The King in Yellow Tales: Volume 1

by Joseph S. Pulver

  Night walkers

  frolic in the dreams of the changeless spectral flame

  of midnight . . .

  . . . wine to soothe the ache, the empty dance of whiteness . . . and sleep after the forced fire-foam of wine. Dreams, the swaying of a light madness, of him lost and walking the leafless, twilit lanes of cold Carcosa . . . she follows, but cannot catch him in the stone autumn air . . .

  Arisen from the embrace of her dreams the next day rings with thorns. She eats bread and honey as evening sings . . .

  Reads (and rereads) of sonatas echoing weakly in dim yellow chambers and dynasties breaking . . . reads (again) of thick fingers muttering in the lonesome valley, and eternal stillness, and the leprous hole the worm keeps its secrets in. Reads on worn, narcotic yellow pages of the dreams adrift in the deeps of night’s river . . . and the utterly lost.

  The next morning comes.

  Licking a drop of honey from her palm she notices his words have expanded . . . One line etched into her white flesh has become two.

  From the One-joined, spirit in spirit, flesh on flesh, light . . .

  More light!

  Bring your quivering brush to the silence where deeper ends . . .

  He’s writing on her.

  She reads the ivy path of his plea. And with needle and ink, writes back . . .

  Each new day additional words appear on the white emptiness of her skin. Each soft curve of skin has become his garden and row after row he plants benedictions and communiqués until she is covered with his desire, his determined, yellowish trails of beauty that cannot be erased . . .

  “Come to this silent dim glade, My Sweet. Come glow. Soothe the stain that follows my every tortured step. Come soon and heal this leper lost in dim yellow fields. Follow the arrow of the winterboatman’s long, threadlike finger . . . Mercy, My Sweet, before I fade out entirely.”

  Naked she stands before the mirror in her bedroom. Her body, laboratory, monastery, garden, bed of heaven, sings with the voice of another. Auguries of pure poetry radiate in circles from her nipples. Bracelets of embroidered language are buds on a vine clinging about her wrists. Valleys and peaks of his winter night words of solitude are a scroll unfurled across the velvet plain of her belly . . . webs of transforming text along the inside curve of her thighs . . . his confessions at the corners of her mouth. Her calves adorned in wispy lace, each character a translation, a bridge, a seed, a wave of love’s lore. The candid and the poetic expressed, she, his lighthouse, is soaked in his words, words that fit her like a glove. Her armpits, back, reveal the route of his desire. Each of the places his lips and fingers had touched—gloried in, bare the written ointment of his longing. Alanna is a traveler, and a map, reading every sweeping word (taking in the bittersweet fragrance of every letter) before putting on his threadbare yellow robe.

  Succumbing to her need wrapped in his, she closes her beguiling blue eyes. The back of her eyelids glow with his fiery rain of you must.

  She can no longer sleep.

  From a closet shelf she takes a picnic basket woven from twisted roots. Fills it with staples for her voyage.

  At the bottom of the stairs unlocks her bicycle, rolls it to the pavement. Lashes her basket to the rim behind her seat.

  And she’s off . . . riding from catastrophe . . .

  Leaning over the handle bars, mouth open—a glare of intent, she pedals her bike furiously through the heavily shaded streets . . .

  . . . a world of doors . . . tarnished faces of buildings . . . strange drumbeats of love . . . ghosts . . . ghosts of . . . decayed doors burning in shadow ink . . . strange ghosts . . . faded hopeless windows. . . cold hands empty and silent . . . dead doorways . . .

  Street by street . . . Buildings. Houses, some single family, some cheap. Brown and black. And white. Or brick. Feet spinning. A half a block of empty . . . the exposed hollow of a home gutted in a blaze . . .

  Each black street echoes with the last exhausted shadow of times and beauty lost. Dim dreams turned by the spade of soil and disuse are flooded by the velvet weeds of night . . .

  Doors (and sin and troubling views, haggling, sleep, vain murmurs, the bare shoulder in the gallery of frost, going left, going right, sullen sighs, mornings after the vino and the hollow laughter, which sweater with this skirt) behind her, trees—sentinels, line her road . . .

  The last hard mile.

  Her eyes are older . . . and full . . .

  The cemetery is quiet. And dark. Not as cold as she’d imagined.

  She finds his grave, her garden, in the dark with no light at all. Laughs sweetly as she stands before him.

  On her knees with a pair of scissors from the drawer of her sowing table. Fingers waltz. Snip by sharp snip she evenly trims the grass of his grave. Her fingers as rake, she removes every loose blade.

  When she is certain she has stripped away every sheared blade Alanna lights a waxlight then spreads her green patchwork quilt of lost and found on the spot beside the coffin-ground.

  Red string. Blood red string. Slowly uncoiled from the ball. Laid out in the exact outline of his form. From her basket she takes two small glow-in-the-dark stars and sets them where his eyes would be.

  Alanna smiles.

  Whispers, “I have come, Dearest.” as she places wilted petals of the yellow rose he gave her in the shape of the Yellow Sign over his heart in the shape of blood red string.

  Her robe comes off. Naked she lies atop him.

  “Read me, Beloved. Take my nightwalker song into your heart. I give you my complexities. Summon them to your shape . . . Each fits you.”

  No moon to help light her way, so she invents one. Gently casts it into the sky . . . Places it just so.

  Candle light.

  Close. But incomplete.

  “Read me,” an alto whisper from mending lips. “I stroke you with my flood of night-tongues. Let my rose words fill the emptiness in your dim heart . . . Banish the sleep that clutters your eyes.”

  Cloaked in cold. Her skins tingles as his breath moves over every ivy arc of etched black marks.

  Pauses to smile. Knowing he is reading.

  Whispers: “Find peace in me.”

  Blood, bone, and desire, she is an open page. A sequence unfolding. A bridal chamber, hips and banquet flower awaiting the cut of light’s liquid arrow.

  “Let my skin be your road. Come across the savage ground of Down and Last that I may carry your burden.”

  Tears. And far cries.

  Candlesoft: “Rest your hand in my hand. I give you my warmth.”

  The prosthetic moon, pallid and weak, looks down.

  She looks up.

  They share tears.

  With a small stone she smashes the face of his timepiece, freezing the moment . . .

  The gun—loaded with the unmistakable power of the afterlife, is in her hand . . .

  “I believe.”

  Light sheared, Alanna and her moon depart for a far cold country . . .

  In far cold Carcosa

  The King sheds no tear . . .

  Knowing

  There will be another needful thing,

  Another jewel needing repair . . .

  And another after that . . .

  From the wake of dark clouds massed, the solitary moon arrives. He looks down . . . Sees what has drowned. And again, awash in alone, cries.

  (Bob Dylan – “Dreamin’ Of You”)

  In This Desert Even The Air Burns

  (for Karl Edward Wagner)

  Early one vicious morning. The air a thirsting panther.

  “Me and . . . ”

  All the old man had was a black and white picture of her, the broken yellow lines in the road headed to who knows where, and the need to put the heavy stars to sleep.

  “her.”

  A ghostly incarnation of Dylan was on the radio singing about love driving him insane. Not his 1st time. Might not be his last. It wasn’t the old man last. Not by a cold million miles. The desert motels, desola
te nests burning in the solarfire, and the dry brush blew by, looked they were headed somewhere. Everything out here looked like it was once headed to someplace else. It just never got there. Most often it paused in the long empty, ducked in a silver of shade to escape the absolute sun, got snagged on memories and never got up.

  The old man stopped and got gas. $15.23. Bought a Coke and a pack of smoke. $3.74. Almost out of silver. Completely out of gold. Opened the glove box and checked his gun before pulling out. He was old, yeah OK, but he wasn’t stupid. Not this go ‘round.

  There’d be a doorway before it got too dark. A bed. A TV with old news he wouldn’t really listen to. He’d get eggs with cheese and onions or a burrito for dinner. Coffee. Black. Hopefully fresh, but if not . . . And he’d lay there in the motel room [or pace around in circles] and wonder.

  Third of a bottle of whiskey and he still wouldn’t be able to forget her. Not on this road with the phone poles stung out like prison wire and the haunted complaints of tomorrow on the wind. Not while his eyes could see the shadows and the things that were locked in them.

  It was a room for not going fast. A room of narrow failures.

  The wind was outside walking the road. By a broken gate that had never seen an island it turned, howled for an old lost love. He pulled the covers tighter. A song from yesterday’s jukebox moved slow in his thoughts. He burned in the cold. The ghost of midnight cried questions of right and wrong. Church bells were ringing.

  The old man turned on the light. Looked at his boots. He wished they knew different habits. Wished they played dumb and just went along with the dance.

  He turned off the light. Wrapped his head around her face. A million miles back and still he had to face the lie. He took. She took. Neither could wait. Neither did. He didn’t dream. Tossed and turned. But didn’t dream.

  When he woke he was still sick. Love. Sometimes it was six foot long and just as deep. It came. You said it would put your mind at ease. Then close got closer and things got blown into a million pieces. Rock yer baby. And she rocked you. And there was paper. And scissors. No one won. And a million miles had passed.

  Before became nowhere. Then was outta doorways. So you left. Didn’t take anything but a broken heart and a maybe a picture of the fire.

  Then came the trains and the river and Baltimore. You sleep when you can. Tried not to gamble.

  Tried . . . to drive straight. Begged night and the painful kisses of the whiskey to bury the bewilderment.

  But on some dirt road where they closed the door, you found you were headed back to the last time. And yer boots started leanin’ back and that black and white picture turned in into a bird flown away.

  Yer standin’ there just taking up space . . . hands lost in your pockets. Thought there was something there, but no one was talkin’. And there’s no one to trade places with. And there’s a sunrise starin’ at you, offering no future and no sermon, and the appetite of the hole just gets deeper . . .

  And the ramblin’ starts again . . .

  Fargo . . . Ensenada, mariachi and wanna-be matador too hung-over to play . . . Austin . . . Eden—someone thought it looked like it . . . Eudura, a lightpole by the jail . . . San Antone . . . Towns little more than small hives outta words and for old times sake . . . oceans of sand without limits . . . alone and gaunt, a little ranch squeezed hard . . . a little one room shack, might be a coffeepot and a cup and a saucer come from the East years back on the small hand hewn table—the nails that held it together might have started rusting . . .

  Ramblin’, hardship to next tomorrow morning, and all the mistakes down the line. You see sin . . . And ashes. See old ghosts—too hot to run from close range conversations with old lies, sitting on weathered old porches . . . waiting . . .

  Indigo darkness stretched out thick, swollen with dry. Half a mile stretched into half a state. Impulses sick of hide and seek surging to move on . . .

  Sun a lion that won’t let you run away. Sand and desert sky with no history . . .

  The road . . . flat today for a while. Rocky later on . . . all day too hot dragging on . . . the sun’s a scar and the sky’s got nowhere it needs to be . . . there’s no water out here. No world to get to here . . . the cactus laugh when your burden goes by . . .

  Time comes. Whispers. A hundred years. A hundred years traveling with an old injury. Barrels of whiskey gone jar by jar . . . A hundred squirms, aches, crawls forward weakly and the inexhaustible details of the puzzle last longer than a long time . . .

  The old man looks at the black and white photograph of her. Even figuring on the clock her once, saint-like face didn’t look a day over a million.

  The wind offers no warm embrace . . .

  It’s late. His pistol is sick of waiting. He smokes his last cigarette . . .

  Looks at her picture one last time. The wind whispers, “Once in their castle beyond night . . .”

  Dusk. The scent of alone thickening . . . 20 miles from Calexico. Far away not far away . . .

  You won’t be wrong this time.

  Not this time . . .

  ~*~

  Once in their castle beyond night . . .

  You were out . . . burning affairs filled with darkness. She took off with your brother. Headed West into that small, rotting sunset . . .

  Never saw it coming.

  You looked at your hand. Didn’t have a needle’s eye of light between your knotted fingers. Picked up your gun . . .

  Put on your boots of Carcosan leather.

  A million miles ago the door closed. You remember what went. But you still don’t know why . . .

  “Cassilda . . . Why?”

  Sunday waist-deep and thick on the ground. The tired old sun setting into the dry ground. Nightwinds with blood on their lips soon. Outta whiskey and full of

  “Why?”

  (Bob Dylan “Dreamin’ Of You”)

  Perfect Grace

  (for Grace Jones—flesh, and Patti Smith—spirit)

  Love—everything—gone in the rain. The grey distances drifting . . .

  My joy snapped . . .

  The bonfire mask of evening sky gone. Night unlit on the wind—the fruitless sigh . . .

  So well composed the angels on the other side of the bridge which few may pass. The girls, cloaked brides pledged to eternity’s solitary king, come to the park. To sit. To walk the flowered, manicured avenues, row after row of soft white lilies on exhibition. In their soft skyblue dresses. In their soft yellow hats. In their silent midnight shoes . . . they discard the frost. Their hands, having chosen Forever, are so clean . . .

  The flowers on the other side of the bridge which few may pass are so soft . . .

  so soft

  There are no birds in the park. No glimpse of sin here. No footprints are left to despair in the shadows.

  The dome of the chamber—passageway, holds No Longer There in its soft, stone shadow . . .

  One block East of the hollow months of yesterday I come upon it . . .

  Black as coal.

  So elegant. So soft her jeweled eyes . . . Soft as the midnight hour under soft black stars.

  She lays her golden crown at my feet.

  All my windows are open . . .

  Fragrant yellow gloves off . . .

  Soft yellow blouse unbuttoned . . .

  Perfect.

  Perfect. Animal grace . . .

  Hot to touch . . .

  I touched her—Hollow. Every elegant shadow . . . echoes. Hurricane of mouth shapes . . . singing. Chewing. Voice as ritual. Perfect. Grace. Running. How far? Near. Near.glued to her touch. How far? Not. far.enough . . . lips consuming sun. giving birth. A face under the face. Giving birth. Hurricane. Echoes. Giving birth. Perfect. Grace. Every elegant shadow . . . Hollow. How far? How far? Under the shadows. Under the face under the face. Lips touching. Ears, lost in the ritual of echoes. Ringing from the distant dust.welcoming dust.

  Sleek coal black limbs. Touching. The kiss. The kiss. A revolt. A celebration. Mouth on
shoulder. On earlobe. Mouth open. The kiss, the kiss. Touching. Hollow. Shadows. Hurricane of mouth shapes . . .

  Ripe and full and soft. Ripe and full and soft . . . soft.

  Hollow.

  Brushing. Touching . . .

  Ripe and full and soft. Hollow. Chewing. Never stop. Never stop. Chewing. Full and . . . soft.touching. day sliding. Coal black soft. Hollow black.fulland soft. Ripe.

  And soft.

  Black. Hollow.hurricane mouth of shapes...

  Touching.

  thee.star-salt on the curve of a cheek.

  Touching. The season of her face, breathing . . . The illuminated face.

  Running. How far? How far? From the arms. Why? Why? Rippling . . . echoes—the swell. Touching. Taking. Consuming. The face. The killer. the kiss. Echoes . . . electrify . . . me. me. . . the face. The lips. The long-stemmed kiss, pressed. The touching. Echoes, sighing . . . in and on and over. Me. me—a sea of echoes. Touching—unbroken. slave. Slave. To the echoes. To the rhythm. Drums. As fingers. Touching. Me. slave. To the sweet evening fingers of the echoes. The mask open. The face under the mask throw off. Open. Rolling. Mouth open. Lips calling. Rolling. Over. Me.me. slave to . . . the echoes of the face. The thunder . . . rolling. And rolling. The swell of perfect shadows. Rolling. Perfect. Grace. Consuming. The lips. The star-weave kiss. Chewing. The hurricane.

  Of shadows. howling. Hollow breast. Hollow eyes. Perfect shadows. The face under the face. Under the mask. the kiss of echoes. Black blooming . . . Yellow. The hills, the sky, the sunset . . . Yellow skin, casket. The yellow flow wrapped in stars. Deep blooming. Shadows deep and echoes wide . . . the kiss. The kiss . . . hollow—cold . . . hollow. Deep. The kiss as roses, as threshold, gathering.whispering eyes. Echoes bite. Bite and bite. The face.desert. The kiss. the lips. Blood flows.a prayer.red & deep.Echoes deep . . . hurricane of mouth shapes. The kiss, the edges of the moon dying in it. the face seen. And seen again. And before. The echoes of night preying in the nest of day. Yellow closing. Consuming sun. Grace. Perfect. Perfect for . . .