It was a temperate blue morning
it seeped cautiously through
the woodframed and putty-glazed windowpanes enjoying
the glasss wobble and its impurities
as it passed
rubbing itself like a cat
the blue was a kind of
magnified blue that warned the rest of the day to follow was
going to be very
hot scorching if you had something to do outside get it
done early
a considerate blue morning
“ . . . he whose talk is of
oxen will probably dream of oxen.” vexed him
he relaxed the large wooden
spoon against the pots lip its nose
tucked at the round and
curve where the wall and bottom kissed
he was stirring his slow-melding porridge
tinged with cinnamon and crumbles of dark
brown sugar
-- Oxen? he
muttered he was being facetious
DeQuincey Confessions of an Opium-Eater he hadnt a better comparison between
consciousness and dreaming than talk and
the dream of oxen he couldnt remember
the last time he saw one a
rare animal was afforded an oxs maturity or stature
if he
played
DeQuinceys game hed ride the Dumbo train parlay
the dance of Pink Elephants
a clawed-foot bathtub snarling and pacing in
its four-walled enclosure quieting
at
a bathers approach
and when they had slid down
into the hot pleasant-smelling sea-salted water their
relaxed nothing-can-touch-me-now
supine pose
itd devour them splashing blood
and hunks of rented flesh snapping bones a skull broken like a walnut
DeQuincey was chided by
Baudelaire his Fleurs du mal hallucinatory
each a Romantic in
the vein and fascination of Americas Poe so much that Baudelaire cried reminiscent of Poe
“Be Drunk! . . . It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk,
“Be Drunk! . . . It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk,
be continually drunk! On Wine, on poetry or on virtue as you
wish.”
Arthur Rimbaud
his derangement of the senses “I say . . . be a visionary, make
yourself a visionary. A Poet
makes himself a visionary through a long,
boundless, and systematized
disorganization of all the senses.”
he stirs again
the porridge
he wants it wetter than most
prefer
it slow-cooked stirred
and wet
and stroking it with a long
wooden spoon he
thinks of
Baudelaires “I have felt the wind of the
wing of madness pass over me.”
hashish and absinthe
oxen
bathtubs
“Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore.’”
the sensitive blue roused him
curled at the corners of his eyes like
flies seeking fluid
reminding him he had dozens of hummingbirds to feed and plants to water
and the porridge was
ready
1356, Day-Between-Two-Ts, 23 7.
14
