8. Tulips sink Ships

it is an anagram. nothing more. the road goes no further.
we have neither arrived or started. The river is crimson in its haste.
Names have been forgotten. They are no longer needed
all conversation is photograph or sketch and for emphasis aquatint, paracetamol
moustache. roller coaster. coney island. It is almost spring.

Pass through and leave no trace

being watched for so long.

the tide comes in goes out. You are 50% over the Atlantic
this is the furthest we have been separated.
we haven’t played chess for hours
hands are turning to chalk
ammonites
tulip

behind the sunglasses you are thinking of
Clun and the ruined castle.

"The town which is the smallest town in Shropshire and is smaller than many villages in the county. It is also the only town in Shropshire never to have had a railway line or station."

The Passion Play has begun.

Explicate.

Body of christ amongst the bracken

there is a thing between us

thin razor like
the sweep of the beach against the town front

the wind drying out the skin.

we are not watching the sun set.

It does not believe in ghost.

They came to the hotel as an excuse. The hotel garden had a life sized chessboard cut into the grass. She wore a white dress in Edwardian style and he wore a black one. Each sported a parasol of the opposite color as they spent their afternoons dancing a gigue from opposite corners of the board. By early evening after meeting in the middle a minimum of eighteen times, they did a mutual swoon and collapse on the grass. He would then commence to sneeze a minimum of 38 times while she covered her face with her hat and listened. Then he presented her with the same wedding band and asked her again to marry him.

“There is grass on your skirt”, she told him, and kissed him very tenderly.

They were already married and had been for several lifetimes.

Sometimes there was a child and she taught the child, male or female much about butterflies and the art of sewing a sleeve to a gown.

It is a pleasure to marry over and over again especially when you get to be Gustav and Alma Mahler.

Proclamation: We don’t particularly like your Mistress this time. She is daft and has ruined our best lipstick by somehow getting toast crumbs inside the tube.

Whereas she has a ruined our best lipstick

Whereas nobody, as of yet, has cleaned up the corners of toast from this morning.

Whereas this passage is tricky and it irritates us

We have turned you into a parrot. Ha!

(Rennecke doesn’t really tell anyone about the doll collection but she had been found out several times, late nights at the theatre, drunkenly assembling them for a labor rally or having doll weddings)

The tulips have begun to bloom, the ones from the bulbs purchased at the Schiphol. They are emitting a strange iridescence. It is oddly pleasing.

PS. Your Mistress is too skinny and has surgical scars from keeping time with that jackal of a surgeon.

Then, on the days when they had a child, they watched him play on the chessboard while doing their balancing exercises on the perimeter. He wondered aloud if they shouldn’t live in an actual house with tulips in the garden. “Tulips sink ships”, she told him and kissed him. Hotels were better for the quicker departures.

your eyes were animals in winter appear as totem-animals. But animals nonetheless. Which means, they are not symbols, or pure allegories, not slaves of signification, but animals still, with all their animal qualities. and your fingerprints were waltz, candelabra, backstroke

a clock. a gilded clock. Blessed the hand that giveth
Then it happens. Absolute silence. Complete nothing.
People are frozen. For one second. Then for another.
The equilibrium of the candelabra.
Is pungent. Disgraceful countryside.

I haven’t studied Latin for years

but I think it says

“there are too many people in my life”

It is only in retrospect we understand these things.

2 Down
And the hunt chases around the vase leaping over fences running past woods they use their crops and the hounds bay. (4,7)

14 Across
Crew arrange with King way to get on board (9)

When we entered the church we knew there was something special
which was confirmed by the anglo-saxon grave in the crypt

We discussed a duel but lunch made us forget the difference.

The lobster was ok.

You wrote on a postcard showing a liner.
I smoked a cigarette on the terrace.

The first cigarette I ever smoked

in the deserted village in the red hills

Across the pond, he has floated a paper boat to me. It only says “Hello”

trees bend in towards james.
lisette remembers a song inside her throats, more or less scientifically.
there is a particular hardness to the child’s gaze.
some trees bend away from james, he is conscious that this is arcadian only in reality.
lisette forgets ever knowing the song.
robert looks at her, knows how beautiful she would look to someone else.
nearby there’s a zoo.
it’s as if we can hear the animals crying themselves to sleep, clara says, but she doesn’t believe what she says.
the child is asleep.
the situation is reversed.
james throws himself at lisette’s lip & misses.
i’m late, says The Cousin, who performs operations in a room lit by a single unshaded bulb.
state sponsored terror.

Now let’s conceptualise the situation. It is happening in an always delayed future that is, logically, perpetually The Past (see bibliography). All news channels report looting; better to starve or freeze or drown than to loot. Hot in its songs.

takes a step closer
colourless eyes blink
once & once only.
was that God
? housing estate.
units.
DESPAIR

So they got ready for the dance & the world was scented with pine & amber-flask powders. Taxis lined up to receive the wounded animals. Take them to the emergency hospital episode 1000 said the killer, rubbing her knees with champagne. They are eating zoo animals, says a distraught soldier to his mother. She smiles through him, he’s with her in the park eating nectarines: a picnic.!? Her outline is protean, yet unmoving. Her insides are displayed behind bullet-proof glass. the bullet-proof glass shatters. Found text. Dead labor is resuscitated and passed on into the value of the new commodity by living labor David Harvey a companion to Marx’s capital, p. 129.

the next year was pale blue.
that’s a colour suits veronika, she silks her f l e s h with it.
her eyes float away upon warm breezes.
each island is more beautiful than the last, although they are identical.
sleep all day & at night drink soup through a straw.
iridescences, pinions of mauves & greens & a snowy grey.
it gets so late in the afternoons.
whoever is a stranger lies on the bed, the sheets soaked with sugar.
a dark blue, neither black nor phosphorous.
all that ”time“ the ceiling has stalked patient third from the door away from the window.
says it believes the sea is closing in.
on.
eradication.
kiss kiss.
kiss