A DFL collaboration with Margaret B Simon
(Published 'Palace Corbie' 1995)
The last greenshadows are folding in and from my studio. I can see the small house that once commanded my irrigation: so boundless with energies and youthful joys and jostling children, lawnmowers and much fuss about holidays
As the skirts darken on the oaks, I see wisps flicker; dashing; precocious; nibbling at the last of light, firefly bright - and two months ago I called the police but they just laughed at me so I had my phone disconnected.
I recall the large round man suited in white stains showing in the early dawn, classifiably the rote minister of some inane cult - came here knocking before he went next door, to the Unfortunates. I have a genuine Irish tin whistle and the doorbell is disconnected, so I played my whistle three times four to one, seven to seven in B flat and F minor as he peered into my front room.
He wore a straw hat, I recall that as well. Saw him wet his lips to interrupt me, knock-knuckling the window. I just rolled my eyes, careful to adjust my flats and minors one after the other, in accord. A very boring tune indeed and he left here - agitated I would ascertain - as he had taken off his straw hat twice to wave at me, a demonstration of impatience.
Last year, I decided on planting flocks instead of sunflowers. Much easier for these bones to tend.
You know, it must have taken him several months, as I recall. After he got over to those nice neighbors, that is. Not in the best of moods, I'd say, and he never came back outside once he got in. I watched him with my bino's that I won at a Bingo game five years back. No, indeed. He never came out and, by and by, nobody else did either.
Perhaps due to my observations, but mostly
because of a growing sense of discomforture, I
requested my phone line be disconnected. You see, I haven't any use for that sort of man, religious or not.
So, when the phone rang, I tried to play it
down with my genuine whistle. I knew it wouldn't be ringing, so shouldn't have been difficult to ignore. Later, the man with the straw hat - except it was now a cowboy one - came into a dream of mine, as large as life. A real jaws of a man. Toting six shooters and he came right up to my face, leering into my mouth as if he were a dentist prospecting for a kiss.
He showed his own sharkfln teeth in a version of a smile.
'I'm back in real life, too,' he said, tempting me to wake.
'Life's one thing - but dreams are private,' was the only thing I thought to say.
'Well, it's yer fault I'm here, 'cos it's your dream,' he countered.
'What I mean to say,' I said with some hesitation, 'is that you look like a man who knows his own mind, but here you are claiming to be a mere figment in my dream.'
He had no answer to that little conundrum of a dilemma. It was only heresay that he was back in real life. A sort of religion that he existed outside my dream.
Then he shot me through the head.
If blood were music, then I woke upon a pillow piled in pavanes and piccolos and pipes and pickled peppers. My head was buried in the tooth fairy's corpse. My eyes unsnailed from their ball-hollows. Nose disjointed. Flats and minors mingled with vile juices. Sun's black bladder blooms beyond the window.
I'd have to call the laughing policemen. With a disconnected phone. Oh yes, and then tomorrow came suddenly bolting through the hole in my head. I shrugged out of the tightly wadded sheets, angered at my disposition. By noon, what with the results of the dream-shot addling my vision, I had become even more insensed. I directed my attention to gardening the flocks, though they needed nothing in particular. As I knelt with spade in hand, a shadow beyond the dark sun cast a line directly overhead.
He wore a straw sombrero but it was the same round man in the white stained suit, smelling faintly of rum. The nightmare man at noon - here; black and white shadows. He produced a harmonica from his vest pocket and bent down to blow it in my right ear. Nine notes, and on each note I felt a finger swell and winch apart from my hands. They fell softly and painlessly into the bed of flocks.
I made a nasty gesture with my remaining digit. 'Why do you do this to me? Who do you think you are, doing such to me, your good neighbor?'
He wet his teeth, gold incisors flushed from dark, 'Yer've got your nerve to ask! You fucking recluse agnostic bastard and on top of that - and what's more, I cain't abide tin whistles.'
Stricken by his insults, I turned to witness the outline of his sombreroed shadow slipping backward slowly, as blink by blink it blurred into the shape of the house next door.
'It's a good job he's there...' I said to the wall. Or was it the wall speaking?
'Why?'
'Because the water pipes come via his property and they'd freeze up if this house's heating wasn't kept going.'
'It isn't his house.'
'He's a squatter, then?'
I looked through the window at the cascading snow. White flocks. Black sunflowers. The ground was an ice rink. Strange how seasons suddenly...
Ring! The saxophone again, with a horn-bell. He played it like the muffin man.
For several years, most of our contact - me and him - had been through the wall with all manner of musical means. Or by a telling rattle in the pipes as he drew off a kettleful of water for his tea. I?d only met him in dreams - and oh, yes, when we gossipped over the garden fence of this and that. Once I asked him why he was never in real life what he was really like in dreams. He answered like the Bingo callers but with notes instead of numbers.
I answered: 'House!'
A fortune win. After all, hope's religion. But I followed up on disconnecting my phone by ripping its pipes from the wall with my middle finger. As I say, I haven't any use for that sort of man, religious or not.
I hate Country & Western, at the best of times. Fucking flutes.
