Part 1 (1/2)
Mascara-Viscera.
by Paul Cameron Brown.
FLASHPOINT
1 The moon has a larder and a kitchen, wears a nightcap as Father in the Night Before Christmas.
2 The moon h.o.a.rds pistachios, marzipan commands the shadows is mustachioed sleeps in a sloop (at least when I look) like the boat owl and p.u.s.s.ycat took to sea.
3 And on country nights in high summer fis.h.i.+ng nets seem drawn about his face, reveal ribbons of light, eerie panhandlers grubbing quarters; a sinister sailor with a sack on a pitch black wharf.
4 Between clouds, leafy barques the hinge reflected on the thick, ashen door the moon will pirate your senses set them adrift amidst twilight islands in the mind's Outer Hebrides where mystery is king and the hem of robe you kiss is an envelope pilfered.
MARZIPAN
1 A thick hole in the dark from which stars pour silver as in pails their runny divide ink-strewn scalps torn from the roof of the sky.
2 Padded footprints giant ferns blooming constellation prints, the wind an athlete pacing about a track drying thru fingerprints thin, nectarine light.
3 Sand down whitest skin moving past your hand a gown, mauve to green, iceberg lettuce, the black festering across a ribcage; while night arranges moths to dusting powder pucker-lipped fronds from afar
4 Afar, the word a gypsy tangled in the waves, foam from a medicine bottle agitated and strewn, bubbles calculated in gasps light into the distance forlorn tree-frogs, the cricket sound round deep --movement of night as a rumbling in the ground,
SANTO DOMINGO
In the crypt with Columbus in the crypt with Giovanni of Genoa, the diaspora driven Jew; watching flecks of the cathedral floor jade-eyed and mica afraid yawning down brown the abyss, his skeletal coffin thin accae wood, phlegm coloured flamed ointment of the saints in holy water bridging the little centuries.
2 Serpentine heavens in coiled stars heaving like pa.s.sion fruit hung down piano wire.
3 Meteors douse the light of black stems, eye holes cut of old Spanish sailors; thin ghosts plundering night.
4 Melange tableaux peut-etre les etoiles sont oiseaux.
WHITE CHINA PLATES I
The moon hummed like a refrigerator, light thru shadows --the solitude of dusk closing in; black scars visible across the moon's face shaped like mountainous hands, all silent, the occasional leaf rustling.
2 My fork at plate's edge listening, listening to the haunting one eye on the staircase wall white as the numb light outside palest night.
Caught off-guard, the musty settee and armchair acting as hallucinogen to the nostril, the calendar of events playing ghostly tag with sheer curtains hovering, shroud-like, on the family Bible big and brown as the Lord's foot stool.
3 The unravelling tale slowly much as thick yarn with a kitten batting it, one event at a time in sepulchre movement down a linoleum floor. Two twins burning, fever scalded in frigid water only shock setting in, dying to join the black creek water from which her unwilling buckets borrowed this liquid crucifixion and bitter vinegar.