Offerings (A Movement In Four Parts)
By Paul Cameron Brown
The night is folly without the moon,
trees blank space against a frontal sky
where lattice work from a bled fish reveals
skeletal markings will not administer
the red jack of hearts to a mistress sea.
Most fickle, the ways of a cockroach
(I don't recommend them) to offerings
of white linen, cold squares atop
a stone diamonded floor.
Palaver shacks drone in ghostly light
communicating some message about eel runs
up the black river, the equivalent brush
of tombstones against dark nightsoil.
Tiny bars open as cubicles.
proverbial flashes of the coming evening,
haciendas to count every blessing.
The road to such places
snarls a dusty pleasure
and will heat thin blood
to boil in the daylight hours.
II
Sweat corrodes the cork's emplacement
about green bottlenecks,
its azure breath tossing back
pools of sparse liquid.
I picture ships placed within such bottles
as bannisters along corrugated highways,
seawater rusting from within the steamfitters's
tonsorial edge.
Haze thickens as sails blur to an artist's brush,
then squiggles in the oilpaint of memory-
her sides fashioning red wounds as pigment
surfacing from robotical crustaceans
lancing the bottom of a deeper crevice.
III
My steps clank to the gaoler's key
to become, within, handmaidens to thorned plants
acting as fuselage along the building's exterior.
Afar, a white seagull sits as a bespectacled tourist
gracing a buoy like a madras shirt.
Early stars in an afternoon sky
are expansive in Chateau Lafitte finery,
the Rothschilds of the universe playing
a cosmic baccarat.
A girl in a brandy snifter of a dress-
dark, sensual, runs through tomes of my mind.
It's a hall of mirrors there;
the radiating glass of the sea,
twilight splendour in tall grass,
the hands of thick mahogany chairs
grimacing against perspiring walls.
I sponge water like a good midshipman
off the brow of a leaking vessel.
Nowhere are there signs of more than
partial seepage though smoke in the
back corridors exists from the fiery aguandine.
IV
Green palms unfurl as flags
to the accordian of my eyes,
blinking back the strong belt of sunlight
that precisely floods the room.
Sailors jostle this crowd of memories,
some surly lipped with broad tattoes.
A naked mermaid presses her thighs 'gainst
memory door, then winks as the
stellar crust of oblivion takes me.
***************************************
In sleep, waterfront toughs are transformed
to storeowners that smile, exchange pleasantries in
Saba.
(French gendarmes embrace on the other side
clustering like starfish on the twin breasts of a beach.)
I devour cups not of riverwater in this cell
but the best pink champagne at the captain's
reception.
With hatfuls of intermittent rest,
blurred outlines recede into mists
thin as General Winter's treasured April snows.
The bony M of a hatpin,
the passkey to better redress of fortune-
the turnstills, concealed within lavabeds of
bladegrass.
beckon upon the return voyage home.