Meredith Quartermain: I, Bartleby

You plunge forth, arms swung up in full march, left hand behind, right flung forward offering as though in a shout, Here! Buy this platter of brains, this tray of tripe. Never will you ever eat such fine entrails. Oblivious that your forward leg bleeds into the pole of a water carrier tall as a lamppost, buckets hanging. You plow on, nose to futurity, mindless of your Siamese twinship with Water Carrier, mindless that she anchors you, while you, like the arm of a shop sign, hang this pail-carrying stalwart over the street so that everyone passing will be entranced at your pas étourdi , your reckless nonchalance, unheedful insouciance, and general inappetence for the fact that you’re balanced on Water Carrier’s elbow.

What’s it like up there sailing over her head, full of blatancy, full of averment and unequivocal vociferation, full of flourish and fanfare and cocksure legibility, with your leg that’s also a water bucket in which you dangle suspended, irresolute as a butterfly while Water Carrier balances your unsettled hovering by growing on her other arm biceps and triceps big enough to hoist a cast-iron bathtub below your outstretched platter of lampredotto? What are those toothless whale gullets gumming your arms? That hatchet hooking your stanchion? That nose in your crotch? That leg-swallowing jaw bookended to square head lecturing his adoration?

What’s this warpness that seizes your woofy significance of where you thought you were going when you were water — you floated in a watery room, you breathed with gills and heard whales opening and shutting gates in the ocean — a gently jiggling thunderous ocean. You think of Jonah and wish he could have been she, a water carrier, and you wish she had returned from the leviathan, you wish she had taught us to unravel it, so that never again could it swallow us, and we could always stand on our own ground.

A cat sidles cornerwise into the room, her whiskers knobbed like leg bones, her eyes footprints in a Halloween sheet to see themselves in mirrors floating on the night. Oh, mirror mirror unfairest of them all, my tongue’s caught in a mouth trap. I’ll claw this bedsheet, shred it to naughts and crosses. Shred it to hopscotch. Let’s see how flimsy I can make this dogged whitewash where they do their doggy roll-on-the-backery and piss-on-the-wallery. Let’s see how far I can prick it, see how it sharpens my pricks up their ears. Let’s make it a pricknic of pricktitude. Mirror mirror, who’s the prickliest? Who’s the best teacher with periculum for the prixiest cataprixses? I’ll look in the prictionary. Get some juxtaprickaments. Cat on a mat. Mat in the night. Night beneath snow. Snow seeming right. Right angled wrong. Wrong facing self. Self as a snake. Snake on a shelf. Shelf in the sky. Sky under sheet. Sheet over cat. Sheets to the wind. Shoed to a coat. Shut to the coot. Cut by the shirt. Shoot for the kite. Hopscotch these grid-eyed looking-words of flapping and tattered legbones. This spooking glass. This scratch mark and sea-saw of flag-natter. I’ll nip your nine-tailing. Turn again, Lord Whittington, thrice mayor of London. Your pussy in boots has stolen your clothes and all the king’s rats and all the king’s men can’t stick pussy together again.

It starts with a rabbit ear and a snout, then an eye mask and another rabbit ear that could be a tongue of the snout or the snout could be talking, wagging its jaw to explain what it’s got in its hands or why its arms are empty — this is just the way it is in times like these, and what’s a dog or a cat to do about it anyway — this is all I’ve got — this is who I am — I’d like to please you, but in times like these one can’t always do that and, in any case, I’d like to be pleasing when being that other thing which is not that wanting to be pleasing. The jaw goes on with a neck curving down a spine which could be a leg — one of four — making the arms also legs and the tongue or lower jaw also — that would be the fourth leg.

Or it could be a chair balanced on the spine, a chair with a very short back and long fat-footed legs — the back being what might have been the tongue and the chair tilting almost upside down so that if you were sitting in it you would slide out on your back, if this were in a world that had gravity. Or the curving spine could be the back of a four-toothed comb with long prongs for really curly hair. It once was an eight-toothed comb but prongs have broken out leaving gaps and a pile of crossed pieces that could be chopsticks or antelope horns or teeth pulled out by the dentist, not stubby molars, but the kind with sharp edges tapering to long pointed roots whereas really they’re prongs of a comb piled to look like whiskers of a cat shooting up from its eyebrows and out from its cheeks to warn her that her tunnel is only big enough for mice.

The upside-down chair could be the head of the cat sitting on its haunches pondering what to do and the chopsticks or comb prongs could be its whiskers in a painting by Picasso or Chagall, which is both a painting of the cat and a painting of the cat’s thoughts floating around in space. A head thinks it’s bigger than its legs and forgets how whiskers attach. It longs to attach them but the whiskers swell to clubs or become knobs of antennae on a butterfly. Or knobs of goat horns above flopping goat ears.

But Goat has lost her face in a window so very much not a goat or a cat. So very much not something growing like a lake or a tree, a mountain or a blade of grass. So contained and divided. So cornered, squared, and closed. So criss-crossed like a muzzle or a strapped trunk waiting on a dock. Cat, too, with back to Goat, waiting on the dock. Their ears almost touch, listening to listening. Goat’s voice caught inside the trunk, Cat sprawling back on her side in the sun, looking over her shoulder, reading Goat’s thoughts. It’s not really a trunk, you know — it’s a book that’s hatching your horns and ears. See the pages — two bricks on end, all mouth, talking, floating on the blackness of endless universe. Can you hear them? They have no bodies, only heads — no eyes, only hinges jawing the lines in a play about a cat and a goat. It’s not very funny, thought Goat.

Robin Blaser said at Naropa, We swim among the constitution of words — chemical — always challenging our stillness. At Steveston, you swam with salmon. Yü , a fish held a furrowed field itself a mouth an entrance for an eye an ear, erhan eye held flaglike from the head, or erha plant spreading underground, like words once they’re heard. Here you’re gathering chian assemblage under the roof of she , a shed, junction of paths on your river, yü , a small boat assembly of eye and currents, stream with ground with dawn’s sun over the horizon and tree and heart heart’s right angle ten eyes could not find fault with. You hold here chinactuality; presence. Walking boldly along you hold heaven and your bow you draw its string and lead into threaded fields . Your bird flies up unfurling wings from your square and labour your meditation gathering documents. A dog rides your shoulder for a kiss.