The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

The Bone Church

If you want to hear, buy me another drink.

(Ah, this is slop, but never mind; what isn’t?)

There were thirty-two of us went into that greensore,

Thirty days in the green and only three who rose above it.

Three rose above the green, three made it to the top,

Manning and Revois and me. And what does that book say?

The famous one? ‘Only I am left to tell you.’

I’ll die of the drink in bed, as many obsessed whoresons do.

And do I mourn Manning? Balls! It was his money

put us there, his will that drove us on, death by death.

But did he die in bed? Not that one! I saw to it!

Now he worships in that bone church forever. Life is grand!

(What slop is this? Still – buy me another, do. Buy me two!

I’ll talk for whiskey; if you want me

to shut up, switch me to champagne.

Talk is cheap, silence is dear, my dear.

What was I saying?)

Twenty-nine dead on the march, and one a woman.

Fine tits she had, and an ass like an English saddle!

We found her facedown one morning,

as dead as the fire she lay in,

an ash-baby smoked at the cheeks and throat.

Never burnt; that fire must have been cold when she went in.

She talked the whole voyage and died without a sound;

what’s better than being human? Do you say so?

No? Then balls to you, and your mother, too;

if she’d had a pair she’d have been a fucking king.

Anthropologist, arr, so she said. Didn’t look like

no anthropologist when we pulled her out of the

ashes with char on her cheeks and the whites of her eyes

dusted gray with soot. Not a mark on her otherwise.

Dorrance said it might’ve been a stroke

and he was as close to a doctor as we had,

that poxy bastard. For the love of God bring whiskey,

for life’s a trudge without it!

The green did em down day by day. Carson died of a stick

in his boot. His foot swole up and when we cut away

the boot leather, his toesies were as black

as the squid’s ink that drove Manning’s heart.

Reston and Polgoy, they were stung by spiders

big as your fist; Ackerman bit by a snake what dropped

out of a tree where it hung like a lady’s fur stole

draped on a branch. Bit its poison into Ackerman’s nose.

How strong a throe, you ask? Try this:

He ripped his own snoot clean off! Yes! Tore it away

like a rotten peach off a branch and died

spitin his own dyin face! Goddam life, I say,

if you can’t laugh you might as well laugh anyway.

That’s my goddam attitude, and I stick by it;

this ain’t a sad world unless you’re sane.

Now where was I?

Javier fell off a plank bridge and when we

hauled him out he couldn’t breathe so

Dorrance tried to kiss him back to life

and sucked from his throat a leech as big as

a hothouse tomato. It popped free like a cork from

a bottle and split between em; sprayed both with the claret

we live on (for we’re all alcoholics that way, if you see my figure)

and when the Spaniard died raving, Manning said

the leeches’d gone to his brain. As for me, I hold no opinion on that.

All I know is that Javy’s eyes wouldn’t stay shut but went on

bulging in and out even after he were an hour cold.

Something hungry there, all right, arr, yes there was!

And all the while the macaws screamed at the monkeys

and the monkeys screamed at the macaws and both

screamed for the blue sky they couldn’t see,

for it was buried in the goddam green.

Is this whiskey or diarrhea in a glass?

There was one of those suckers in the Frenchie’s pants –

did I tell you? You know what that one ate, don’t you?

It was Dorrance himself went next; we were

climbing by then, but still in the green. He fell

in a gorge and we could hear the snap. Broke his neck,

twenty-six years of age, engaged to be married, case closed.

Arr, ain’t life grand? Life’s a sucker in the throat,

life’s the gorge we all fall in, it’s a soup

and we all end up vegetables. Ain’t I philosophical?

Never mind. It’s too late to count the dead,

and I’m too drunk. In the end we got there.

Just say that.

Climbed the high path out of all that

sizzling green after we buried Rostoy, Timmons,

the Texan – I forget his name – and Dorrance

and a couple of other ones. In the end most went down

of some fever that boiled their skin and turned it green.

At the end it was only Manning, Revois, and me.

We caught the fever too, but killed it before it killed us.

Only I ain’t never really got better. Now whiskey’s

my quinine, what I take for the shakes, so buy

me another before I forget my manners

and cut your fucking throat. I might even

drink what comes out, so be wise, sonny,

and trot it over, goddam you.

There was a road we came to, even Manning agreed

it was, and wide enough for elephants if the ivory hunters

hadn’t picked clean the jungles and the plains beyond em

back when gas was still a nickel.

It bore up, that road, and we bore up with it on tilted slabs

of stone a million years jounced free of Mother Earth,

leaping one to another like frogs in the sun, Revois

still burning with the fever and me – oh, I was light!

Like milkweed gauze on a breeze, you know.

I saw it all. My mind was as clear then as clean water,

for I was as young then as horrid now – yes, I see

how you look at me, but you needn’t frown so, for

it’s your own future you see on this side o’ table.

We climbed above the birds and there was the end,

a stone tongue poked straight into the sky.

Manning broke into a run and we ran after, Revois

trotting a right smart, sick as he was.

(But he wasn’t sick long – hee!)

We looked down and saw what we saw.

Manning flushed red at the sight, and why not?

For greed’s a fever, too.

He grabbed me by the rag that was once my shirt

and asked were it just a dream. When I said I saw

what he saw, he turned to Revois.

But before Revois could say Aye or Nay, we heard thunder

coming up from the greenroof we’d left behind,

like a storm turned upside down. Or say

like all of earth had caught the fever that stalked us

and was sick in its bowels. I asked Manning what he heard

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 roll: 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