Ange Mlinko

The sky was laced with Irish cream mist, that mellow tan overhanging the hills, which were studded with deathmasks and baskets spilling flowers from both ends. We scanned the haze for lightning. They were studded with earthworks and iron forks inserted between leaves of grass, jacks and bearings and balances, sinuous fingers of pink marble and synovial joints in bronze. But if we got struck by lightning—not a lot; say glanced, or shaved, there was a chance (we heard) it wouldn't be so bad: a little refreshing, a little like La Vita Nuova in a readable translation. "In a flash," as they say, we could acquire a self-renewing subscription to classical music (it's always classical in the scientific literature) accessible at all hours and piped into the forebrain from the hypothalamus. This space available for celebrations. Someone visits for the first time and says, "Oh, let's get married here" and guests drive in and eye the hors d'oeuvre tent before finding a folding chair. But it isn't long before the mirroring going on between, for instance, the sculptures and the trees—the trees looking more like sculptures, the sculptures getting seasoned, growing bark (patinas) even—it isn't long before it hypnotizes the guests. Who would wear a wedding dress in such a charged atmosphere, having heard that ghost story of the wedding dress with the power to possess the soul of the bride? Actually it was a horror flick from somewhere, Tokyo or Calcutta . . . It was a wedding dress that took possession of the soul of its bride the minute she saw it in the mirror, or it saw itself—and this we know happens, but not with the malevolence of this dress that wreaked havoc at the reception, set the hall on fire and dropped a crate of champagne on the string trio. "Aha," cries the groom as he realizes the chrysalis of evil he must divide from his bride: "You are hardly an unruffled surface!" No you would not want to wear that dress amid the wireless network of gigantic sculptures and their wind-scraped murmuring. When the wind stirs, is it not the gardeners? The gardeners are invisible, they don't garden during business hours. As you'd put a dye in the air in order to see it, a bird sucked through its drafts advertises the invisible and upgrades it to naked.

Here I am saying “The leaves are falling” —one of those choruses that vie with interminable verses to mock hoarders. Yeah, we get that a palette of winds is a pretty thing: one blurs the anther, another the river splurging on riprap, expunging phosphates, out of the temperature differential building sculptural fogs that promenade between shores a glacier wedged ajar, a fjord. Whatever gives the river its seriousness reverses in the light of those clouds moving as if absorbing their pomp in advance of it— characters which untied the painter and took the sculls again.

i Dear A. — Nailing crockery to the walls was not something I ever understood, but Simonetta’s maiolica falls, like this sideboard, painted wood, under the enchantment of a freehand look — a curling script, a loose grape tendril, the forms that hecatomb smoke took purling to a Roman god’s nostril    ... Because geranium is crinkled in the spillage from the wishing well, now outdated and backfilled, this whole place evinces the nature of a souvenir plate. Another tell: the mosquito flourish in its signature. ii The rustic bicycle, like a pen that spent its ink, wrote an invisible sentence to the ramparts and back, now and again rolling through the arches of an aqueduct dowsing with its sixth sense across the hillsides. Locals tucked plastic water bottles under spouts chiseled into lions’ pouts stationed at intervals, like shrines. Their cars idled while they stooped, and on Sundays even formed lines. They trust this water more, Lorenzo whooped, than what comes out of their taps? The sources snake beneath the maps. iii The little terrier Amore, they warned me, had eaten the seat belts; so there I was, my friend, fearing whiplash in the back seat (no headrest either!), in all respects afloat — Simonetta on alert for signs of gallantry, like the wives of those diminished Casanovas who dream they’ve merely grown discreet. And the dissertation she once wrote on courtesan-poetesses, fancying herself of that ilk (“Like me!” — a phrase she’d strew among her compliments) gathers dust on a shelf. When I think of Boccherini’s metacarpals interred beneath the soppressata marbles of the duomo, I think:Casa del Diavolo. Those two.

I went to make kouign amann. It sounded Irish a

Louisiana skies paddle north nodding hello to some exiles displaced by floodwaters so we all putter in the bisque in fretted dresses, alleviated by a fan. But we have nothing on "Le Matin," in whose rococo frame a curtain sweeps to bare a boudoir, a Bichon Frisé worrying something between paws, begging the dulcet glance of the mistress whose push-up, cupless corset and up-drawn stocking border what they fall short of, per the stern frame rippling like a cloud! Even the candle angles to get a look in the mirror engloving the scene. Why it is her slipper the bitch clutches! The gentleman's reverie is elsewhere . . . Loitering Louisiana stops to admire this engraving by "N. Lavreinee." What a chevalier! It makes the smeariest sunset think it's in a Restoration Comedy, in such humidity chefs defer meringues. "Ksar Rouge," "Taos Adobe," "Gulf Shrimp"—a thousand names of softboiled lipsticks fritter English as if it were French, meaning meeting no resistance from the flesh.

Three mini ciabattini for breakfast where demand for persnickety bread is small, hence its expense, hence my steadfast recalculation of my overhead, which soars, and as you might expect the ciabattini stand in for my fantasy of myself in a sea-limned prospect, on a terrace, with a lemon tree... Not: Assessed a fee for rent sent a day late. Not: Fines accrued for a lost library book. Better never lose track of the date. Oversleep, and you’re on the hook. It’s the margin for error: shrinking. It’s life ground down to recurrence. It’s fewer books read for the thinking the hospital didn’t rebill the insurance; the school misplaced the kids’ paperwork. Here’s our sweet pup, a rescue which we nonetheless paid for, and look: he gets more grooming than I do. When I turn my hand mill, I think of the dowager who ground gems on ham for her guests; the queen who ground out two cups of flour on the pregnant abdomen of her husband’s mistress; I think of a “great rock-eating bird” grinding out a sandy beach, the foam said to be particulate matter of minute crustaceans, each brilliantly spooning up Aphrodite to Greek porticoes, and our potatoes, and plain living which might be shaken by infinitesimal tattoos.

Reaching for the vinegar over the range hood (still dashing grass wisps on the gas flames from the exhaust vent where we booted that brooding sparrow) I remember the rabbit in the Tiergarten that perched on its spatula feet where the grass had just started to green. The German clouds were unibrow. It's not the stretching, slightly weaving, that recalls it, it's the tang of vinegar, Easter egg dye solvent. And my gallimaufry gets going, guests for dinner, the requisite foofaraw. In the soffits of the staircase a rag and a featherduster. In the eaves the nests made of frass and cellophane. "When it rains on a golf course it's called Irish dew — " Father-in-law's jackstraw. "Dundee, is this an Aussie shiraz? Put it in the croc au vin." Cellophane and frass. Everything in the canon went into Gargantua before he was born from the ear beneath his mama's cornrows: Augustine, Aquinas. Aristotle and Plato. Virgil and Homer. Goliards and troubadours. Thus an ort peeking out from a nostril, skin flakes, a slight acne, undercoat all colors, like a farrow; the chuffer, snuffler, grunter, farter, pecker, whelp, head half the size of the requisitioned teat (Googling "mastitis" and finding "ewe," ew) — the whole shebang reeks of bedstraw. On the radio, transrational statistics; Brigitte Bardot lashing out at the leash law in Zurich; on an uncle's fourth percussive sneeze the baby wakes — interrobang —

From the weathered boards knots pop like the eyes of potatoes. From brick salients not a clink of a pupil in a loop- hole. Cannon, yes, but without their kick. Ironically or entirely appropriately, who can say, the Fort will not admit us. The reenactors are going home; we see them retreat, backs x’d with sus- penders, toward the forest housecleaned into state park. Ocean beyond the ramparts suggests that stem-celled seconds fiend- ishly agglomerate with fits and starts into unprecedented forms. And so who cares that a fort’s built on a sand bar, that we don’t make it in, and go only so far round the perimeter.

They sang Green, Green Grass of Home sailing west from New Orleans. They sang Ne Me Quitte Pas beneath mesquite while digging graves in Matagorda. Pelican soup was a vile, greasy potage. They sang Green, Green Grass of  Home where alligator was a luxury (the meat) down at the Turtle Bayou Turnaround. They sang Ne Me Quitte Pas beneath mesquite. Near the Old and Lost River they surmised Spanish moss strains coffee pretty good. They sang Green, Green Grass of Home. They were whingeing Stuck in Lodi, forty Slavonians in the Big Thicket. They sang Ne Me Quitte Pas beneath mesquite. They cut down the trees, they sawed the blocks, split the blocks into billets, split the billets into boards. They sang Green, Green Grass of Home. They sang Ne Me Quitte Pas beneath mesquite. • Frederick Olmsted was right when he wrote G.T.T. (Gone to Texas) was appended “to every man’s name who had disappeared before the discovery of some rascality.” Brands were a language: Shanghai M, Running W. Frederick Olmsted was right when he wrote, or rode upright, through “a sort of Brobdingnag grass.” Bradded L, Walking R, Swinging   J. Every man’s name who had disappeared singed like needles off a cactus, whiskers off rope (this was a practice). Rocking T, Tumbling K — Frederick Olmsted was right when he wrote in the alphabet we got from the Canaanites. Oxhead A. Camel G. If it doesn’t brand, it bites. To every man’s name who had disappeared, someone added: Sent to heaven to hunt for a harp. Or maybe it was another case of slow. Olmsted slowed so he could write while he rode among men whose names had disappeared.

Sunset backlights some pine to ... a caped sponge and though I throw my gasp after a monarch there is no hitch, no hitching either to its serape or the echoing orange drawing a rope, horizon’s doubledutch. Mina Loy + Arthur Cravan As blood hits the air & goes red, so I burst outside exhilarated. He has thrown a tippet on the double-bass, which rests on its end-pin the way a singer rests on a glittering stiletto while the other foot slips on a banan—piano. The strings are not the electrified wires of a prison camp, but she’s the instrument of his escape, leaving me to educate my feelings, subtracting the red from night til a winebottle dawns green. Leonora Carrington + Max Ernst I saw the chessplayers over their griddles, all the furor of thinking swallowed like a song in a furred flute; so it must seem when a small daughter disappears with a wife, morning reabsorbed into a lambent priori. Jacqueline Lamba + Andr