Richard Emil Braun

This was a true happening but (as you will see shortly) not such as would ready me for future ones. What has brisk disaster to do with a leisurely ordeal? Neither event, as you will notice also, has made me an understanding man. It was my watch one night, away then on the sea, when leaning on a couple of crates of something I dreamed of nothing special into the dark, and whispered the smoke of a sugared native product into the dark. Then from behind a quick rush burst not six feet over me with a sawing and then a cracking sound, and the other watch pointed up where a black squall ran port-side into the distance and a six by six crate lid veered and disappeared like a gull. But the other time we were idle ashore for days somewhere there are sandy foothills and small plains with weeds that stand like birds, and there was a steady blow on land that left off out at sea, leaving us all peculiar if I remember. The wind rasped the dense whorls of sharp leaves low on the ground and shrilled through the heads on the tall seed-stalks, and all those days the sound rose until we, without hope, without breath bore the conviction that our sojourn had not begun and had no end, like a period of dissipation. In certain Spanish havens the beggars come to you saying “Give me an amount. God will make it good.” Had they been wise those ladies would have said something of that kind and proffered a gratifying smile to their junior treasurer the other Tuesday and maybe been spared a peculiar fall. For forgetting their cards or missing dues or due to rancor from a month of planning they were turned away from the luncheon which might have saved them through its regular plaudits and calls to order. Instead they turned immediately back after some while waiting with other members in vying groups where the sound rose and narrowed, and from the dim hushed hall those five ladies, my individual patrons, came across the park together, under a hefty sun, under slight muffling rain, to my teashop. I worked on a cruising vessel one season and saw a woman being led below about a minute after she had vaulted the rail, and now her face cluttered with casts of hair returned to me, and a suggestion of the odor of moist wool. Then, after ordering, over the tinkle of service, the ladies called me and began the question of a particular person none had touched, wondering by turns in words like these: “Maybe when he was a child he went alone one night along the lakeside or followed streams in the dark and mating mayflies swarmed him or he was caught by a swirl of slippery animals risen from rotted cresses. It could be too a bird’s egg fell on him, that red and yellow spattering his coat showed him the partial form of brain and bill and wings like candy arms.” A second lady established the problem but in studious and in idle terms: “He must have tried becoming a sphere once when something hurt and must have failed. He is a cylinder and lacking the perfected self-containment of the sphere he nonetheless has beauty and though incomplete is unassailable.” The third advanced the first with this addition: “Maybe when he was a child and a good half he planted a happy garden for himself and tried to bring a boyish girl inside to share his secrets he could not bestow.” The fourth supposed some more years and less hope and figured on effects of disaffection: “Perhaps it was a time sprouting potatoes came creeping like things of the undersea surrounding him that gave him the first fevered turn toward what we now call his fine beauty.” The last lady came near to reconciling them: “Some awareness certainly shook him unawares once and he flinched and flinching has made him beautiful to all of us who admire huge eyed skittishness, the fawn standing some steps off always awkward and desired.” Odd gulls often join before a gale to bank and shrill in company, then at the heavy time of it they hush and float broadcast. Those ladies did the same the other Tuesday. Hopeless and breathless, both I and they rode like sitting birds into a last lull, and I was not (as you have seen) prepared by quick calamities of ocean labor for land bound suffering at ease. Understanding or unconcern could serve but pain and malice won, and who may be forgiven even his shapeless victories? “The boy is never by himself,” I said, “but by him stands an unseen friend whose face came in the petal fall under a secret tree, who meets his vague eyes with beaming gaps and his remote grin with a long lipless smile.”

You perished, in a toyland, of surprise; and only I am here to bury you in dessicated tulip tips and eyes of broken diadie-dolls. Poor pink, poor blue! Will you be grown when I’m in Heaven too? Will length of death have turned you Classical like old Bisque faces, keen and sainted view, pearl on your breast, pearl-pointed linen shawl? No, you’ll still have your flowers with no stem, and harp, clear stringed, the blur of La Boheme. You’ll heap upon that Mansion’s mantlepiece impossible plush animal creations, and pout the pillared City’s aberrations. You rest a Classic, but of Wedgewood’s Greece.

Over the honored bones of Boston (resting, as we say) old leaves’ bones underfoot are restless; and boys and schoolgirls going home splash through them, reciting alphabet lately received. They run the known, intone the unsure patterns, repeat the magic, nearly Grecian syllables; and little winds are winding up their strident lmno, R, S, T. She was no snowy witch, but young and turning, a mother-dear more dear now incipiently frosty; witches most live when she died, October; primly colonial, Mother Goose’s grave; who did not rhyme or gather the pages vainly: what mantic abc’s she told she dared make charming only to spell her children’s moral lives. The children passing sing the future, certainly, but knowing nothing (as the lore requires) and recommending nothing as they are merely oracles spelling their letters’ lives, not telling theirs. They have their own games not of the elder nation; certain cobwebs accommodate the young, and special weeds; and these who chant now know no gentle Sibylla but many seemingly answering leaves. What there will be of signs, of sounds so flighty and so friable, the letters as the leaves, boys and girls as letters, and of late Boston’s honorable cinders, laid quietly and always restless: maybe a daisy, my dears, or a white carnation, or only an unanswerable tenderness.

Perhaps, when we the strangers in the bar’s blue light turn liberal, you’d claim fraternity or clan and say Detroit is turned American by the community of appetite. There was this hurried time of fear of the last bell, our sure prognostication it would be somber so soon to face a sky of December that impended on the light blue snow swell, when someone turned and told of Caucasian wheat fields, the harvest sun, a last effrontery. His father decapitates their Turkish master. The village is invested. No one yields. Then, you may know, the last round came, and with it pride. I swivelled round to face my own whiskey recalling anecdotes in turn of ancestral snowfields and running wolves and fireside.

The first commotion stirred him to offend, forgivably, with friendly leaps and clutching; but soon too urgent friendliness was wrought by a new wave of guests. At last I complained to that one man that it was indecent of him to tempt the beast so, pressing his tweed knee against the furry brisket. But he smiled, and spoke with a Rhinelandish accent: Milady, your youth, as mine did me, tends you now to the younger beliefs of men, their naive symbols: cloudy animal heads to represent witless rampages of glands. Egyptian Hershef, Seth, Ra—the romance of anonymity above the neck and smooth humanity below—were gods of early hankering and youthful conscience. See how the shaggy thing turns back his ears; the straining mouth and eyes’ protuberance leave me my steady vision and clear speech and mind. The aegipans, surely the centaurs are truer concepts of the dual beast and a maturer Hellas sculpted them: potentially ironic man above and hairy vitality below the waist. No one, Milady, no lover on earth does other than what I am doing now, methodically tempting the brute, till from the dim sheath an eager lick of flame darts forth.

The natives here enjoy a delicate and tense society. Their upper classes make an art of conversation so refined that no Caucasian ever participates without making at least one outrageous faux pas. Few Europeans, in fact, can manage even the rudiments of this language, which consists of vowels only, and, although several grammars have been composed by reputable scholars, these disagree on every major point of syntax. The chieftains are invariably stout: a proverb says “Fat men must be sure; doubt and misgivings need agility.” The special term for this is rendered as “complacency” in all the lexicons, but is in no wise derogatory.

They have shown her facing, from a range of barley at times and from the patio. She wrings a sprig of mint in a walled garden; behold, the dimple that none reckoned on, careless burdens of plums, of parsley. I thank those gentlemen: many an old master is needed if there shall be love. I thank Velasquez more: for a woman turned away may be imposed without disparagement in a prospect of grandeur. Where this high cliff joins the deep sunlight I see you beside me spread aside in the buoyant deer-moss; I sit cross-legged nibbling juniper berries and I call you my Louella now, now Ella Lou. Far down from one rim is the bay with flocks of teal, and we might look down shafts of cedar the other way; I feel a privileged one who waits, remembering the special pleasure of youth is of self-denial. Since Velasquez and the masters have hexed my eyes I see you now even in this northern grandeur; following the hip I watch the flank’s retirement and watch the nape declining from the crescent shoulder. But where your shoulder ripples back to fill the arm is a slight plump area, probably nameless: in all but rarest postures that form vanishes into wherever you withdraw inopportune breaths. You might not wonder it is there I, stretching forward, beseeching you be motionless, hold the wide kiss; I wonder mightily for my part for what purpose have I stretched a thousand miles between the two of us.

Trailing her father, bearing his hand axe, the girl thought she had never guessed what earthly majesty was before then, as he strode unconcernedly holding a vicious gander by the horny mitts and let the big wings batter his knees. She was also surprised to feel a liberating satisfaction in the coming bloodshed, and that notwithstanding all the times she had been beleaguered and had fled, today she did not fear the barnyard hubub. Yet, as her father’s clever stroke fell, as the pronged head skipped sideways and the neck plumes stiffened with blood from the cleft, she was angry; and, when the headless goose ran to the brook and was carried off into the woods alive, she rejoiced, and subsequently frequented those woods and avoided her father. When the goose began to mend she brought him small hominy, which was welcome though she had to press the kernels one by one into the pink neck that throbbed into her palm; when haemorrhage occurred she would not spare handkerchiefs, and stanching the spot she felt a thrill of sympathy. But for the most part there was steady progress, and growing vigor was accompanied by restlessness, and one cool day the blind thing was batted out of existence by a motorcycle. She had no time for tears. She ran upstairs to miss her father’s barytone commiseration, then out onto the fields, and, holding an old red pinwheel, ran ran ran ran.