The King in Yellow Tales: Volume 1

by Joseph S. Pulver

  Did they ever?

  All those skies to get lost under. All those trees to wind through, some like devil-brutes, some a concert of angels, pushing green like it was hoping fingers. Half with cracked rotting branches. Pushing before the speed of autumnal brought the knife . . .

  3 cigarettes left and still an hour to go. He took one out. Considered it. Odd. An odd thing. Strong as a drink. Quiet as a thoughtful friend. Lit it. Watched it burn.

  Smoke. Like a carnival—not a big one, not one that you glee over body and soul, moving, swirling—whirlpool no crossroads, no previews. Dancing. Smelled like success. Another illusion.

  Didn’t preach. No.

  Wasn’t a fairy tale.

  Just a cigarette.

  Watched it burn. Smoked it slowly.

  Still had time.

  Time before her scene and the tension it might release.

  59.

  Right there on the page of his thin little volume.

  No entry between page 40 and page 59. Odd.

  Not eerie odd. Strange. No blank pages either. All filled. But with the smoke closing doors he was having troubling seeing the shape of the black marks as whole and present.

  Odd.

  Then again the whole week had been. The afternoons stormy. The twilights uncertain. Nights were not too cold, more detours than lost highways.

  Detours.

  “You think my legs are detours.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “You’re eyes did.”

  Didn’t laugh. Never laughed at the stars. Or the faces. Didn’t laugh when they came right over to the porch and sat there with stories to tell. Love. Hate. Light and what it means. He never got to pick. They did. Didn’t smile. Never started like that. Gave him that look and before a second breath out came the consequences.

  Deal.

  Nothing to win.

  No card to play.

  Handle it. And move on.

  She did.

  Watched her. Then watched her walk away. The hole in the knee of her black stocking. Knew it was there. But didn’t get to see it.

  Wanted to.

  Wanted.

  Wanted to ask her what she wanted.

  Just lit a cigarette and watched the carnival.

  Cigarette burned out and she was gone.

  Page 40 (long as playing footsy with a hookah loaded with unstoppable flavors) was Santiago. Afternoons in the bar, not searching, just waiting for things to fade. Nights—here, there, busy, even if you didn’t agree with the venue. Didn’t deal with daylight when he could sidestep it.

  Day was like jail, or a job posing as an execution. Took a long time. Didn’t give you much. Mere pennies or some water. Not much.

  Much. That was night. Like a railway station. Going, going, going. Stops everywhere. Slow to desperate to polar. All you had to do was watch.

  Maybe smile here and there. Maybe smoke a smoke while things burned. Didn’t have to hold up your hands for it to stop. Did that in its own time. Watch. You weren’t needed as cinematographer. Just smoke your smoke and watch.

  He did.

  Page 40. Wrote it down for later. Older, he needed reminding.

  She told him he did.

  He believed her. She was not to be overlooked, or disregarded. And one could not accuse her of reasonable doubt. Not when she was as clear as the siege of the clock’s big knife.

  Here. Clock? Interlocked with some gesture by one’s fear. Blue as ink endowed, extended, chewing the calm. The lid of an eye, unpacking

  the suitcase lost in the moat… (fear a chilling music)(something tight in the amnesiac lines of the curtains)(a ferry of loopholes, a sticky shakedown dragging some pitfall, begging for punishment and mercy to stop peeling unfettered black)(“We catch fire in the solarfire.”) unpacking… another (count out the past) and another (count the stills and the chase) and another (the constellations connected to her neck, like you’re some detective who can confront the verbs and colors under the crust of flesh) . . . All in there, the silt on it, temporary, preventing . . . But it can slide, mid-sentence; all the meanings, moving crows painting the lawn of shadows, and the clouds, unfolding the maps, making doors—leaning in…

  Blackening(no soft isolated trumpet up in it). Gut captured on the platter(no crying sax or snare-shot to frame it) … Melting, a fraction of a ripple(anger that was banked comes out of the scrapbook—monkey on a knife or gun bender, spinning Joe Frazier particles at your heart and ribs), the opposite side and its unborn dust an ice of ghost-wings—a delta of veins—spilled on the black and white canvas… 10 digits of madness grasp a hollow spot of language, a circle… Eyes like the perfume of a sea… A coitus of sundown…

  …leaning in…

  Elsewhere

  the ghost-house, leaning in, splashing yesterday wall to wall

  Cry.

  (for Mother)(for bye and bye)(and windows)(open)

  ash

  dust

  Words

  a door

  the season after The Crossing…

  The circle, traces of stormy in the sand, salty air says it needs Forever.

  Cry. (sister full of sour lunar illustrations cries, “There!”)(on the battlefield with the fire in brother’s “You’ll fall hard.” eyes)(every word blooms)(every speck—root to fable—picks at the years)

  Words in the bedroom,

  the crack in the sky,

  the speed of the bed,

  the calligraphy of the electric-light moon perched

  diffusing

  nebulae…

  Page 40. A one way street named To-morrow. A weathervane hour swaying with names that never orbited golden. Something about a scarf that didn’t make a good shield. A big hole in the footnote you could fall through, some error without a pearl yes. All there. Overturned, and rubbing on the bottom of the echoes. Are all those signs you touched melting?

  Somewhere in the night illusions are sleeping on a staircase. Drank their fill of rain, drank them right down to undone. A dim fugue of a sonnet swerved in the roots, lost its stitches, the auctions of sugar went Outer, whirled in the collision. Shriveled.

  Boots impersonated miles. Santiago. Seemed like the highway to hang the verdict on.

  Page 40. Frisson. Secrets. With make-up on it looks like a poem. Nice little hill—folded in prayer to the mountain, nice little halo, you don’t see the wedding of torn wings and the gun. (Arm reaches out)(longer) No evidence in the disturbing illustration. (middle dropped)(no coma)(no period). Sidewalk and city end in sleep.

  Window’s open. No witness in it.

  Night’s a good canoe in the FURTHER game (if your chemistry doesn’t get stuck on “But the thing is—”). You move, not independent, mouse (with no scissors) in an occult game of drain. Move . . . before Emptiness dyes the light DEAD.

  The waves come, the waves go; jealousy, reckless, time is strange, words bleed and multiply with error and a circus of commas, sounds likes a blues for Monday, got some dead mixed in with the stormy. Repeat performances; night, big town, jungle. Fingerprints of pretenders with nocturnes to kiss to-morrows that decide not to come. Heated core in its error suit, the censor that doesn’t care what light it leaves on the floor after the interrogation.

  Rowing. Rowing… lighthouse in Poe City burned out of dim, bellied-up to off…

  Dulled doesn’t change much on the way south. Grey skies. Murmur, no surface bursts -rustle -feathers -feel every raindrop…

  Rowing… all the rinds of the old poets are dirty, littered with exhausted vowels.

  Rowing…

  Hard enough might avoid the pendulum…

  Till the wild wind blows.

  And cold dances.

  The horizon starts like a pinprick, a pitchfork erupting on the eye. No blur no commentary. Not there to take a sworn statement of the disaster. Just there. Opening. Opening a spot labeled run. Could be a guide, or a hatch, but there’s no net.

  No chase after a crime wave—the blood and tears over there
, back there, offstage (ACT III –newly penned –an asylum/winter/deadfall/diamondback ripple ending on a scream), but caught just the same. Framed. The obsessions of dust seem to take over the room.

  Ruin had the same margins as Macbeth. Eyes can’t stretch it out of their possession. Why can’t a pen, ink responding in WILL words, make a scene of “there is still time” there?

  Page 40

  (just before the last paragraph—PAIN-sorrow-press on, find redemption thin as a dead dog’s picked-over carcass. try not to worry about the toxic seams in the back-half of the 4th sentence . . .)

  more tears ahead

  other words about the other thing that spoke on the other page, spoke about gone, told you with harsh bells

  Santiago.

  Slow and lazy. Nice current of blue. Plenty green, a sea chemical-rich with metaphor. Entrepreneur could work with this if he stashed the bundles of rash and rowdy.

  Little this and little yellow flowers. A soft district, no fog, no thrash, smiles you can hear in the glass windows. The bright one, simple as an escape, cut into the scene—Ankles. And fragrant knees. You like her shoulders, scrubbed gently. Nice, with a little fire. You like the arrows of ready her mouth clasps. Nice how she reads. Slow one dab at a time, every summit a gateway. Nice little yellow print dress. Her legs make sense in it.

  Slow and lazy. Bit of this, pieces of feast on her Scheherazade fingertips. Moments a little less chopped here; might be the cotton of her pulse; she twirls, her silk doesn’t bruise the secrets in your spoon. She’s a bird content with the threads you weave. Not love, but it glints with the same colors.

  Slow and lazy.

  Not writing it in the book. Not on the opulent paper. Not measuring disorder with light. Just enjoying how soft and yellow it is this time.

  For a time. (stopped rowing)(didn’t reach out)(let longer stay Over There)

  But then there were words. Fast as the isolated thing on the bed. Sleek yellow thing shaking her head no…

  That river…

  Before’s Night becomes Now.

  Again.

  (returns with The Face)

  (and the sound of words that stand right next to you)

  Tark left Santiago…

  2 cigarettes left. Took one out. Considered it. Odd. Strong as a drink. Quiet as a thoughtful friend. Lit it. Watched it burn like a carnival—not a big one, not one that you paid the price body and soul for. Moving, swirling—whirlpool, no crossroads.

  Didn’t preach. No. Wasn’t a fairy tale.

  Just a cigarette.

  Watched it burn. Smoked it slowly.

  Slow and lazy. Not hit by the imbalance of the scriptures. Not meditating on the soil of intricate. Crayon doesn’t have to play saint to the puzzle pieces. Don’t care what couplet came first. Just a cigarette, not death valley, not a home behind the damn.

  59. New page, but it burns 98.6 on its way up.

  (Hotel. Well lit.) (The end starts—the worm of fear big as a Humpty Dumpty all-splat)(No one switches off the lights)

  Just sneaks in.

  With another

  now

  no memory

  just this

  huge lonely place

  in

  naked moontide-o’clock. She crossed the sea. Lotta nerve, all those horns of wrong punctuating the risk. Made it out of the past all the way to no way out. You get to see the clots you wish you didn’t line yesterday with. Got to give her credit for it, carrying that tongue without swallowing it.

  Nice hand, touching Once… Nice hand. (the length)(all the way from there to its wrist) Always was, mostly. Nice gun it in.

  Too bad it’s covering the hole in her stocking.

  …Summer ends in Knoxville… In their castle of Night… the wind sounds like the measure of a cello that’s slipped back into a map of rebuked lantern light… Escape the day… (as if you could choose) That Day… Didn’t know each other. Not well enough to know what stepped off the page—could have been there wasn’t enough light, or not enough warmth in your veins to open the floor to START… Shadows in motion on the ladder, eyes a family portrait of me and you out of tune, cold blue steel loaded with eagerness . . . then… was… fear…

  Then it

  is…

  again fear… what should be…

  here

  Someone does not say what should be…

  Nothing

  good

  in her eyes

  —not even the flower you brought here for her…

  nothing

  here

  Now.

  nothing…

  the joy of the other words

  someone else’s words

  of

  Night (“withered the sun”)

  Night (is always)

  Night

  (that tells you not to ask for a door out of over and over)

  in

  a

  lonely

  place

  Here.

  Now.

  Lights the last cigarette before this is all over

  inhales “you can’t remember the morning”—it had water on the horizon— on the other page

  Maybe the jury of bibliophiles meant mourning? Maybe he shouldn’t have mentioned the emotional trauma caused by her unbuttoned blouse in his disposition? Her being nearly naked and holding him open like that as her eyes scanned what he had translated, didn’t that count? Her blushing when her nipple brushed his vocabulary was not his fault. If they’d bothered to read the italicized passage in his volume and not focus on that single damning annotation regarding “Hildred de Calvados, only son of Hildred Castaigne and Edythe Landes Castaigne, first in success,” they might have, should have, understood the effect of that light on honorable human qualities. . .

  Leaving Santiago. All because she’d misunderstood the typesetter’s error—

  [Weather Report I Sing The Body Electric]

  Marks and Scars and Flags

  Is it real?

  Is it?

  These last 6 hours . . .

  This pack.

  Did she, looking down at her feet and gently smiling—in that crocodile way, really say, “Go. Ask, Alice.”?

  Did she?

  While I stood there, that silence all around, on that cold bank, waiting to cross.

  Did she have to ask if I was mad?

  Does she think all I do is make the bed, and listen to those voices? I think. When I’m in the yard, and the world is changing around me, I think.

  Is that madness?

  She sits there, across the room, seeing everything I say. Never asks me to stop. Not even when I cry.

  All those time I sat on her knee. Me, the puppet. Pet—“Good boy-Good, boy.” Thing. Waiting. Being good. Trying to be. Even my hello said, I’m behaving, I’m listening. I’m trying to understand. Even though the whole world is changing around me.

  The cars hiss by, rushing to meeting and pedigrees . . . and the dogs on their chains howl; they’re frightened, wounded, they feel it . . . Night takes on a chill—that scares me. I can feel it grow. It’s a live thing. I don’t see why They don’t see it. I don’t understand why she can’t feel it.

  Can’t it penetrate all those scars? Or is it simply a question of fears?

  Why does she fear the stars?

  They’re too far away to leave scars. Too soft. Too small. They look small. I keep telling her that. Does she think that’s foolish?

  What you are, even in this twisting light, is what you are. It’s the whole world that’s changing.

  Can’t she see that?

  When she’s grinning in her sleep, I think she knows. Looks like it. Looks like she looked that afternoon when the revolution upset things.

  I know she saw the signs. She even told me she saw them. Every one of them. Told me she heard all the talk in that upstairs room. Even over the saxophone making love to summer, she heard. And she wasn’t drunk. She was all there. Some of the others weren’t. They were drunk, their clattering
tongues made harsh noises, licked the filthy laughter tossed at them. But she heard. She heard the widows and their tiny voices, and the flag, that animal lighthouse that is quick to shake your blood, to tumble the comfort in your lock and key. She heard.

  Heard the animals run over her skin.

  The drummer and the piano player heard it to. She talked to them after. Told me what they said. When I was in her arms, lost in her world rising and falling back, she told me. I was close, I heard it all.

  Even that thing in her eyes that went unspoken. I felt it on her skin. Touched it before she put it away with all the things that are coming, and her solitude. Hid it behind those absolutes. I see them burning. Tall as mountains. I see them. Manic and full of countries of abandoned.

  I was in there. Once. Back when I fell for her. Once? Maybe it was many times? Hard to remember, I was bleeding and the cat was up there on that high beam arguing a difficult game. Told him, I was already sold. He could take his clouds and go. Back to his hole. Take all his bells with him. Just take his treasons and retire.

  I was not going to surrender.

  Didn’t have anything to give. I was sold.

  SOLD.

  The trumpets rang out the day I was inaugurated. They were loud. And unmistakable. The heroes were there with their glory days, red and gold and immortal, or so we were told. They grinned. Even the strikers took the day off. They grinned too. Everyone saw the sign. Said they’d keep the secret.

  And they have.

  It’s not them. They have not sold me to the stations of December. Would not. Not even after the flowers of the revolution fell under the feet of the weary. Not even as the day grows shorter and closes, and the flag goes cold. Not even then.

  Vanity. Fears. The things in the mirror. All that time that stands against desire, time that can’t rewrite the thunder. They can put up a new flag to fly and push and cover new ground to pull you along, like you’re mad. They can even hand out a new sun. One with a new plan to relight hearts with love you madly. Let them. Let them try. It won’t stick to this floor, or these walls.

  She knows that. I told her so.

  I told her these stars won’t get me. They are too soft. Too far away. I don’t feel them pull. They try. Push that moon at me. Try to spoon it down my throat. It doesn’t work. Can’t. Not when I’m sitting here at her feet.