Rambling On: An Apprentice’s Guide to the Gift of the Gab

It’s lovely to hear that jangling of panes of glass and see you thrusting through to the far side of things. Now you’re flying quite low over a meadow like a swallow before a storm, Siberian irises in bloom scrawl purple flashes across your breast, you’ve just paused and hang transfixed in the air like a mermaid over the counter of old chemists’ shops, now you’ve sailed into the scent of an olive tree in bloom, knowing how much we like to pick flowering sprigs of olive and interline our shirts and bodices with them in our chests of drawers, all the smells of an alluvial forest are postcards from you, a sand dune beyond the translucent heat is the colour of your grainy thighs and hips, a meadow of flowering ox-eye daisies emits the inaudible sound of your unblinking eyelashes.

So we strode that time hand in hand in silence through the reed-green of early evening, from an army barracks a plaintive bugle sounded a plaintive lights out, the lining of the evening was made of purple washable silk, from an army barracks a bugle sounded a plaintive lights out, shadows lay themselves down in brown-green folds.

Evening Prague vendors cried: Two ministers fall from plane! Border guard’s vigilance saves church pictures worth several million crowns! Lenin gets party card number one signed by Leonid Brezhnev himself! Corpse of unknown man found in the woods at Krč! I see that grotesquely melancholy beauty enduring in a pedestrian subway beneath Wenceslas Square, a joyous vacuity wraps events in a plastic mac, I’m standing before the demolition site of a sunny day and see how repetition brings jocund devastation, and signs and shouts invigorate me.

Bank then the Vltava embankment gleamed with black velvet ribbons, from the barracks a plaintive bugle sounded a plaintive lights out, your vulva was locked tight with tacking stitches and clips made from golden ribbons and velvet buttons, a vulva locked like a taffeta blouse.

Once, in the pouring rain, we saw two snails making love on a big rock, they merged into one whole sticky body like two slices of buttered bread. Now I stride through the depth of night without lights, steering solely by a sector of starless sky, ever on into the fuzzy wedge of converging pine tops, and the deeper I stride into the depths of the forest, the more precisely I know that I’m heading for your parted legs and that soon my dream of entering your inner parts as a haywain enters a Baroque gateway is to be fulfilled. But a bend has straightened the forest track and pushed the root and wellhead from which your legs sprang back to a respectable distance.

So tied to the circle of a water-mill, I wade into situations in which I haven’t been before, a cathedral’s statues crumble into the letters of posters, but an apple with letters pasted all over it can be used to recompose the Bible, the Empire frontage of the furthermost station in remotest Galicia can be restored to a Greek tympanon.

From a barracks a plaintive bugle has sounded a plaintive lights out, an aqueous green daybreak, the window onto the river is open, a loose bodiless bustier swings on a hanger.

I’m walking through damp sand thinking of your complexion thinking of your back, thinking of the tall and tender sleeve of your neck, thinking of your peasant hips corset-constrained and decorated with two strangulation stripes, in front a tie woven from tufts of fluff struggling up, thinking of a bit of broken Sèvres porcelain. I’ve clambered down to a forest brook and again and again I dash the stream’s water on my face, quietly savouring the distilled juices of gorgeous village maidens long buried in the local graveyards, juices filtered through heather, sand and fern and, with the gradient, purified into the aromatic mirrors of quiet springs and fast-flowing streams, I wet my face in that holy water and baptise myself with the sign of the cross, with the vertical of your vulva, the horizontal of your lips.

An Evening Prague vendor called:

Is anyone missing a family member?

A partisan, Czesko, writes to say that I am the well in which a child has drowned. From a barracks a bugle has plaintively sounded lights out, although sober, I show signs of being drunk. Water has rejuvenised itself and my eyes put on the finery of wall-bars.

When a farmer doth die, his animals cry. Thereafter nought but burning, burning, burning laughter. I’m dead tired, but happy. And amen.

June 1976

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19 AN APPRENTICE’S GUIDE TO THE GIFT OF THE GAB