaming for a jane.

It is a fitting coincidence that on the same day I read this post my friend William showed me a link he had posted on his Face Book page: Word Horde. The OED is expunging words from its children’s dictionaries to make them more relevant. They contend that the traditional, Christian, monarchical vocabulary of England and the word horde associated with nature, the naming of Eden, are not relevant to a multicultural, multi-religious society. As if Hindus and Moslems had not the same need to know about Christianity as Christians, Jews and Atheists have a need to know about Islam and Hinduism. As if Pakistanis, Indians and Nigerians had not the same need to know about English history as English students have a need to know about the histories of the countries their forebears conquered. They’ve removed words like ‘aisle’, as if the former Colonials did not have aisles in their mosques and temples, or their buses and planes. But look at the list of words being eliminated and compare it to the words being added:

Words taken out:

Carol, cracker, holly, ivy, mistletoe

Dwarf, elf, goblin

Abbey, aisle, altar, bishop, chapel, christen, disciple, minister, monastery, monk, nun, nunnery, parish, pew, psalm, pulpit, saint, sin, devil, vicar

Coronation, duchess, duke, emperor, empire, monarch, decade

adder, ass, beaver, boar, budgerigar, bullock, cheetah, colt, corgi, cygnet, doe, drake, ferret, gerbil, goldfish, guinea pig, hamster, heron, herring, kingfisher, lark, leopard, lobster, magpie, minnow, mussel, newt, otter, ox, oyster, panther, pelican, piglet, plaice, poodle, porcupine, porpoise, raven, spaniel, starling, stoat, stork, terrapin, thrush, weasel, wren.

Acorn, allotment, almond, apricot, ash, bacon, beech, beetroot, blackberry, blacksmith, bloom, bluebell, bramble, bran, bray, bridle, brook, buttercup, canary, canter, carnation, catkin, cauliflower, chestnut, clover, conker, county, cowslip, crocus, dandelion, diesel, fern, fungus, gooseberry, gorse, hazel, hazelnut, heather, holly, horse chestnut, ivy, lavender, leek, liquorice, manger, marzipan, melon, minnow, mint, nectar, nectarine, oats, pansy, parsnip, pasture, poppy, porridge, poultry, primrose, prune, radish, rhubarb, sheaf, spinach, sycamore, tulip, turnip, vine, violet, walnut, willow

Words put in:

Blog, broadband, MP3 player, voicemail, attachment, database, export, chatroom, bullet point, cut and paste, analogue

Celebrity, tolerant, vandalism, negotiate, interdependent, creep, citizenship, childhood, conflict, common sense, debate, EU, drought, brainy, boisterous, cautionary tale, bilingual, bungee jumping, committee, compulsory, cope, democratic, allergic, biodegradable, emotion, dyslexic, donate, endangered, Euro

Apparatus, food chain, incisor, square number, trapezium, alliteration, colloquial, idiom, curriculum, classify, chronological, block graph

The list of axed words is full of juicy syllables, it is concrete, beautiful, pert. These are words with swollen lips and erect nipples. They are tactile and odoriferous. They are scaled and iridescent, or shimmering and smooth, nacreous. Adder, Ass, Beaver, Boar. Chestnut, Clover, Conker. Tulip, Turnip, Vine, Violet, Walnut, Willow. You can taste and smell and feel these words. These words exist on a continuum from the diaghram, through the esophagus, the vocal cords, the tongue, the lips, the teeth. They sink down from the brain through the brainstem to the tailbone. They race from the finger tips and the nostrils into the head and out the mouth accreting along the way custom and concept. But most of all these are words that are vanishing from our lives because they are vanishing from reality. When we knew these words and knew these things we knew they were part of us. We are immersed in the world, of a piece with it. When it dies, we die with it. And what’s left behind after the purge is a list of abstract, technical, and I assume, already known, words. I’m not saying the new list doesn’t belong in a dictionary or that they aren’t an important part of our world. But I am saying Terrapin is a word they will need to know and don’t, just as they will need to know the word Pangolin to read Marianne Moore. I am all for incisors, block graphs and idioms. I like Brainy, boisterous cautionary tales such as Chaucer tells. We are interdependent with creeps and we must negotiate celebrity and childhood, we must have common sense to debate and be tolerant. But a world without bridals and brooks, with voicemail and no porridge, is a dyslexic world of committees, a compulsory world to which I am allergic.