Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

(we infiltrate like angels trying to change and are broken in on by a young voice down the hall from a 1977 apartment in some articulate structure accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units and the voice is talking to the basso profundo but not about the //amto-opera warehouse gig thrust upon him, who gives off a delighted rumble now at the words "This weekend we’re going to play leapfrog in the asparagus bed, Popsy" accomplished by a clink which as Larry does not guess is a large jar of the basso’s down the hall in his apartment, his latest discovery, Clamato Juice!)—

Until there is nowhere to go except understanding: however, the division of sadness which was Brad’s way of shouldering brotherhood—"and crawls on his belly like a reptile," sounds the barker’s cry in the voice of more than one fourteen-year-old including Jim — left a less-known job of grief or action to the superior brother Jim, the study of which he found one day in his still teenage grandma’s Democrat "piece" on Mars, done when interest was at a height (August 18, 1892—"apogee," darts in the interrogator), but Jim’s interest betrayed itself in a quite foreign detail, it improved Jim’s study of his side of the grief responsibility (awkward words, but) also of how the Hermit-Inventor of New York explained the Anasazi healer’s theory of the cleft by which the layers enveloping our neat fragment of the brother Sun, brother to others yet not to us who are a mere breakage become anxiously clear (through convergence of semi-explosive clays) and bent on becoming more, came periodically into line; and on that day, the Sun would not go down until those drawn by convergence of the many gods’ periodic effort to think one thought in common had had the chance to be found by cosms of this tearing or breakage of the Sun which, like ceremony, recalled that signal tearing one of many tearings or great breathings of this brother Sun when at the peak of breath or inhaled explosions of possibility that drop of fire blood split off, in love with, or expelled by, its own hunger for the void or to find what rein of force waited like a relative string arcing some bond unknown even to the cactus with its nesting eye and the birds that the winter wind becomes when it leaves: and the person who is struck by such reminiscent cosms of the Sun’s inhaled breath would find such purpose, at last, that she would start her life over as if either she had aimed inward to the center where the hells and rock-skinned saurs and river-rhines and the rock-skinned rhinogog and also the rich kettles of change tipped gimbaling this way and that upon the magma of a magnet that was not there, or her starts had been launched as secretly outward as her inexplicit "hello" to other worldlings in her 1892 Democrat piece when Mars, in opposition to Earth every twenty-six months, reached its regular fifteen-year extreme of opposed closeness—"hello":

amidst speculation engendering in the mind a wild longing to know whether people like ourselves live there and enjoy the hills and valleys and rocks and all the waterways of the universe, the rivers, waterfalls, even yes canals, and the eternal sunsets — they surely have enough moonlight! we would want to know if they were anything like ourselves and slept, eat and drank to live; and whether they knew anything of electricity and gunpowder or would like to know; and if they were going to have a World’s Fair

(the giveaway) — she would make a start "out of" no less than her future, or, in awesome fact, marriage to Harflex, the suitor, who awaited her presence,’ her go-ahead back along the shores of Choor: while the Hermit-Inventor of New York explained the effect of these cosms of the Sun winging all instantly through this long window comprising in one long "point" all the single clefts in layers of breath embracing our own known world, the bodily senses of one’s given future: but Jim found later he had on Brad’s Day begun extending this material, having gotten mad at his grandmother — and maybe from the moment when Pearl W. Myles, his statuesque journalism teacher, appeared in the bereaved Throckmorton Street house, dark red paisley draped across the Chickering grand, a dust of English biscuits hovering round their sweet tin in a curtained dining room where a fortnight’s supply of Newark and Asbury Park and New York papers stared neatly stacked on a pulled-out chair, soap (Pear’s mild), upstairs flowers (fresh from Margaret’s garden which Sarah always accepted, while calling them "dead"), a nutmeg left to roll around the kitchen table (it might have been a brown Mexican jumping bean Bob Yard’s wife gave Jim after a trip to New York where she said it was the Italians who imported Mexican jumping beans) as cold as a dead turtle: the East Far Eastern Princess listened, and as she did so, the Sun began to tip into the horizon line of irregular mountains warped up toward the Sun as if (to allow the Hermit-Inventor his way of accounting for this strange afternoon) the axis had tilted so that this southwestern corner of the Earth became a pole. This explanation was no better than the Princess’s twin dreams the night of the long afternoon, nor the large turtle mouth painted upon the face of dancers in the snowy dawn of the year according to an outcast cousin from another people who carried water to the Anasazi twice a week though he was by now barely more than an occasional if intelligent fume given off by time’s inching root, which the Anasazi’s own thin mouth fresher than all the rest of him put together could be heard to tell, though with a softness audible only to those at a certain distance from him, not those as close as the Chilean javelina specialist Mena emerging before him upon the last in a series of ladders, her mouth painted white only by some love in her mind’s quest for the white-lipped javelina, not by ceremonial pigment, nor to the Navajo Prince when, long before Princess came along or giant bird, he knelt next to the Anasazi healer and took from him a Colt pistol, having at a distance of half a mile heard, moments before, the breath of the ancient healer telling how he had let his medicines take him for decades at a time away from his faithful and humorous wife and doting children only to find that one day they were gone across the space of one unending sunset which begot a double moon inside the Princess’s mind that night whereby she saw the Moon singly with each eye and dreamt that she was agreeing with a council led by the Prince’s brother that she would cost that young horseman "her" Prince his life.

And the trails he left, when she departed three nights later toward Zuni country (with its afternoon-long ramparts and nests of red cliffs), were not of cornmeal nor of crusts from her wooded memories of Choor but were only in her lover’s mind grown there by the thought of her womb hair and the embrace of her pale breasts, all such parts lost along the cells of his hand’s brain, bold as decision, humble as seeming-fact that’s beyond what idiots call sacrifice; and so he followed her.

We are such mingled growths, which the interrogator incorrectly remembers as Owl Woman’s words "I am running far to see the land, / While back in my house the songs are intermingling," who has yielded his button (though to no one) for the moment and says "We" to us and sees our no doubt human matter here as a far cry from some center of information and political identification.

Well he may, for the Anasazi medicine man claimed that not he but his many hundred years younger colleague Owl Woman had sent the Princess the dream she came to him with on the morning after the Hermit’s interview with her near the eyrie of the giant bird: to wit, that having run hard all night to get to where she was to see what was vital to her precisely at dawn, the Princess was stricken by the dawn rays too soon, as if life won’t wait for you to find it.