Desolation Angels (6 page)

At night at my desk in the shack I see the reflection of myself in the black window, a rugged faced man in a dirty ragged shirt, need-a-shave, frowny, lipped, eyed, haired, nosed, eared, handed, necked, adamsappled, eyebrowed, a reflection just with all behind it the void of 7000000000000 light years of infinite darkness riddled by arbitrary limited-idea light, and yet there's a twinkle in me eye and I sing bawdy songs about the moon in the alleys of Dublin, about vodka hoy hoy, and then sad Mexico sundown-over-rocks songs about amor, corazón, and tequila—My desk is littered with papers, beautiful to look at thru half closed eyes the delicate milky litter of papers piled, like some old dream of a picture of papers, like papers piled on a desk in a cartoon, like a realistic scene from an old Russian film, and the oil lamp shadowing some in half—And looking at my face closer in the tin mirror, I see the blue eyes and sun red face and red lips and weekly beard and think: “Courage it takes to live and face all this iron impasse of die-you-fool? Nah, when all is said and done it doesnt matter”—It must be, it
is,
the Golden Eternity enjoying itself with movies—Torture me in tanks, what else can I believe?—Cut me limbs off with a sword, what must I do, hate Kalinga to the bitter death and beyond?—Pra, it's the mind. “Sleep in Heavenly Peace.”—

27

All of a sudden on an innocent moonlit tuesday night I turn on the radio for the bull session and hear all the excitement about lightning, the Ranger has leff a message with Pat on Crater Mountain for me to call at once, I do, he says “How is the lightning up there?”—I say “It's a clear moonlit night up here, with a north wind blowing”—“Well,” he says a little nervous and harassed, “I guess you live right”—Just then I see a flash to the south—He wants me to call the trail crew at Big Beaver, which I do, no answer—Suddenly the night and the radio is charged with excitement, the flashes on the horizon are like the second-to-the-last stanza of the Diamond Sutra (the Diamondcutter of the Wise Vow), a sinister sound comes out of the heather, the wind in the cabin rigging takes on a hypersuspicious air, it seems as though the six weeks of lonely bored solitude on Desolation Peak has come to an end and I'm
down
again, just because of distant lightning and distant voices and the rare distant mumble of thunder—The moon shines on, Jack Mountain is lost behind clouds, but Desolation is not, I can just make out the Jack Snowfields surling in their gloom—a vast batwing 30 miles or 60 miles wide advances slowly, soon t'obliterate the moon, which ends sorrowing in her cradle thru the mist—I pace in the windy yard feeling strange and glad—the lightning yellowdances over ridges, two fires are already started in the Pasayten Forest according to excited Pat on Crater who says “I'm having fun here noting down the lightning strikes” which he doesnt have to do it's so far away from him and from me 30 miles—Pacing, I think of Jarry Wagner and Ben Fagan who wrote poems on these lookouts (on Sourdough and Crater) and I wish I could see them to get that strange feeling that I'm down off the mountain and the whole bloody mess of boredom done—Somehow, because of the excitement, the door of my shack is more exciting as I open and close it, it seems to be
peopled,
poems written about it, washtubs and Friday night and men in the world,
something,
something to do, or be—It is no longer Tuesday Night August 14 in Desolation but the Night of the World and the Lightning Flash and there I pace thinking the lines from the Diamond Sutra (in case lightning should come and curl me up inside my sleeping bag with the fear of God or a heart attack, thunder crashing right on my lightning rod)—: “If a follower should cherish any limited judgment of the realness of the feeling of his own selfhood, the realness of the feeling of the selfness of others, the realness of the feeling of living beings, or the realness of the feeling of a universal self, he would be cherishing something that is non-existent” (my own paraphrase) and now tonight more than ever I see these words to be true—For all this phenomena, that which shows, and all noumena, that which shows not, is the loss of the Heavenly Kingdom (and not even that)—“A dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, the lightning's flash …”

“I'll find out and let you know—woop, one more—so I'll find out and let you know, aw, how things are,” Pat is saying on the radio as he stands at his firefinder marking X's where he judges the lightning strikes, he says “Woop” every 4 seconds, I realize how funny he really is with his “woops” like Irwin and I with our “Captain Oops” who was Captain of a Crazy Ship up the gangplank of which on sailing day all kinds of vampires, zombies, mysterious travelers and harlequin clowns in disguise did troop on board, and when, en route sur le voyage, the ship reaches the end of the world and's gonna plop over, the Captain says “Oops”

A bubble, a shadow—

woop—

The lightning flash

“Woop,” say people spilling soup—It really is dreadful, but the passer-through-everything must really feel good about everything that happens, the lucky exuberant bastard—(cancer's exuberant)—so if a lightning bolt disintegrates Jack Duluoz in his Desolation, smile, Ole Tathagata enjoyed it like an orgasm and not even that

28

Hiss, hiss, says the wind bringing dust and lightning nearer—Tick, says the lightning rod receiving a strand of electricity from the strike on Skagit Peak, great power silently and unobtrusively slithers through my protective rods and cables and vanishes into the earth of desolation—No thunderbolts, only death—Hiss, tick, and in my bed I feel the earth move—Fifteen miles to the south just east of Ruby Mountain and somewhere near Panther Creek I'd guess a large fire rages, huge orange spot, at 10 o'clock electricity which is attracted to heat hits it again and it flares up disastrously, a distant disaster that makes me say “Oo wow”—Who burns eyes crying there?

Thunder in the mountains—

the iron

Of my mother's love

And in the dense electrical air I sense the remembrance of Lake-view Avenue near Lupine Road where I was born, some thunderstorm night in the summer of 1922 with grit in the wet pavement, trolley tracks electrified and shiny, wet woods beyond, my apocloptatical paratomanotial babycarriage yeeurking on the porch of blues, wet, under fruited lightglobe as all Tathagata sings in horizoning flash and rumble bumble thunder from the bottom of the womb, the Castle in the night—

Round about midnight I've been staring so intently out the window dark I get hallucinations of fires everywhere and near, three of them right in Lightning Creek, phosphorescent orange faint verticals of ghost fire that come and go in my swarming electrified eyeballs—The storm keeps lulling then sweeping around somewhere in the void and hitting my mount again, so finally I fall asleep—Wake to the patter of rain, gray, with hope silver-holes in the skies to my south—there at 177° 16′ where I saw the big fire I see a strange brown patch in the general snowy rock showing where the fire raged and spitted out in the allnight rain—Around Lightning and Cinammon no sign of lastnight ghost-fires—Fog seeps, rain falls, the day is thrilling and exciting and finally at noon I feel the raw white winter of the North sweeping from a Hozomeen wind, the feel of Snow in the air, iron gray and steel blue everywhere the rocks—“
My
, but she was yar!” I keep yelling as I wash my dishes after a good a delicious pancake breakfast with black coffee.

The days go—

they cant stay—

I dont realize

I think this as I draw a ring around August 15 on the calendar and look, it's already 11:30 on the clock and so the day half over—With a wet rag in the yard I wipe the summer's dust off my ruined shoes, and pace and think—The hinge of the outhouse door is loose, the chimney piece is knocked over, I'll have to wait a month for a decent bath, and I dont care—The rain returns, all the fire's'll lose their tinder—In my dreams I dream that I have controverted some wish of Cody's wife Evelyn concerning their daughter, on some sunny barge house in sunny Frisco, and she gives me the dirtiest look in the history of hate and sends me an electrical bolt that sends a wave of shock into my gut but I'm determined not to be afraid of her and stick by my ideas and go on calmly talking from my chair—It's the same barge where my mother'd entertained the Admirals in an old dream—Poor Evelyn, she hears me agree with Cody that it was silly of her to give the only floor lamp to the Bishop, over her dishes her heart pounds—Poor human hearts pounding everywhere.

29

That rainy afternoon, according to a promise I made myself owing to the memory of a wonderful Chinese rice dish Jarry'd cooked up for us in the Mill Valley shack in April, I make a crazy Chinese sweet and sour sauce on the hot stove, compounded of turnip greens, sauerkraut, honey, molasses, red wine vinegar, pickled beet juice, sauce concentrate (very dark and bitter) and as it boils on the stove and the little rice pot makes the lid dance I pace in the yard and say “Chinee dinner alway velly good!” and remember in a rush my father and Chin Lee in Lowell, I see the redbrick wall outside the windows of the booths of the restaurant, scent rain, rain of redbrick and Chinese dinners unto San Francisco across the lonesome rains of the plains and mountains, I remember raincoats and smiling teeth, it's a vast inevitable vision with poor misguided hand of—of fog—sidewalks, or cities, of cigar smoke and paying at the counter, of the way Chinese Chefs always scoop up a round ladleful of rice from the big pot and bring the little China bowl up to the inverted ladle and dump in leaving a round globe of steaming rice that is brought to you in your booth along with those insanely fragrant sauces—“Chinee dinner alway velly good”—and I see generations of rain, generations of white rice, generations of redbrick walls with the old-fashioned red neon flashing on it like warm compost of brick-dust fire, ah the sweet indescribable verdurous paradise of pale cockatoos and yocking mongrels and old Zen Nuts with staffs, and flamingos of Cathay, that you see on their marvelous Ming Vases and those of other duller dynasties—Rice, steaming, the smell of it so rich and woody, the look of it as pure as driven lakevalley clouds on a day like this one of the Chinee dinner when wind pusheth them rilling and milkying over stands of young fir, towards raw wet rock—

30

I dream of women, women in slips and in slipshod garments, one sitting next to me coyly moving my limp hand from her spot in the soft roll of flesh but even tho I make no effort one way or the other the hand stays there, other women and even aunts are watching—At one point that awful haughty bitch who was my wife is walking away from me to the toilet, sniffy, saying something nasty, I look at her slim ass—I'm a regular fool in pale houses enslaved to lust for women who hate me, they lay their bartering flesh all over the divans, it's one fleshpot—insanity all of it, I should forswear and chew em all out and go hit the clean rail—I wake up glad to find myself saved in the wilderness mountains—For that lumpy roll flesh with the juicy hole I'd sit through eternities of horror in gray rooms illuminated by a gray sun, with cops and alimoners, at the door and the jail beyond?—It's a bleeding comedy—The Great Wise Stages of pathetic understanding that characterize the Greater Religion elude me when it comes to harems—Harem-scarem, it's all in heaven now—bless their all their bleating hearts—Some lambs are female, some angels have woman-wings, it's all mothers in the end and forgive me for my sardony—excuse me for my rut.

(Hor hor hor)

31

August 22 is such a funny date in my life, it was (for several years) the climactic (for some reason) day on which my biggest handicaps and derbies were run in the Turf I conducted as a child in Lowell, the racing marbles—It was also the Augustcool end of summer, when trees of starry nights swished with a special richness outside my screen window and when the sand of the bank got cool to the touch and little clamshells glistened therein and across the face of the moon the Shadow of Doctor Sax flew—Mohican Springs racetrack was a special raw western Massachusetts misty track with cheaper purses and older railbirds and hardboots and seasoned horses and grooms from East Texas and Wyoming and old Arkansas—In the Spring it ran the Mohican Derby which was for plugs of age three usually but the big 'Cap of August was a hoi polloi event that had the best society of Boston and New York flocking and it was then Ah then that the summer being over, the results of the race, the name of the winner, would have an Autumn flavor like the flavor of the apples now begathered in baskets of the Valley and the flavor of cider and of tragic finality, with the sun going down over the old stalls of Mohican on the last warm night and now the moon's shining sadfaced through the first iron and massed concentrates of Fall cloud and soon it will be cold and all done—.

Dreams of a kid, and this whole world is nothing but a big sleep made of reawakened material (soon to reawake)—What could be more beautiful—

To complete, cap, and tragedize my August 22, it was upon that date, the day Paris was liberated in 1944, that I was let out of jail for 10 hours to marry my first wife in a hot New York afternoon around Chambers Street, complete with bestman detective with holstered gun—how far the cry from sad-side-pensive Ti Pousse with his migs, his carefully printed Mohican Springs entries, his innocent room, to the rugged evil-looking seaman in tow of a policeman being married in a judge's chamber (because the D.A. thought the fiancée to be pregnant)—Far cry, I was so degraded in level in that time, that August month, my father wouldnt even talk to me let alone bail me out—Now the August moon shines through ragged new clouds that are not August
cool
but August
cold
and Fall is in the look of the firs as they silhouette to the far-down lake at after-dusk, the sky all snow silver and ice and breathing fog of frost, it will soon be over—Fall in the Skagit Valley, but how can I ever forget even madder Fall in the Merrimac Valley where it would whip the silver ooing moon with slavers of cold mist, smelling of orchards, and tar rooftops with night-ink colors that smelled as rich as frankincense, woodsmoke, leafsmoke, river rain, the smell of the cold on your kneepants, the smell of doors opening, the door of Summer's opened and let in brief glee-y fall with his apple smile, behind him old sparkly winter hobbles—The tremendous secrecy of alleys between houses in Lowell on the first Fall nights, as though amens were falling by the sisters in there—Indians in the mouths of trees, Indians in the sole of earth, Indians in the roots of trees, Indians in the clay, Indians in there—Something shoots by fast, no bird—Canoe paddles, moonlit lake, wolf on the hill, flower, loss—Woodpile, barn, horse, rail, fence, boy, ground—Oil lamp, kitchen, farm, apples, pears, haunted houses, pines, wind, midnight, old blankets, attic, dust—Fence, grass, tree trunk, path, old withered flowers, old corn husks, moon, colorated clouts of cloud, lights, stores, road, feet, shoes, voices, windows of stores, doors opening and closing, clothes, heat, candy, chill, thrill, mystery—