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. 44, 45, 46,47 Back to the Contents Page 

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