Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

— Quit the corn, we got a funky opera to put on, and the main actor’s traveling incognita (ha! ha! ha!) Speaks aria darkly hinted to be the great man’s fragment abandoned in anger when he fell out with a librettist on how to liberate the musical nightmare from Shakespeare’s edgy depth — real fragments of reputedly Verdi’s Hamlet text — eased away then (could he care less?) from Verdi by the young friend Muzio who toured Civil War America laughing all the way until they hit him with a tax (was it, within the larger inarticulate structure, a particular logical tax on Italians?) and somewhere out there he unloaded or purloined such sheets folded and refolded of aria and scene as threatened to summon from Hamlefs gravity of relations two triangles past and present pivoting wife/sister-in-law/mother Gertrude into deep, rainy par-allelogrammatic refractions of male poetry/love/power: so in Muzio’s wake were to be found unrecorded frontier traditions of some Latin’s wild horseless yet familiar opera— Amleto? Amleto did some Mexican-Indian divisible into one Mexican and one Indian call it? — performed in a southern Colorado saloon with, the story went, a mathematician’s daughter in the lead: and these traditions dispersed themselves during a rare symmetrical tornado in Navajo country in the eighties, only to appear as folded pages in a Victorian melodrama in New York not read but used as part of the insides of a prop, to wit stuffed desert javelina, its head and shoulders crisped with blood guaranteed by the naturalist wife of a commercial saguaro-cactus exploiter to be female human blood not shed by the javelina whose hind-mounted scent glands puzzled South American zoologists and travelers for decades until one of them nurtured an idea slowly northward following the javelina hundreds and hundreds of miles till in some wonderful dependency the tracker, feeling and at last smelling that she was tracked by what preceded her, knew so surely and doubly that she was and yet was not the momentum of the sparse herd ahead of her that she foresaw a moment when she would gain traits of theirs in exchange, possibly, for some collective mind of theirs situated who knew where, outside us all maybe, for as a system like war or love marginal to one eye may to the one next it be viewed center-stage, so will one day an immigrant cook come to teach natives that desert-fried javelina chops may bear their stuffing owfside:

— chemistry that, on its way through systems able to digest its clouds and pellets, carbons bows milks and staggered scaleless explosions, so becomes its course it reincarnates mere myth into day, a coastal day in ‘94 when the sometime Princess was turned by the Hermit-Inventor of New York to an experimental mist, to be secreted in that great, once upon a time dismembered Statue carrying a torch for the elaborate harbor, the Unknown State, in which meanwhile at other places a brave lover-scientist Prince ran up the steps into Miss Liberty’s folds about the abdomen and the might of the virgin wind-cooled sun-heated breast and felt in him a touch of her as of the entire continent so prodigal in finding its way to the wrong home at last that the only memory is ahead, the only work is a change made of knowing you will never come such a distance again from your People in the West and must now only internally howl and yell for a girl who took from what he had to give, took love, then self-protection, then more love and power part pressed upon her then acquired till she flew away under her own power, not wings of a father’s loaned bird circling in the skies above the Four Corners of a universe: so the skies themselves seemed spirals feeding on species with no compass, no princess, no crystal monitor to fly it back to Choor or the whereabouts of the Princess to whom the king had entrusted the giant bird as he had entrusted her to it:

— and the diva who has her part in many operas secretly picks up a phone in her dark duplex kitch, and because her totalitarian beloved is nearby is glad it’s a pushbutton and "dials" her friend Clara to ask her what she and her exile husband know of the sexual officer still mayhap asleep in her otherwise directionless huge bed or watching from some wonderful naked limb of his equipped with sight.

For the correspondent-woman, who tried and tried to hear the bell that rang in the void of all her memory’s trained convergences, while she kept an eye on the man with gray hair and the young, intense-talking kid and, of course, the girl, who paid as much attention to the man as the boy to her, recognized in the fresh absence of the auburn-haired dramatic woman’s elegant escort none other than the man in the park last Sunday his back to a tree beside the interior road where color-fast joggers, like all the different dogs there were, came contentedly by, passed by racing bicyclists who though they passed them seemed to stay with them as if the bikes circled the same center but further out (yet speedwise further in!), while for her part the correspondent-woman had been going through (on her park bench) being stood up by a man named Spence whom she had never seen and whom she had not liked the busy, riding-falling sound of over the phone (as though it was his phone, not hers), and to whom she had given a description of herself so he would know her, assuming he would give one of himself (when he didn’t), till a whirr of glimmering spokes soared past like force sweeping the last of the joggers past — and the Latin man leaning against the tree had a visitor out of nowhere, as light had tumbled into its shadow, a loose yet tense type of man in a ponytail wearing a fringed hide jacket glazed with some substance, maybe use, who craned his neck forward (so his neck was abnormally important to some rest of him) speaking: but looking once around the tree, he never moved his hands to express his aim, so that the correspondent-woman, intrigued, forgot she had been stood up by an unknown contact named Spence who over the phone had asked her if she knew that James Mayn’s daughter had lived in the apartment house where the correspondent-woman had attended a women’s workshop run by one Grace Kimball.

Attended also by a woman named Clara, yes?. . suspected of helping to spring from a New York State prison a supposedly anti-Castro nationalist:

So that this trained agent could supposedly find sanctuary in a South American nation. But why had a man such as her phoner said so much to her on no acquaintance?

The aforementioned anti-Castro anti-Communist with cousins in New Jersey all with thunderbolt emblems on their cigarette lighters was then to operate against that very South American, junta-ruled (what else was new?) sanctuary state he was supposedly sympathetic toward, by liquidating a key general officer of the junta and abducting a famous old socialist presently under house arrest (in this case apartment house). A nation, it is learned, recently redesigned to replicate the tough-money model generated by the Chicago Institute but a nation also where the thousand-mile-long surf coast often pondered by a maverick meteorologist moves like a would-be shadow as we think about it, listening for breakers, for breakers breathing, recalling the silence of undersea boats passing or pausing like evolved creatures, silence remembering sound, bearing music.

And now, having identified in a Mexican restaurant the mustached Latin man leaning against the tree last Sunday as the departed escort of the woman with hair whose rich auburn might drip blood, the correspondent Lincoln left the place certain the gray-haired, powerful man’s eyes were on her — she would gladly have made a foursome — he had obviously had it with the kids, yet loved them.

But she did not stop, nor look back, convinced that she had figured something out only to find behind it the obstacle that had been keeping her from it.