Song of the White and the Black (Fragment)
1
An elongated swordfish pierced the setting sun
and as if the world began anew, lamplight climbed loudly
up the flushes that hurried past the house-front paintings,
with a fag in one hand, and a casual piece of hip
in the other. The gait still poised, the gaze still shrouded,
amid the throng were seen the painters in their baggy coats
and poets with their long strides to nipples and the bar.
Newshounds leaned, as usual, with drooping
shoulders in the corner of every backstreet bar, picked
compulsory fights and tapped pencils on the pane
before their misty eyes. Right through these starlets
rang the hubbub of outdated theories,
still unacquainted with the fact that fact had been abolished
by the new dictatorship of probabilities.
And the flushes found the painters, and the painters
found the poets, and the poets gave an assurance
that all in all one could still live with once
being always – and if not, you were fine anyway.
In brief, it was an evening when one can well understand
why paper must sometimes stay white. The tram rails
ticked darkly, like a penitential echo of God’s
possible voice, which past chips stalls and terraces
derailed quite intricately. It was the evening
one almost knows for sure: the long breath
of one’s own lap remains inside
and outside black, black; the only defence
was to seek the truth in others.
2
The night above the Spui drank beer out of straight schooners
and in the tourmaline sky tipsy clouds drifted
past a moon that was halfway between
filthy and washed. Theodorus hesitated too,
wondrously moved in his indifference.
He heard the syncope of the high-heeled choir
in the bedding of the gables, mum for centuries,
haughtily bent forward, to see themselves all gold
in the water of the canal. Theodorus knew better.
The gold exchanged for silver, the ducats chattering
behind each pair of shades in the peroxide Porsches
and on bikes the bronze of dumbing-down was tinkling.
A cosmos of having and the whole world usurers.
But was this not the navel of all that had a name?
This web of haste as violently woven as rent?
Theodorus was seldom wrong. He knew those
one should know, was a neighbour to those like him.
Hadn’t, on the threshold of his male drinking hole,
a slim poem wiped the floor with gigantic novels?
It was a comic spectacle. Tapped like dominoes
the verses toppled and pulled whole wads of prose
to make themselves a mattress. A well-meant free fall
of flowerlets and butterflies. A more or less symbolic
sunset horizon. Or perhaps a merger
of the drinker and the source. A quite earthy cloud
of madness and brotherhood. The heavenly light
on stilts that is fed up with thunder.
Theodorus giggled at so much marvellous mercy.
The bar filled up with stressed and well-shaved gentlemen
trying to escape the voices of their exes.
Orders arrived before they left the bar –
the licensed trade was in a hurry too. Much grey and slow gesturing.
Much ice to break, lots and lots of ice, many cold
silent years. No wonder that most women
who were still worth looking at avoided this joint
like the plague. Now and then a shapeless dress with
seven or so chins, here and there the craquelé skin
of a mutated reptile. But only very seldom
a nice young sweet smart chestnut-brown coyote girl.
What a lot of language here! Phoney hypotheses.
Rancorous jokes. Points like white froth
plucked straight from the beer. Promises and breaches,
newspaper spats, standards of conduct, a hierarchical
manifesto, a mouthful of well and ill-meant
philosophical slips of the tongue about the great nothing.
What fun, thought Theodorus, that such a confluence of
streamlined intellect never moves a muscle
when a smile again sharpens knives and somewhere
behind his back and hand burns the target of his smile
on mountain of tar and feathers. Sipping at their schooners
people continued to stun each other with total animosity.
At the navel of the world did one revert to babyhood?
Spider in its web? Companion of the gods? Cloud and child?
A girl at the bar laughed shrilly and nervously –
perhaps she was pregnant, perhaps she was in love.
Theodorus plied her up with anecdotes about anacondas,
a statement on Stalin, just as long as it alliterated.
Her laugh froze in vodka of the cheapest sort.
But the ice went overboard and they became animated.
