and Manning said nothing. He was hypnotized by
that cleft, looking down a thousand feet of ancient air
into the church below: a million years’ worth of bone and tusk,
a whited sepulcher of eternity, a thrashpit of prongs
such as you’d see if hell burned dry to the slag of its cauldron.
You expected to see bodies impaled on the
ancient thorns of that sunny tomb. There were none,
but the thunder was coming, rolling up from the ground
instead of down from the sky. The stones shook
beneath our heels as they burst free of the green
that took so many of us – Rostoy with his mouth harp,
Dorrance who sang along, the anthropologist
with the ass like an English saddle, twenty-six others.
They arrived, those gaunt ghosts, and shook the greenroof
from their feet, and came in a shuddering wave: elephants
stampeding from the green cradle of time.
Towering among em (believe what you want)
were mammoths from the dead age when man
was not, their tusks in corkscrews and their eyes
as red as the whips of sorrow;
wrapped around their wrinkled legs were jungle vines.
One come – yes! – with a flower stuck
in a fold of his chest hide like a boutonniere!
Revois screamed and put his hand over his eyes.
Manning said ‘I don’t see that.’ (He sounded
like a man explaining to a fucking traffic cop.)
I pulled em aside and we three stumbled
into a stony cunt near the edge. From there
we watched em rolclass="underline" a tide in the face of reality
that made you wish for blindness and glad for sight.
They went past us, never slowing,
the ones behind driving the ones before,
and over they went, trumpeting their way to suicide,
crashing into the bones of their oblivion a dusty mile below.
Hours it went on, that endless convention of tumbling death;
trumpets all the way down, a brass orchestra,
diminishing. The dust and the smell of their shit
near choked us, and in the end Revois ran mad.
Stood up, whether to pelt away or to join em
I don’t never knew which, but join em he did,
headfirst and down with his bootheels in the sky and
all the nailheads winking.
One arm waved. The other … one of those giant flat feet
tore it off his body and the arm followed after, fingers
waving: ‘Bye-bye!’ and ‘Bye-bye!’ and ‘So long, boys!’
Har!
I leaned out to see him go and it was a sight to remember,
how he sprayed in pinwheels that hung in the air
after he was gone, then turned pink and floated away
on a breeze that smelled of rotten carnations.
His bones are with the others now, and where’s my drink?
But – hear this, you idiot! – the only new bones were his.
Do you mark what I say? Then listen again, damn you:
His, but no others.
Nothing down there after the last of the giants had passed us
but for the bone church, which was as it was,
with one blot of red, and that was Revois.
For that was a stampede of ghosts or memories,
and who’s to say they’re not the same? Manning got up
trembling, said our fortunes were made (as if he
didn’t already have one).
‘And what about what you just saw?’ I asked.
‘Would you bring others to see such a holy place?
Why, next thing you know the pope himself will be
pissing his holy water over the side!’ But Manning
only shook his head, and grinned, and held up hands
without a speck of dust on them – although not a minute
past we’d been choking on it by the bale,
and coated with it from top to toe.
He said it was hallucination
we’d seen, brought on by fever and stinkwater.
Said again that our fortunes were made, and laughed.
The bastard, that laugh was his undoing.
I saw that he was mad – or I was – and one of us
would have to die. You know which one it was,
since here I sit before you, drunk with hair that once
was black hanging in my eyes.
He said, ‘Don’t you see, you fool—’
And said no more, for the rest was just a scream.
Balls to him!
And balls to your grinning face!
I don’t remember how I got back; it’s a
dream of green with brown faces in it,
then a dream of blue with white faces in it,
and now I wake at night in this city
where not one man in ten dreams of what
lies beyond his life – for the eyes they
use to dream with are shut, as Manning’s
were, until the end, when not all the bank accounts in hell
or Switzerland (they may be the same) could save him.
I wake with my liver bellowing, and in the dark
I hear the lumbering thunder of those great ghosts rising
out of the greenroof like a storm set loose to harrow the earth,
and I smell the dust and the shit, and when the horde
breaks free into the sky of their undoing, I see
the ancient fans of their ears and the hooks of their
tusks; I see their eyes and their eyes and their eyes.
There’s more to life than this; there are maps inside your maps.
It’s still there, the bone church, and I’d like to
go back and find it again, so I could throw myself
over and be done this wretched comedy. Now turn away
your sheep’s face before I turn it away for you.
Arr, reality’s a dirty place with no religion in it.
So buy me a drink, goddam you!
We’ll toast elephants that never were.
For Jimmy Smith
Morality is a slippery subject. If I didn’t know that as a boy, I found out when I went to college. I attended the University of Maine on a slapped-together financial scaffolding of small scholarships, government loans, and summer jobs. During the school year, I worked the dish line in West Commons. The money never stretched far enough. My single mother, who was working as head housekeeper in a mental institution called Pineland Training Center, sent me $12 a week, which helped a little. After Mom died, I found out from one of her sisters that she had managed it by giving up her monthly beauty parlor visit and economizing on groceries. She also skipped lunch every Tuesday and Thursday.
Once I moved off-campus and away from West Commons, I sometimes supplemented my own diet by shoplifting steaks or packages of hamburger from the local supermarket. You had to do it on Fridays, when the store was really busy. I once tried for a chicken, but it was too fucking big to go under my coat.
Word got around that I would write papers for students who found themselves in a bind. I had a sliding scale for this service. If the student got an A, my fee was $20. I got $10 for a B. A grade of C was a wash, and no money changed hands. For a D or an F, I promised my client that I would pay him or her $20. I made sure I would never have to pay, because I couldn’t afford it. And I was sly. (It embarrasses me to say that, but it’s the truth.) I wouldn’t take on a project unless the student in need could provide at least one paper he or she had written, so I could copy the style. I didn’t need to do this a lot, thank God, but when I had to – when I was broke and simply couldn’t live without a burger and fries at the Bear’s Den in Memorial Union – I did.
Then, when I was a junior, I discovered that I had a fairly rare blood type, A-negative, roughly six percent of the population. There was a clinic in Bangor that would pay twenty-five dollars per pint for A-neg. I thought that an excellent deal. Every two months or so, I drove my battered old station wagon up Route 2 from Orono (or hitchhiked when it was broke down, a frequent occurrence) and rolled up my sleeve. There was far less paperwork in those pre-AIDS years, and when your pint was in the bag, you had your choice of a small glass of orange juice or a small knock of whiskey. Being an alcoholic-in-training even then, I always opted for the whiskey.