The Who-Dunnit Collage

pieced together by Amanda Earlw/c = 389 wordsThe consequences of two men wrestling (1): the infinite erotic civilization we created is declining now (2). What manner of sinners do you have in Rome? They must be grand ones. I have seen much wickedness and cannot be deceived (3). All these people! Intermingled and jabbering and as much confusion among them, to me, as there is in my own mind. The sources reveal a people endowed with valuable qualities, hemmed in by stormy seas along a narrow strip of coastline, dense forests and steep mountain ranges behind them (now filled with flunkies, whistle-punks, chokermen, cat-skinners, the fiery mountainsides and stands of trees disappearing. (4)

To think the connection between my introspective black companion and those outcrop rocks taking the brunt of the ocean-this requires a stretch of the imagination. (5)

Her eyes were set so deeply the colour was hidden from a distance and he was surprised now by the emerald shade of them. Green as sea glass. (6) If you have ever seen the green in water that is forever flowing out to mystery and adventure then you know something of the colour of her eyes. (7) Along the river, trees are stranded bare as witches and dark as the woman who never learned to love one man. (8) She could never have imagined that a woman would lie beneath a man who grins like an ape fully clothed in a tattered tunic, ten feet from a body freshly abandoned by the spirit in its blood. (9) He lies there in a wilderness of sheets and his body inhabits strange spaces, oblique dimensions; like the keen emptiness of a child's eye, it offers me no entry and no alibi. (10)

Warned her to keep indoors with politic goodwill, not haste into a landscape of stark wind-harrowed hills and weltering mist; but from the house she stalked intractable as a driven ghost. (11)

I knew that it would happen like this. I hear the clouds of kestrels circling. The leaving. The solitude. (12) Finally the shape of the dream appears. Her arms in the cold air, holding the cutting tools. Space like glass. (13)

I see her head bowed in thinking of me, by the river, her beautiful eyes searching inside for the proper famous thought of me she loved. Ah my angel-my new angel, black, follows me now-I exchanged the angel of life for the other. (14)

(1) "certain works of carl stewart, artist" rob mclennan, name, an errant p. 44
(2) "The Erotic Civilization" A.F. Moritz, Night Street Repairs, p. 33
(3) "7. To The Church at Rome" K.I. Press, Spine, p. 56
(4) "Resources, Certain Earths, John Newlove, Moving In Alone, p. 72
(5) "1. Otherwise than place" Don McKay, p. 16
(6) Michael Crummey, The Wreckage, p. 13
(7) "Poem For A Tall Woman" Robert Priest, Scream Blue Meaning, p. 118
(8) "At Nootka Sound" Susan Musgrave, What The Small Day Cannot Hold, p. 6
(9) "Adrienne, Stephen Brockwell, Fruitfly Geographic, p. 47
10) "Hypnos" Gwendolyn MacEwen, Volume One, The Early Years, p.163
(11) "The Snowman On The Moor" Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, p. 58
(12) A Basket of Distress" T. Anders Carson, Folding The Crane, p. 49
(13) "Hope Stories: I Signal Fire" Erin Moure, Sheepish Beauty Civilian Love
(14) "The Legend of Duloz," from Maggie Cassidy, Jack Kerouac, The Portable Jack Kerouac, p. 70

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