Desultory Vision at Lyric Point
- A WORK IN PROGRESS -
There's no such thing as a bad co-incidence.
- quoted in David Lynch's Lost Highway
My father was a gleeman,
A poet of the third-hand,
Who could translate the daily papers
Into any script but our own.
- Kinsella to his son to his son
EPISODE ONE
At Lyric Point
the willow drips
its bitter rods
to earth the charged sky.
Hooded crows
perch
on fence posts
and outlying barns
like charred antennae
beaming funereal glee
into the parlour where
Kinsella dozes
before the fuzzed out
television.
A white noise
lulls his dream
into snowy fields
of sheep and mist.
Columns of smoke rise
like the souls of sheep
ascending
from the ball of his foot
up through the posterior
of his forebrain
to the heavenly host…
OK?
5 (flashes of magenta) | 10 (scud of saffron-yellow) | 20 (Beavertail)
30 (Fiddleneck) | 40 (White Popcorn)
liquid tarmac streaming
into an estuary of headlight;
a '52 Oldsmobile…
and Old Kinsella
behind the wheel,
eyes dripping with smoke
and tequila
50 (scrub)
white lines spewing
jets of morse…
60mph (tumbleweed)
.. .----. -- | .- |
.-. --- .-.. .-.. .. -. .----. |
... - --- -. . | .- .-.. .-.. |
.- .-.. --- -. . | .- -. -.. |
.-.. --- ... -
the cab reeks
of stale sex
and warm leatherette,
Kinsella raps
to his shadowy self
guttering like a flame
dying against the windshield…
Call me Hawk-Eye the word-hoarder…
Perky with pinky-power
and willow-wooded wisdom,
I unmute the maculate mouth
of the desolate deadman…
…back in Aughagower,
in the 1890's,
they called him filid,
filled as he was with the gift
of the gab.
They say when he chanted
the very bones of St. Patrick
fell from his mouth.
When he left Mayo for the USofA
he buried his head in his hands
and wept so great
his face peeled like a transfer,
leaving its tattoo of grief
upon his soiled palms
like the Turin Shroud…
…his other face
hangs, half-shaved,
before the bathroom
mirror in the art-deco
retirement home on Milton Street,
here on the outskirts
of Plain Springs…
I'm a rollin' stone all alone and lost…
… the shimmer and sweep
of cotton… calico dresses…
fiddles, washboard bass, banjos
in Tupelo's barn…
The TV screen pops
and shrivels the static buzz
to a single white point.
The speck holds on awhile
to the dead centre of
the cathode tube
then eats itself;
the generator's conked again
or, simply, run out of juice.
Kinsella wakes.
To be continued...
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