Lunar Follies

SEA OF CLOUDS

Black-light lamps, placed carefully around the room, and selected, as you surely know, with the sneer that passes for witty irony in this sophisticated time of the businessman-comedian-writer-host-actor, illuminate found objects — salutes to the gauche past — that clutter the place: Regrets and mercies, taxes and napalm, sex and marriage, installment plans and out-of-tune pianos and cauliflower, the end of the road, the end of the game, the end of the party, and four o’clock in the rainy morning; gravestones in Brooklyn, bitter-cold funerals, wet black trees, rubber soles in hospital corridors, oxygen tents; the sun on the beach and on that beach and on the other beach; the smell of clean hair, awed love, thighs and bathing suits, dumb lust; whatnots, snots and sneezes and coughs and dark-brown blood; c-rations, lustrous carbines smelling of gun oil, combat boots and smudged brass and the snap and whine of 0.50 caliber slugs overhead, canned fruit salad on the mashed potatoes; old photos, yellowed lace, a black mantilla, spatulas, cooking spoons, wood-handled forks, cast-iron skillets with black silken innards; cannoli, cassata, oil and garlic on the fusilli and a bright drift of parsley; gas refrigerators, wooden potato mashers, long dark hallways and musty hampers, leg of lamb, string beans, boiled potatoes, green mint green jelly green, a two-way stretch girdle and Evening in Paris; the sun on Sheepshead Bay; lanolin wild root brylcreem vitalis vaseline and torn underwear, smiling mouths, straw boaters, creamy vests, Packards, DeSotos, Hudsons, LaSalles, and flat packs of English Ovals; whiteness of Twenty Grands, Sweet Caporals, Wings, Herbert Tareytons, Virginia Rounds, not to mention heartbreak loneliness and despair; lies and self-pity, questions and sobs and wails and regrets and death; flowers, recriminations; priests in black and gold and crepuscular churches, candles and incense and the gleaming monstrance, censers and Jesus Christ Almighty and Sister Veronica; sweet perfume and sweat, sweet odor of thighs and breasts, of young women in flat straw hats and spring coats, of virginity; the wind come up off the Narrows, fish and salt, clean, remote, sound of buoys distant, and the bridge, a drawing in the haze and fog, and the barely recalled laughter of dead women. “Don’t see nothin’ too goddamn funny here.”