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By Root 500 0

Hill Street and we were 8,9, we explored first thing the banks of the Merrimac in that part along Lakeview Avenue then-Polish slums where the river swam dirtily, meekly without rock-roar along the huge red walls of Boott Mills–we’d on rainy Sunday afternoons in February run down there to kick at ice floes and rusty empty kerosene cans and tires and crap– One time we fell in to our hips, got wet–Big brother Henry shat against a tree, he actually did, squatted and aimed an explosion on a lateral line, horrible. We found fat lovers disentangling huge dimpled lady legs and hairy manlegs out of an intercourse in a litter of movie magazines, empty cans, rat rags, dirt, grass and straw halfway up the slope in the bushes … a gray afternoon in summer, they were delightfully engaged in a field dump by the river … and at night came back, darker, wilder, sexualler, with flashlights, dirty magazines, jiggling hands, sucks, furtive listens to the Sound of Time in the river, the mills, the bridges and streets of Lowell … wildeyed in heaven they screwed, and went home.

Joe and I ransacked the river down there … the darker and rainier the better the time… We fished out crap from the stream. An unknown and forgotten morning took place in the yard of a rickety two story house corner of Lakeview and Bunker Hill where we threw firewood and balls all up and down the air and mothers yelled at us, new friends,— like the forgetting of the memory of next Monday morning in school–ugh it’s impossible to forget the horror of school … coming … Monday-

One afternoon–in the ghost yards of St. Louis, the crunchly gravels of recess, banana smells in the lockers, a nun combing my hair with the water of the pissoir drip-pipe, dank dark gloom and sins of corridors and corners where also (on the girl side) my sister Nin dashed in eternities echoing of her own horror–one afternoon as the whole school stood silent in the noon gravel, listening and fidgeting, Joe, who’d done some pécker (sin) during the recess, was being whanged with a big ruler with iron rims on the ass in the Sister Superior’s office–shrieking and howling he was, when I asked him about it later he said “It hurt” and didn’t make any excuses for the howling he did. Joe was always a big cowboy. We played in some old Farmer’s (Farmer Kelly’s) field–he had a solemn farmhouse on West Sixth with attendant hugetree and barns, 100-years-old farm, in the middle of middleclass cottages of Centralville, behind his great fields spread, apples, hollows, meadows, some corn close in, fences,—with the St. Louis parish on his flank (rectory and church and school and auditorium and battered sadfield of recess) (St. Louis, where my brother’s funeral darkened in a fitful glimmer before my eyes … in a dim far loneliness far from here and now … forgotten rains have shrouded and re-shrouded the burial grounds) … Farmer Kelly-his old lamplit oil house flimmered in a glub of night trees when we passed going from my house to Joe’s, we always wondered what kind of an old mysterious hermit he must be, I knew farmers and farm life from Uncle John Giradoux in the Nashua woods where I went in summers … to a cobwebbed Sax of forest trees–

A kid across the street from Joe’s died, we heard wailing; another kid in a street between Joe’s and mine, died–rain, flowers–the smell of flowers–an old Legionnaire died, in blue gold horrors of cloth and velvet and insignias and paper-wreaths and the cadaverous death of satin pillows– Oh yoi yoi I hate that–my whole death and Sax is wound in satin coffins– Count Condu slept in one all day below the Castle-purple lip’t–they buried little boys in them–I saw my brother in a satin coffin, he was nine, he lay with the stillness and the face of my former wife in her sleep, accomplished, regretted–the coffin streaks, spiders join his hand below–he’d lay in the sun of worms looking for the lambs of the sky–he’d gook a ghost no more in those shroudy halls of sand incarnate dirt behung in drapes of grain by level deep doop dung–what a thing to gape at– AND THROUGH ROTTING SATIN.

I gave up the church