Read an Excerpt
The Little Door Slides Back
By Jeff Clark Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 1997 Jeff Clark
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8213-3
CHAPTER 1
LUNAR TERCETS
Things are not as we would have them be.
The moon is not a yellow sow
hung from a meat hook
on a drab shed wall: it is a moon.
Ashes do nothing
while we sleep: they are trees.
Satellites are not boys circling the low-back chairs
and record heaps of their drunken masters: they are machines.
The broad-hipped distended form stepping in the foam
is not someone going to wet her legs
but no one, phantom without live taxis.
She thinks, Ships in the night are cruel ships.
Even if, her left ear aimed at the brack
even if the claps and peeling lulled
she would not hear the canvas smack
there would be no din in the hull
no luminations in the masts:
tonight the moon soils its pallet
and what will emerge in the light by my bedside but No One,
her gown ratty from seawater and sand and from bedless cubicles
bedowned by whirling feathered things.
FUNESTE
If the smoke should go out
of my mouth and into
the jeweler's room,
if dawn should blue up now
his sash the plume goes through,
sucked out and upswooned,
if the jeweler's dawn
be fog-sodden or rued
by memory-beacons,
if I should write I down,
if I should now ruin
this dawn, return, he dies
MY INTERIOR
One bordello, three suites in the ass.
One two-bit nightery with chessboard in the back.
A snare drum, a pump, the rubble pile of a palace.
Siamese traps, and pink cocktail umbrellas
for the little blowsy ones who tramp the boulevards
and blue byways of my interior, tapping the asphalt
with their parasol-tips, unfurling their wings
to fly the Queen, tipping their fedoras to show their holes.
All day they pull cottons from inhalers that come down my conveyor.
But in my night, they bolt home and lock it tight, and move inward,
and begin to sniff by their basins, and whimper
We feel a first liquid now coming down the fuchsia
We hear Opal, we feel the bloodpump slow
Our lice awaken and slide to the wings
We nurse him with our holes, we love in his marrow
We snake out pipes, make rounds with caulk guns
Before dawn, debauched,
they try to stroke me to sleep in the bath ...
High noontide in my interior: the red deer
wends out of my ravine when I wave, the gilled goat.
The shadows of my Frenchmen annihilate my little night-womps.
In my back-of-the-eyelid cinema: arabesques.
My best records are each hiss or moan or tremolo.
Your shadow annihilates my little day-womps.
Languor keeps my body from the desk.
Languor keeps the stockings on your legs.
Glare keeps the little ones at the conveyor
and out of the head ... but then, from way off, with cranking
comes my night, and when it arrives
I go to it like a callboy to a C-note.
BLOW-NOTES
He said, "Take this gun," by the log house hearth, Babydoll
looped and blown on the log house love seat, her simper part
pixie, part slut, her breasts in situ, that is to say bare and
beaded with tiny brine gauds.
She would be screwed now to that sofa by
him, who would afterward play something lento and maudlin
on the log house upright.
"Stroke teeth" in the log house.
Make the ash box talk.
He said to me, "Take this gun and go to bed now."
And said,
"In the morning, when you wake and hear those shingle-pecks
and beeps, go out onto the deck and blow them down. Ten
dollars for each dust-to-dust and oil-to-oil woodpecker."
From a plastic sac, then arranged upon the earth:
white and blue
feathers.
Wet bits and bill.
At one a verdict from the log house:
a baleful low from Babydoll, and then from further
"Come, Love,
and bury the blue jays."
In my rotted missal, a Memorare:
Flared by white I fly to you, to you do I go, within you do I live, sphere to your orbit, around you do I heave, tide to your piling, despise not my wish, squid to my squall, to kill you, sinful and sorrowful, orbit to my sphere, despise not my want, Amen, until ends, to return you to fields, to return you to potential, O probable ending bed
Three a.m. was a mass
My pew a tawny
and shopworn sofa bed
set up with animals and flowered sheets
his a red chair by a turntable
Home after a last set
ruddy, not alive, beautiful clothes
Slurred canticles
Blow-matins
Blow-lauds
One-ended antiphons
Lines for an inward and
moonsick psalter.
We loved to walk then after a Host
or ride, was it a Cadillac?
Ferries for certain
Sash flaps, bathroom door slams, and by my nose passes the
bedroom's morning fragrance.
Of tombs and flu-sodden sailors
his perfume, with a hint of wheat, and one of tobacco plumes
above the bed
as my bed now, beware this, one of musk, two of
wet cards, cuttlefish, pits
Confusion
In white pajamas in a hall of Salpêtrière: in a mantle of salt now,
hanging in a coldroom.
In a poppy-blue drawing room: in a
mantle of salt now, hanging in a coldroom.
In a stall: hanging in a coldroom.
In a field: in a coldroom.
Now movement in the room:
Whose kingdoms come
Confusion
On the intake the white birds alight
Where the branches collapse and expand
I went up in a lift and into a dressing room without a knock.
He was on a bed by a window, senseless,
his mattress was a bale
of hay.
Flowing of a tap in the
bathroom, and in there Babydoll is stooped nude over the basin.
I took her hips and spun her around.
Her tongue and lips were
green.
She grinned and hopped her bottom onto the basin and
wrapped her legs around my waist, bits of blade in her teeth,
green spit on her breast
Confusion
The glauzy and noisome Soul-Siphon settles like a brume.
Soul-Siphon settles like ash spat from a dust devil, floating into
and cooming a thicket.
Soul-Siphon settles on a pigeon's-blood smoking jacket and
cessed hair of one pouring rum on a piano lid, who is going to
light it and begin the next number.
Soul-Siphon cooms a lounge, then hole hotel
Confusion
In the spleen-slapped humid gloom two want
to embrace and so
arise in their room
Con
Two wanted to
embrace and so
arose
ST. NEMELE
Who hovers above me now,
in a black coat, the table lit
as if by a tenebrist?
Whose mane glints
as if slicked
with pomade not pitch?
Who isn't tincture of pine
but of pall and cyst.
Whose eyes are holes
not spangles in a hall.
Nemele, I wander around
embracing waists of trees
who won't speak,
who don't attend to atonalities.
When I lied after noon
like the one half of a brothel pair,
you opened your gown
and in there
in bleary stills
I saw an anvil,
then a
then an unwell
— what? — in an evil antedawn.
In the evening you opened your gown —
Nemele, you must have gone.
Why now phantoms, why now gauze,
green fins, dead swans?
Why someone in a yellow dusk
with piece outslung
at one end of Pont-Neuf?
Have you gone
darkward, or where
the white mare —
Who hovers above me now
pricks in manifold forms
ON AN IRON COT
The way it was decorated, one might have thought the trailer vacant, or that its tenant were tasteless and poor. But the boy had not time in which to consult the antique merchants of the city, nor was he interested in art. I cannot say, despite months of meticulous surveillance, that he fancied anything besides sleep, nakedness, and cigarettes.
Nor did he fancy his occupation, since not a single moment of my patronage of the circus did his grin while playing the ukulele or riding his tiny bicycle seem anything but counterfeit. He had a tenuous rapport with the ringmaster, who many nights, after the show had ended, would burst through the boy's door and denounce his religious tippling. "Little man," he would curse, "I have in mind to replace you with a chimpanzee if you insist on poisoning yourself like this each night. And this chimp can play the theremin like a virtuoso!"
Ruined, sweet boy ... When at last I had the courage to reveal to him my infatuation, I entered his trailer, at the hour I assumed he would be in the ring, to deposit a love letter for him. To author, it had required several hours, so many amorous sweeps of the pen, that twice I had to
* * *
I won't ever forgive myself for failing to observe the clearly rendered announcement, hung early in the day:
NOON SHOW CANCELED
NEXT SHOW 7:30 P.M.
When I unlocked the back door of the boy's trailer with a file, and moved into the kitchen to place the letter on his table, a whiff of oil arrested my pulse, and my beloved boy, thinking I were a thief, sprang upon me and knocked me unconscious with a bottle.
When I came to, some form, my letter in its hand, was humping itself with laughter, and on an iron cot a sickly dog with its ears back and its tail slapping the sheet.
NAPOLEONETTE
I had a small part in Napoleonette. I wrapped some meat in newsprint and handed it to a woman. The scene was shot in one morning. Since I am not a fan of film, I went home, and in the afternoon the phone rang me from sleep. Geschenk was angry, he said, "All it was was the lady reaching over the counter — for nothing! — you weren't even there!"
Sometimes a ghost entered my heart and I could feel, and sometimes phrases entered my mind and I could speak, with reason. But never was I able to stay a man long enough to remain him.
INVAGINATIONS
I passed the afternoon wandering the bazaar, lingering in stalls so long I almost abandoned my plans in order to shop.
There was a hall tree I wanted badly, a cracked klieg light, a picture book, a suede armchair in which I fell asleep and was therefore escorted out of a shop cellar and up into wet night.
I was famished and had some pho, and tipped the waiter poorly, for seating me near the toilets.
Then it was fully time and I hustled toward the building, my brow pimpled with sweat and pomade, the revolver plucking hairs from my belly.
Outside I fidgeted endlessly with my coat buttons, and had such a fit of cussing that when I caught the doorman mid-leer his lips were apart.
I paid and went through the hot parlor and into the hall, which rumbled with the roars of drunks.
Lucienne was up in the fore, beside a piano. Someone cranked a gramophone and aimed its horn at her.
The pianist straightened and began the first tinklings of "Parlez-Moi d'Amour" ...
I was rapt in the middle of the floor, the cellist pushing down his bow, Lucienne singing now, but it was so unlike what I had wanted, her voice so like the whine of a looped supplicant, the strings so like eunuchs bawling in a larder, the shouts in the bar lifting not ceasing, grease all over my fingers, she was so unlike for whom I had yearned, so thin and blemished, her eyes like wood nickels, brows penciled on, and it occurred to me then that her aspect was nearly identical with one of those auraless derelicts in velour and corduroy, in yellow alley-light, a terrible blush in the cheeks, unzipping her duffel in the snow, having a long look into a compact, squatting down, hand on the third or fourth step of some back stoop, to release that steam so unlike exhalations, her white ass so terrifying.
One "spell" is followed almost immediately by the next, so that he has no time to reflect, or to compose himself. Here he is a "palmist," here suddenly an "assassin." If he is not sending me out of his room and away from his transports, he is calling me back in to say, Would you believe I am now — I rarely respond to his pleas, since I don't know which to believe. The cats run away from him. He thinks he heard someone call him "daft" this afternoon as the doors of an elevator were closing. When he goes to the bathroom to shave and to wash, he growls about — — —
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Little Door Slides Back by Jeff Clark. Copyright © 1997 Jeff Clark. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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