Tom Robbins - Wild Ducks Flying Backward

I stopped by Satan’s house,

I just happened to be in the neighborhood.

Satan came downstairs in a Raiders jacket.

His aura was like burnt rubber, but his grin could paint a sunrise on a coal shed wall.

“I see you’ve met Desire and Fulfillment,” he said, polishing his monocle with a blood-flecked rag.

“Regret is in the kitchen making coffee.”

Ancient elf bones stewing in the rain,

Angels the size of fruitflies circling a buddha turd,

Star maps drawn in lipstick on the mud walls of opium towns.

Images like those,

scenes such as these—

The red midgets of hell challenge Suzy’s friends to a snowball fight

Or

In the cave behind the waterfall

the ant king licks the clitoris

of the sleeping anthropologist. —

existing only on paper

are yet more important

than flags, bibles, gold,

guns and reputations.

So

throw off your armor of acronyms,

your layers of numerical padding and

come bathe with me,

come slide beside me naked

into the world’s steamy honeycomb

of words.

The phantom arrived in a neon speedboat

ferrying a cargo

of coconuts and diamonds.

From the veranda of the malaria hotel

we saw it coming:

a kabuki magazine published by a hurricane.

Its clown-head prow sawed the surf in half

causing Crayola buddhas to run

over the hill with sacks of tadpoles on their backs.

A fat old tropical radio

interrupted the news to announce

that it was now king of the waterbugs.

Watching it turn wine into mink milk,

bedsheets into sandwiches of snow,

we imagined it must be a wind-up toy

designed by a mad scientist

to brighten the long frown of time.

But…

in the end

it was just my old mistress

and your new boss,

the moon.

Brown spider dangling

from a single strand.

Up down, up down:

Zen yo-yo.

They’ve built their nests

in the chimneys of my heart,

those swallows that you lost.

Everywhere she walks,

that ghost is right behind her:

Ah, panty outline!

I

The witch-girl who lives by the bend in the river is said to keep a fart in a bottle.

It’s a poisonous fart, green as cabbage, loud as a shotgun; and after moonset or before moonrise, her hut is illuminated by its pale mephitic glow. For a time, passersby thought she had television.

Of course, no antenna sprouts from her thatched roof, no satellite dish dwarfs her woodpile, and can you imagine the cable company stringing wires across the marsh and through the forest so that a witch-girl could watch the Occult Channel? Anyway, how would she pay for it? With the contents of her mushroom basket, the black candles she makes from hornet fat, her belladonna wine? With that cello she saws with a human bone?

It’s conceivable that she could pay for it with her body: her body’s been admired by many a fisherman who’s chanced upon her wading the rapids in loonskin drawers. But no man’s ever bought her body, and only one has had the courage to take it for free.

That fellow’s gone away now. It’s said he fled back to South America and left her in the lurch. Oh, but she still has a hold on him, you can bet on that. Our witch-girl’s got a definite hook in that fly-by-night romeo. She’s woven his mustache hairs into a tiny noose. She’s got his careless fart in a bottle by the stove.

II

Turn a mountain upside down, you have a woman. Turn a woman upside down, you have a valley. Turn a valley upside down, you get folk music.

In the old days, the men in our village played trombone. Some better than others, obviously, but most of the men could play. Only the males, sad to say. The women danced. It was the local custom. The practice has all but died out, though to this day, grizzled geezers are known to hide trombones under their beds at the nursing home. It’s strictly forbidden, but late on summer nights, you can sometimes hear nostalgic if short-winded trombone riffs drifting out of the third-story windows, see silhouettes of old women on the second floor, dancing on swollen feet in fuzzy slippers or spinning in rhythmic circles in their wheelchairs.

As noted, however, our musical traditions have virtually vanished. Nowadays, people get their music from compact discs or FM radio. Who has time anymore to learn an instrument? Only the witch-girl by the bend in the river, sawing her cello with a human tibia, producing sounds like Stephen King’s nervous system caught in a mousetrap.

When milk sours before it leaves the udder or grain starts to stink in the fields; when workers go out on strike at the sauerkraut factory, the missile base, or the new microchip plant down the road; when basements flood, lusty young wives get bedtime migraines, dogs wake up howling in the middle of the night, or the interference on TV is like a fight in hot grease between corn flakes and a speedboat, people around here will say, “The witch-girl’s playing her cello again.”

Turn folk music upside down, you get mythology. Turn mythology upside down, you get history. Turn history upside down, you get religion, journalism, hysteria, and indecision.

III

The setting sun turned the river into a little red schoolhouse. Thus motivated, the frogs got to work conjugating their verbs. The witch-girl handled the arithmetic.

She divided a woodpecker by the square root of a telephone pole.

Multiplied the light in a fox’s eyes by the number of umlauts on a Häagen-Dazs bar.

Added a kingfisher’s nest to the Gross National Product.

Calculated the ratio of duende to pathos in the death song of a lamp-singed moth.

Subtracted a mallow from a marsh, an ant from an anthem, a buddha from a peach can shot full of holes.

IV

A white plastic bucket in a snowy field. A jackknife of geese scratching God’s dark name in the sky. A wind that throbs but is silent. Candy wrappers silent against fence wire. Stags silent under their fright-wig menorahs. Bees silent in their science-fiction wax. A silent fiddle bow of blue smoke bobbing in the crooked chimney atop the witch-girl’s shack.

It is on a cold, quiet Sunday afternoon past Christmas that the television crew arrives in our village. By suppertime, everybody but the hard cases at the nursing home knows it’s in town. At the Chamber of Commerce breakfast Monday morning, hastily arranged to introduce the videopersons to the citizenry, the banquet room is overflowing. Understandably, we villagers assume the crew is here to film the new industries of which we are rightly proud. The director is diplomatic when he explains that missile bases and microchip plants are a dime a dozen.

“We are making a documentary on flatus,” the director explains. The audience is spellbound.