Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [54]
“They think a pit exists not?
“Ah!”—(for suddenly he sees me, and ducks).
BOOK FIVE
The Flood
1
Doctor Sax STOOD on the dark shore, a ledge above the waters–it was March, the river was flooded, ice floes were thundering against the rock–New Hampshire had poured its torrents to the sea. Heavy snows had melted in a sudden soft weekend–gay people made snowballs–the runners were noisy in the gutters.
Doctor Sax, holding his shroud around his shoulder firmer, utttered a low laugh beneath the roar of waters and stepped closer to the edge—
“Now a flood will bring the rest,” he prophesied. Just barely you can now see him, gliding off between the trees, bound for his work, his “mwee hee hee ha ha” floats back sepulchral and glee-mad, the Doctor has rushed to work to find his spider-juices and bat powders. “The day of the Great Spider,” is come–his words ring beneath the Moody Street Bridge as he hustles off to his Dracut Tigers shack—one lorn pine stands above his bier-shaped house, into which, with a doorslam, he vanishes like ink in inky night, his last laugh trailing to any suspect ear in the March— faintly in the air, following his laugh, you hear the distant dumb roar of the swollen river.
“River! river! what are you trying to do!” I’m yelling at the river, standing on the ledge among bushes and rocks, beneath me great ice floes are either slipping in big lumps over a rock-dam in the holocaust or floating serenely in temporary dark drownpools or crashing square and headstone against the bier of rock, the ship side of the shore, a rock armor of the earth Merrimac Valley– The carnage of huge rains in a snow flood. “Oh rose of the north, come down!” my soul I cried to the river–
And from a small bridge at the north fairyplace where the river was 30 feet broad–up somewhere far north of Lake Winnepesaukee, north of gaps in the White Mountains, the Merrimac had an infant childly phase of beginning from an innocent bubbling-up in the Sandy pines, where fairy tale people made moos around Child Marri-mack–from the little bedangled bridge a lover boy in a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale dropped a rose into the stream–it was Saturday night and his little Gretchen had stood him up to go out with Rolfo Butcho–Hero Boy was defeated, would never see her ruby lips again or make with the stash in her pantaleens, never would the stars shine on the soft grease of her thighs, he was sunk to digging holes in the ground and ramming it bloody in, so he threw the rose away– The rose was meant for mary–and down it comes in the Merrimac Valley–following that eternal waterbed– down by Pemigawasset, down by Weir, down by weird, down by the poems of the night.
THE POEMS OF THE NIGHT
So falls the rain shroud, melted
By harps; so turns the harp gold,
Welded by mell, roll-goldened
By caramel, softened by Huge.
The weary tent of the night
Has rain starring down the wallsides,
A golden hero of the up atmospheres
Has sprung the leak in the ambiguity
That made the heavens fore-fall.
So the pollywogs grow
And the bigger frogs croak,
By the May Pole in the mud
Crazy Lazy swings her crutches—
Was the wife of Doctor Sax
Gave up him for a crud.
Maybelle Dizzitime, a gal of many
Fancies, swings her shadow ape
In the cloaks of midnight whamsy;
The ball of the pollywog may-time,
The dance of the flooded mall
Crack went the Castle underground
Cank cantank old Moritzy
Flames his froosures in the dank,
Dabbely