Dhalgren

D-t moved the junk aside on the table (Marceline in the room with Tarzan was calling out, “Let me! Let me…! Come on, let me!”) and sat on the up-ended milk crate to read the article to us. The crate was so low the table top hit him just below the tit. /He read the part about: “…/during the holocaust, broke into a wooden frame house adjoining a grocery store already in flames and let out five youngsters trapped in the second floor rear bedroom. It is reported the bedroom door had been clumsily secured by the back of a chair beneath the door knob—”

“It wasn’t a chair,” I said. “Somebody had taken a fucking piano bench and turned it on its end. The God-damn music had fallen out all over the hall rug. Why doesn’t it mention George?”

“Sound [s?] like you had a reporter standing right there watching you,” D-t said.

I said “There wasn’t anybody,” I said. A piece of rubber pulled free, only I dropped it and couldn’t see where it had fallen between the refrigerator and the sink. “Just George.”

“The[n] how did they know to write about it?” Lanya asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “George actually got the door open. All I did was yank at the legs. The bench came open and all the music fell out. On the rug. The top of the bench was still jammed up in there.”

“Maybe George met a reporter later that evening,” Lanya said. “He could have told the papers, Kid.”

“‘…The children are reported to be safe, but we do not know…’”

“Of course it doesn’t sound like George to cut himself out.” Lanya sighed and made a funny movement with her hand, grinding her palm on the greyn[?] formica. “Oh, Kid…”

Inside Tarzan neighed loudly and Woodard’s hiccuppy laugh shrilled above it, covered in turn by Marceline’s squeal.

“The real question—” Lanya looked up—“is what are you going to do with them. Are you going to keep them here[?]”

“You’re out of your fucking head—” I said.

D-t said, “The guys like them—”

“How many days was it?” I said. “How many days ago, Nightmare and dragon [sic] Lady almost murdered each other? Look!” I went to the living room door. “There’s blood all over the fucking God-damn wall—!”

Fist against his chin, Stevie was looking at me.

Tarzan had sat back on his heels and, conceitedly, wasn’t.

“Ride me!” Marceline said. “You rode Woodard before. Now you ride me!”

“Yeah,” Woodard said. “You ride her now.”

I stepped back into the kitchen.

“What are you going to do with them?”

I told her, “I don’t know.” Tarzan neighed again.

Three staples on the bottom of the

above page hold a creased rectangle

of newsprint. The end of the column

has either been ripped off or (the bottom

is torn on a second crease) handled

so frequently it had come away:

BRASS ORCHIDS

BLOOM BENEATH

A CLOUDED SKY

This handsome book, or rather booklet, has already become a Bellona commonplace, on night-tables by the reading lamp, in the back pockets of youngsters in the park, or tucked, along with the Times, under the arms of people going about the city. This reviewer only wonders how our anonymous author achieved such vivid visualizations with such simple language. Before subject matter so violent and so personal, yet so clearly and wittily voiced, few familiar with Bellona’s landscape will be able to avoid strong reactions, negative or positive. If the poet’s own emotions seem disjointed or strange, they are still expressed pointedly, incisively, and in an intensely human mode.

True anonymity in a situation such as we have here is, of course, impossible. Since the interview with the author we published a while back, many have simply held it an open secret that the cultivator of these brazen blooms is actual—

This morning I climbed out of the loft soon as I woke up. When I’d gone to bed, they’d been laid out neatly on Raven’s sleeping bag he’d opened up full for them by the couch:

Woodard was curled on his side a yard off the edge. Rose had two fingers threat through a tear in the plaid lining. A tuft of stuffing that had come /half/ out shook with her sleeping breath. Sammy, Marceline, and Stevie were banked against Copperhead’s back. who For some reason /he/ had gone to sleep on the floor beside them.

I got them the kids up noisily (when we were ready to leave, Copperhead had rolled the bag around himself, head out one end, boots out the other, and wedged under the couch; there was a tuft of stuffing caught on his beard) and took them to the school.

I pushed the door open and herded them inside. Lanya was doing something with the tape-recorder and looked up, more startled than I’d thought she’d be.

“Nobody else here, yet?” I asked.

“Christ, you surprised me.” She pushed the fast (forward? reverse?) button. Things clacked, crackled, and spun.

“I brought the kids.”

Rose went and immediately sat on a chair in the corner. Woodard wandered toward the table.

Marceline said to Stevie, “You cut that out,” only I wasn’t sure /at/ what [he’d done].

“The other kids will be in soon,” Lanya said.

I said: “Good. What you have to do is when the parents come for the kids in the afternoon, you have to farm these here out to them.”

Lanya stood up fully and faced me. “God damn!”

“I can’t keep them,” I said. “I told you that.”

She pulled her lips thin and looked angry.

I was surprised that I had been expecting her to be just that way about it.

“What am I going to do with—Yeah, I know what you said.”

Stevie said sharply: “You better keep your hands off that, nigger!”

Woodard turned off the from the tape recorder, holding a spool of tape gingerly, blinking apple green eyes below his brush of mustard wool. He smiled uncertainly.

Rose began to cry. The knuckles of her fist pressed together. Her chin bobbed, sobbing, and tears tracked from the inner and outer corners of both eyes.

Sammy, move/ standing by the far wall, moved/turned/ the toe of his sneaker over /on/ the floor and blinked.

The following letter is paperclipped

to the top and side of the page on

which the next entry begins. The envelope,

stuck beneath, has left its outline

on the stationery:

How absurd—

—to apologize for an uncommitted injury. But I shall not have been at your party tonight—if Lansang delivers this. There is nothing less sympathetic than the vulgar pleading extenuating circumstances for their vulgarity. There is nothing more distressing to a man who admires formal honesty than to discover he can only offer “personal reasons” as honest explanation for his breach of form.

But, for personal reasons, I will not have attended your party when you read this. I am distressed.

I have been rude.

And I have often imagined that to be the most terrible admission I might ever have to make.