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By Root 481 0

fairies in blue mist gardens with gingerbread Holland skylark rooftops (with breadcrumbs on them), talking to wistful heroines about the mean old monster on the other bosky side of the dale —”In another part of the forest, mein princess, the lark’s largesse is largely hidden”—and other sinister meanings– shortly after dreaming that I dive into dreams of upper hills with white houses slashed across by rays of a Maine sun sending sad redness over pines in a long highway that goes unbelievably and with … remorse … jump off the bus so I can stay in little Gardiner town, I bang at shutters, that sun’s same red, no soap, the people of the north are silent, I take a freight train to Lowell and settle on that little hill where I rode my bicycle down, near Lupine Road, near the house where batty woman had the Catholic altar, where–where— (I remember the statue of the Virgin Mary in her livingroom candlelight)—

And I wake up in the morning and it’s bright March sun —my sister and I, after hurried oatmeals, rush out in the fresh morning not unenlivened by the dew-residue of the river in its muddy slaw down by the tearful shore–Nature’s come to pet and woo poor billywoo in the river valley-golden clouds of blue morning shine above the decay of the flood–little children dance along the washlined neighborhoods, throw sunny rocks in muddy rivers of the turtle day,— In a Susquehanna special river shore on Riverside Street-a-Dreams, legitimate, I saunter along with my sister to the library, throwing scaled rocks on the river, drowning their flight in mud floodwaters of greenly corpses bumping– Sailing along and jumping in the air we dally to the library, fourteen–

I come home from the library that morning, up Merrimac Street with Nin. At one point we veer off to Moody Street parallel. Ruddy morning sun on stone and ivy (our books firm under our arms, joy)—the Royal Theater we pass, remembering the gray past of 1927 when we went to movies together, to the Royal, free because Pop’s printing press that printed their programs was in back, early days, the usher upstairs niggerheaven balcony where we sat had raspy voice, we waited impatiently for 1:15 movie time, sometimes arrived 12:30 and waited all that time looking at cherubims in the ceiling, round Moorish Royal Theater pink and gilt and crystal-crazy ceiling with a Sistine Madonna around the dull knob where a chandelier should be,—long waits in rickety nervous snapping bubblegum seat-scuff Seattle tatter “Shaddapl” of usher, who also had hand missing with a hook at the hump World War I veteran my father knew him well fine fellow–waiting for Tim McCoy to jump onscreen, or Hoot Gibson, or Mix, Tom Mix, with snowy teeth and coalblack eyebrows under enormous snow white bright blinding sombreros of the Crazy Hollywood silent West–leaping thru dark and tragic gangs of inept extra-fighters fumbling with beat torn vests instead of bright spurs and feather-holsters of Heroes– “Gard, Ti Jean, le Royal, on y alia au Royal tou le temps en?—on faisa ainque pensee allez au Royal–as t’heur on est grandis on lit des livres”(Look, Ti Jean, the Royal, we used to go to the Royal all the time hey?—that’s all we thought about go to the Royal–now we are grown up we read books.) And we trip along gaily, Nin and I, past the Royal, the Daumier Club where my father played the horses, Alexander’s meat market on the canal now in the Saturday morning all mad with a thousand mothers milling at the sawdust counters. Across the street the old drugstore in an ancient wood Colonial block house of Indian times showing jockstraps and bedpans in the window and pictures of the backs of venereal sufferers (made you wonder what awful place they’d been to get such marks of their pleasure).

“I never did forgive you for that time you hit me on the head with a marble Ti Jean,” Nin is saying to me, “but I will never hold it against you–but you hit me on the head.” I had, too, but if with Repulsion, champion of the Turf, she wouldn’t be saying it without a lump on her head. Luckily I used a regular marble not the ballbearing–I flew