Doctor Sax (16 page)

“They think a pit exists not?

“Ah!”—(for suddenly he sees me, and ducks).

Doctor Sax STOOD
on the dark shore, a ledge above the waters–it was March, the river was flooded, ice floes were thundering against the rock–New Hampshire had poured its torrents to the sea. Heavy snows had melted in a sudden soft weekend–gay people made snowballs–the runners were noisy in the gutters.

Doctor Sax, holding his shroud around his shoulder firmer, utttered a low laugh beneath the roar of waters and stepped closer to the edge—

“Now a flood will bring the rest,” he prophesied. Just barely you can now see him, gliding off between the trees, bound for his work, his “mwee hee hee ha ha” floats back sepulchral and glee-mad, the Doctor has rushed to work to find his spider-juices and bat powders. “The day of the Great Spider,” is come–his words ring beneath the Moody Street Bridge as he hustles off to his Dracut Tigers shack—one lorn pine stands above his bier-shaped house, into which, with a doorslam, he vanishes like ink in inky night, his last laugh trailing to any suspect ear in the March—
faintly in the air, following his laugh, you hear the distant dumb roar of the swollen river.

“River! river! what are you trying to do!” I’m yelling at the river, standing on the ledge among bushes and rocks, beneath me great ice floes are either slipping in big lumps over a rock-dam in the holocaust or floating serenely in temporary dark drownpools or crashing square and headstone against the bier of rock, the ship side of the shore, a rock armor of the earth Merrimac Valley– The carnage of huge rains in a snow flood. “Oh rose of the north, come down!” my soul I cried to the river–

And from a small bridge at the north fairyplace where the river was 30 feet broad–up somewhere far north of Lake Winnepesaukee, north of gaps in the White Mountains, the Merrimac had an infant childly phase of beginning from an innocent bubbling-up in the Sandy pines, where fairy tale people made moos around Child Marri-mack–from the little bedangled bridge a lover boy in a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale dropped a rose into the stream–it was Saturday night and his little Gretchen had stood him up to go out with Rolfo Butcho–Hero Boy was defeated, would never see her ruby lips again or make with the stash in her pantaleens, never would the stars shine on the soft grease of her thighs, he was sunk to digging holes in the ground and ramming it bloody in, so he threw the rose away– The rose was meant for mary–and down it comes in the Merrimac Valley–following that eternal waterbed– down by Pemigawasset, down by Weir, down by weird, down by the poems of the night.

THE POEMS OF THE NIGHT

So falls the rain shroud, melted
By harps; so turns the harp gold,
Welded by mell, roll-goldened
By caramel, softened by Huge.
The weary tent of the night
Has rain starring down the wallsides,
A golden hero of the up atmospheres
Has sprung the leak in the ambiguity
That made the heavens fore-fall.

So the pollywogs grow
And the bigger frogs croak,
By the May Pole in the mud
Crazy Lazy swings her crutches—
Was the wife of Doctor Sax
Gave up him for a crud.

Maybelle Dizzitime, a gal of many
Fancies, swings her shadow ape
In the cloaks of midnight whamsy;
The ball of the pollywog may-time,
The dance of the flooded mall
Crack went the Castle underground
Cank cantank old Moritzy
Flames his froosures in the dank,

Dabbely doo, dabbely dey,
The ring has got the crey.
Ringaladout, ringalaree,
Ringala Malaman,
Ringala Dee.

The hooded urchins of the pissed river
Are making melted marbles of the mud;
Rain, Rain, Sleeping Shrouded Falls,
The manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates
Is sleeping in his craw.
The boss of the winter stove league
Has given up his chaw.

So Sax in his Ides Does Bide,
Comes Melting Like Mr. Rain
With a Shake of the Fritters,
Drops his Moistures One by One.

The Golden Rose
That in the wave’s
Repose–

The Lark & Lute
in Every Mist

The Hoods of Windfall
Blown with Rain

The Ice Floes
Bonging at
the Falls,

The Eyes of Eagles
on the Main–

The Angel with the
Wetted Wings,
The Nose

The Cark that in
the Harried Anxious
Flows to East

The gammerhooks
of cloud-rise
in the moon.

The Whistle of
an Arcadian
Fluke

Flaws in Heaven
Are no Pain.

Demi mundaine dancers at the broken hall ball,
Doctor Sax and Beelzabadoes the whirling polka
GaUipagos–

The crickets in the flower petal mud
Throng at the Water Lilies, Thirst
for fair-

Cring Crang the broken brother boys
See Mike O’Ryan in the river rising,
Tangled.

The Spiders of the evil Hoar
are coming in the flood

Every form shape or manner
the insects of the wizard blood

The Castle stands like a parapet,
Kingdoms enthralled in air

Saturday Heroes of the windy field
Bare fist-glasses to the
mer—

The Merrimac is roaring,
Eternity and the Rain are Bare

Down by White Hood Falls,
Down by the darkened weirs,
Down by Manchester, down by Brown,
Down by Lowell, Comes the Rose—
Flowing to its seaward, brave as knights,
Riding the humpback Merrimac
Rage excites

So doth the rain droop open,
more like a rose

Less adamantine
Than ang

Liquid heaven in her drip
eatin rock
mixing kip

Eternity comes & swallows
moisture, blazes sun
to accept up

Rain sleeps when the rain is over
Rain rages when the sun keels over
Roseg drown when the pain is over

The water lute sides of Rainbow
Heaven—
Rang a dang mam-mon
Sing your blacking song.

THE SONG OF THE MYTH OF THE RAINY NIGHT

Rose, Rose
Rainy Night Rose

Castle, Castles
Hassels in the Castle

Rain, Rain,
Shroud’s in the Rain

Makes her Luminescence
Of folded Incandescence

Raw red rose in wetted night
“I had all to do
With that dreaded essence.”

Pitterdrop, pitterdrop,
Rain in the woods

Sax sits Shrouded
Meek & crazy
Rumored in his trousers
Naked as a baby

“Rainy drops, rainy drops,
Made of loves,

Snake’s not real,
Twas a husk of doves

‘The rain is really milk
The night is really white
The shroud is really seen
By the white eyes of the light
A young & silly dove
Is yakking in the sky
The dream is cropping under
The muds & marble mix
Petals of the water harp,
Melted lutes,
Angels of Eternity
And pissing in the air

“Ah poor life and paranoid gain,
hassel, hassel, hassel,
man in the rain

“Mix with the bone melt!
Lute with the cry!
So doth the rain blow down
From all heaven—s fantasy.”

—Deep in myself I’m mindful of the action of the river, in words that sneak slowly like the river, and sometimes flood, the wild Merrimac is in her lark of Spring lally-da’ing down the pale of mordant shores with a load of
humidus aquabus aquatum
the size of which was one brown rushing sea. By God as soon as the ice floes were past, the brown foam fury waters came, thundering in midstream in one lump bump like the back of a carnival Caterpillar pitching green muslin-hunks and people screaming inside–only this was chickens, drowned chickens garnished the middle of the rill-ridge roar in centerriver–brown foam, mud foam, dead rats, the roofs of hen houses, roofs of barns, houses—(out of Rosemont one afternoon, under sky drowse, I felt peaceful, six bungalows got out their moorings and floated to midstream like duck brothers and sisters and proceeded to Lawrence and another Twi League)—

I stood there on the edge ledge.

It was a Monday night I’d first seen the floes, a terrible, bad sight–the lonely turrets of houses near the river–the doomed trees–at first it wasn’t so bad. Pine families would be saved from the rock. None of the inhabitants of sorrow
in the orphanage across the way could drown in this deluge-

Nobody knows how mad I was– Tommy Dorsey’s
I Got a Note
was out that year, 1936, just at the time the Flood mounted in Lowell–so I went around the shores of the roaring river in the joyous-no-school mornings that came with the flood’s peak, and sang “I got a nose, you got a nose —(half octave higher:)—I got a nose, you got a nose,” I thought that’s what the song was: it also occurred to me how strange the songwriter’s meaning must have been (if I thought of songwriters at all, it seemed to me people just got together and sang over the microphone)—It was a funny song, at the end it had that 1930’s lilt so hysterical Scott Fitzgerald, with writhely women squirmelying their we-a-ares in silk & brocade shiny New Year’s Eve nightclub dresses with thrown champagne and popples busting “Gluyr! the New Year Eve Parade!” (and there, huge and preponderant, sprung the earth’s river devouring to its monstrous sea).

In gray afternoon my mother and I (it was the first no-school afternoon) took a walk to see why there was no school, the reason was not given but everyone knew it was going to be a bad flood. There were a lot of people on the shore, at Riverside Street where it meets the White Bridge near the Falls–I had every measurement of the river keen-etched in my mind along the rock of the canal wall–there were a few flood-measurements written, in numbers showing feet, and the marks of old moss and old floods– Derby-hatted Lowell had been there a hundred years, was grimed like Liverpool in its Massachusetts river fog; the huge
humus of mist that rose from the flooding river was enough to convince anybody a flood, a great flood, was coming. There was an improvised fence set up in the gloom near the bridge, where the lawn went too close to sidewalk and rail that once were summer dalliances, were now sprayed by the mist from the great surging brown watermass roaring right there. So people stood behind that fence. My mother held my hand. There was something very sad and thirtyish about this scene, the air was gray, there was disaster (copies of
The Shadow Magazine
were dusting in the gloom in the little hideaway junkstore across the street from St. Jean Baptiste, in the paved Apachean alley, copies of
The Shadow
in the dark gloom, the city’s in flood)—

It was like a newsreel of 1930’s to see us all huddled there in gloomy lines with minstrel-mouths shining white in the darkscreen, the incredible mud underfoot, the hopeless tangle of ropes, tackle, planks—(and seabags began pouring in that night).
“Mon doux, Ti Jean, regarde la grosse flood qui va arrivez —
“tut-thut-thut-” with her cluck tongue, (My goodness Ti Jean look at the big flood that’s going to happen)—
“c’est mechant
s gross
rividre la quand qutja bien d’la neige qui fond dans VNord dans YPrintemps
(It’s bad those big rivers when there’s a lot of snow that melts in the North in the Spring)”—

“Cosse qui va arrivez?
(what’s gonna happen?)”

“Parsonne sai.
(Nobody knows.)”

Officials in bleak windswept raincoats consulted ropes and boxes of City equipment—”No school! no school!” The little kids were singing as they danced over the White Bridge– In a matter of 24 hours people were afraid to
even go on that bridge, it was concrete, white, it already had cracks in it … the Moody Street Bridge was all of iron and racks and stone, gaunt and skeletal in the other part of the Flood-

In the bright morning of the gray afternoon after school was called off, me and Dicky Hampshire sallied forth at 8
A.M.
to the scenes of wrath and destruction that already we could hear roaring over our Wheaties. People were walking on Riverside Street below Sarah with strange preoccupied airs. Those headed towards Rosemont understandably! Rosemont was low and flat at the river’s basin, already half of Rosemont and its lovely Santa Barbara cottages were in six feet of brown water–Vinny Bergerac’s home was a raft, they spent the first day him and Lou and Normie and Rita and Charlie and Lucky the old man on a lark in the flood and played rafts and boats around the front and back of the house, “Wheee! looka me Ma!” Vinny’s yelling “The Goddam Navy’s come to town, order up all the beetleskins, here comes purple Shadows McGatlin the Champ”—and the next morning at six they were ordered to leave the tenement crazy house in the Rosemont suburbs by a crew of booted policemen in rowboats wearing rain hats and gloomcoats, Rosemont was in a state of emergency, in another day there was hardly any of it left, spit and floodbubbles were at mylady’s boudoir-

Dicky Hampshire’s eyes gleamed with excitement. It was the greatest sight we’d ever seen when we crossed the back Textile field and came to its high-end plateau over the dump and the deep canyoned river quarter mile wide to Little Canada, and saw all the way there the huge mountain of
ugly sinister waters lunging around Lowell like a beast dragon– We saw a gigantic barn roof floating in mid stream, jiggling with the vibration of the roar in the hump there— “Wow!” Hungry, tremendously hungry as we got on this excitement we never went home to eat all day.

—”The strategy is to snare one of them barnyard roofs and make a gigantic raft,” said Dick, and was he ever right– We rushed towards the river across the dump. There, in brightest morning, where the great chimney loomed 200 feet high, orangebrick, overtopping the brick mass of Textile so nobly situated in height-vistas, there were our green lawn-slopes (the lawns of power houses neat and swardgreen) where we’d been playing King of the Hill for eternities, three years–there was the cinder path to Moody Street at the bridge (where cars were parked in this exciting morning, people were gathered, how many times I’ve dreamed of leaping over that fence at bridge end and in dream glooms rush down by the shadow of the iron underpinnings and the jutting rock of the shore, and bushes, and shadows, and Doctor Sax dreary ambiguities, something namelessly sad and dreamed and trampled over in the civil wars of the mind & memory– and further scene-dreams on the straw slopes cundrum-cluttered overlooking a little cliff drop to the waterside rocks)— We felt we’d grown up because these places and scenes were now more than child’s play, they were now abluted in pure day by the white snow mist of tragedy.