by Jack Kerouac
Cank cantank old Moritzy
Flames his froosures in the dank,
Dabbely doo, dabbely dey,
The ring has got the crey.
Ringaladout, ringalaree,
Ringala Malaman,
Ringala Dee.
The hooded urchins of the pissed river
Are making melted marbles of the mud;
Rain, Rain, Sleeping Shrouded Falls,
The manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates
Is sleeping in his craw.
The boss of the winter stove league
Has given up his chaw.
So Sax in his Ides Does Bide,
Comes Melting Like Mr. Rain
With a Shake of the Fritters,
Drops his Moistures One by One.
The Golden Rose
That in the wave’s
Repose–
The Lark & Lute
in Every Mist
The Hoods of Windfall
Blown with Rain
The Ice Floes
Bonging at
the Falls,
The Eyes of Eagles
on the Main–
The Angel with the
Wetted Wings,
The Nose
The Cark that in
the Harried Anxious
Flows to East
The gammerhooks
of cloud-rise
in the moon.
The Whistle of
an Arcadian
Fluke
Flaws in Heaven
Are no Pain.
Demi mundaine dancers at the broken hall ball,
Doctor Sax and Beelzabadoes the whirling polka
GaUipagos–
The crickets in the flower petal mud
Throng at the Water Lilies, Thirst
for fair-
Cring Crang the broken brother boys
See Mike O’Ryan in the river rising,
Tangled.
The Spiders of the evil Hoar
are coming in the flood
Every form shape or manner
the insects of the wizard blood
The Castle stands like a parapet,
Kingdoms enthralled in air
Saturday Heroes of the windy field
Bare fist-glasses to the mer—
The Merrimac is roaring,
Eternity and the Rain are Bare
Down by White Hood Falls,
Down by the darkened weirs,
Down by Manchester, down by Brown,
Down by Lowell, Comes the Rose—
Flowing to its seaward, brave as knights,
Riding the humpback Merrimac
Rage excites
So doth the rain droop open,
more like a rose
Less adamantine
Than ang
Liquid heaven in her drip
eatin rock
mixing kip
Eternity comes & swallows
moisture, blazes sun
to accept up
Rain sleeps when the rain is over
Rain rages when the sun keels over
Roseg drown when the pain is over
The water lute sides of Rainbow
Heaven—
Rang a dang mam-mon
Sing your blacking song.
THE SONG OF THE MYTH OF THE RAINY NIGHT
Rose, Rose
Rainy Night Rose
Castle, Castles
Hassels in the Castle
Rain, Rain,
Shroud’s in the Rain
Makes her Luminescence
Of folded Incandescence
Raw red rose in wetted night
“I had all to do
With that dreaded essence.”
Pitterdrop, pitterdrop,
Rain in the woods
Sax sits Shrouded
Meek & crazy
Rumored in his trousers
Naked as a baby
“Rainy drops, rainy drops,
Made of loves,
Snake’s not real,
Twas a husk of doves
‘The rain is really milk
The night is really white
The shroud is really seen
By the white eyes of the light
A young & silly dove
Is yakking in the sky
The dream is cropping under
The muds & marble mix
Petals of the water harp,
Melted lutes,
Angels of Eternity
And pissing in the air
“Ah poor life and paranoid gain,
hassel, hassel, hassel,
man in the rain
“Mix with the bone melt!
Lute with the cry!
So doth the rain blow down
From all heaven—s fantasy.”
—Deep in myself I’m mindful of the action of the river, in words that sneak slowly like the river, and sometimes flood, the wild Merrimac is in her lark of Spring lally-da’ing down the pale of mordant shores with a load of humidus aquabus aquatum the size of which was one brown rushing sea. By God as soon as the ice floes were past, the brown foam fury waters came, thundering in midstream in one lump bump like the back of a carnival Caterpillar pitching green muslin-hunks and people screaming inside–only this was chickens, drowned chickens garnished the middle of the rill-ridge roar in centerriver–brown foam, mud foam, dead rats, the roofs of hen houses, roofs of barns, houses—(out of Rosemont one afternoon, under sky drowse, I felt peaceful, six bungalows got out their moorings and floated to midstream like duck brothers and sisters and proceeded to Lawrence and another Twi League)—
I stood there on the edge ledge.
It was a Monday night I’d first seen the floes, a terrible, bad sight–the lonely turrets of houses near the river–the doomed trees–at first it wasn’t so bad. Pine families would be saved from the rock. None of the inhabitants of sorrow in the orphanage across the way could drown in this deluge-
Nobody knows how mad I was– Tommy Dorsey’s I Got a Note was out that year, 1936, just at the time the Flood mounted in Lowell–so I went around the shores of the roaring river in the joyous-no-school mornings that came with the flood’s peak, and sang “I got a nose, you got a nose —(half octave higher:)—I got a nose, you got a nose,” I thought that’s what the song was: it also occurred to me how strange the songwriter’s meaning must have been (if I thought of songwriters at all, it seemed to me people just got together and sang over the microphone)—It was a funny song, at the end it had that 1930’s lilt so hysterical Scott Fitzgerald, with writhely women squirmelying their we-a-ares in silk & brocade shiny New Year’s Eve nightclub dresses with thrown champagne and popples busting “Gluyr! the New Year Eve Parade!” (and there, huge and preponderant, sprung the earth’s river devouring to its monstrous sea).
In gray afternoon my mother and I (it was the first no-school afternoon) took a walk to see why there was no school, the reason was not given but everyone knew it was going to be a bad flood. There were a lot of people on the shore, at Riverside Street where it meets the White Bridge near the Falls–I had every measurement of the river keen-etched in my mind along the rock of the canal wall–there were a few flood-measurements written, in numbers showing feet, and the marks of old moss and old floods– Derby-hatted Lowell had been there a hundred years, was grimed like Liverpool in its Massachusetts river fog; the huge humus of mist that rose from the flooding river was enough to convince anybody a flood, a great flood, was coming. There was an improvised fence set up in the gloom near the bridge, where the lawn went too close to sidewalk and rail that once were summer dalliances, were now sprayed by the mist from the great surging brown watermass roaring right there. So people stood behind that fence. My mother held my hand. There was something very sad and thirtyish about this scene, the air was gray, there was disaster (copies of The Shadow Magazine were dusting in the gloom in the little hideaway junkstore across the street from St. Jean Baptiste, in the paved Apache
an alley, copies of The Shadow in the dark gloom, the city’s in flood)—
It was like a newsreel of 1930’s to see us all huddled there in gloomy lines with minstrel-mouths shining white in the darkscreen, the incredible mud underfoot, the hopeless tangle of ropes, tackle, planks—(and seabags began pouring in that night). “Mon doux, Ti Jean, regarde la grosse flood qui va arrivez — “tut-thut-thut-” with her cluck tongue, (My goodness Ti Jean look at the big flood that’s going to happen)— “c’est mechant s gross rividre la quand qutja bien d’la neige qui fond dans VNord dans YPrintemps (It’s bad those big rivers when there’s a lot of snow that melts in the North in the Spring)”—
“Cosse qui va arrivez? (what’s gonna happen?)”
“Parsonne sai. (Nobody knows.)”
Officials in bleak windswept raincoats consulted ropes and boxes of City equipment—”No school! no school!” The little kids were singing as they danced over the White Bridge– In a matter of 24 hours people were afraid to even go on that bridge, it was concrete, white, it already had cracks in it … the Moody Street Bridge was all of iron and racks and stone, gaunt and skeletal in the other part of the Flood-
In the bright morning of the gray afternoon after school was called off, me and Dicky Hampshire sallied forth at 8 A.M. to the scenes of wrath and destruction that already we could hear roaring over our Wheaties. People were walking on Riverside Street below Sarah with strange preoccupied airs. Those headed towards Rosemont understandably! Rosemont was low and flat at the river’s basin, already half of Rosemont and its lovely Santa Barbara cottages were in six feet of brown water–Vinny Bergerac’s home was a raft, they spent the first day him and Lou and Normie and Rita and Charlie and Lucky the old man on a lark in the flood and played rafts and boats around the front and back of the house, “Wheee! looka me Ma!” Vinny’s yelling “The Goddam Navy’s come to town, order up all the beetleskins, here comes purple Shadows McGatlin the Champ”—and the next morning at six they were ordered to leave the tenement crazy house in the Rosemont suburbs by a crew of booted policemen in rowboats wearing rain hats and gloomcoats, Rosemont was in a state of emergency, in another day there was hardly any of it left, spit and floodbubbles were at mylady’s boudoir-
Dicky Hampshire’s eyes gleamed with excitement. It was the greatest sight we’d ever seen when we crossed the back Textile field and came to its high-end plateau over the dump and the deep canyoned river quarter mile wide to Little Canada, and saw all the way there the huge mountain of ugly sinister waters lunging around Lowell like a beast dragon– We saw a gigantic barn roof floating in mid stream, jiggling with the vibration of the roar in the hump there— “Wow!” Hungry, tremendously hungry as we got on this excitement we never went home to eat all day.
—”The strategy is to snare one of them barnyard roofs and make a gigantic raft,” said Dick, and was he ever right– We rushed towards the river across the dump. There, in brightest morning, where the great chimney loomed 200 feet high, orangebrick, overtopping the brick mass of Textile so nobly situated in height-vistas, there were our green lawn-slopes (the lawns of power houses neat and swardgreen) where we’d been playing King of the Hill for eternities, three years–there was the cinder path to Moody Street at the bridge (where cars were parked in this exciting morning, people were gathered, how many times I’ve dreamed of leaping over that fence at bridge end and in dream glooms rush down by the shadow of the iron underpinnings and the jutting rock of the shore, and bushes, and shadows, and Doctor Sax dreary ambiguities, something namelessly sad and dreamed and trampled over in the civil wars of the mind & memory– and further scene-dreams on the straw slopes cundrum-cluttered overlooking a little cliff drop to the waterside rocks)— We felt we’d grown up because these places and scenes were now more than child’s play, they were now abluted in pure day by the white snow mist of tragedy.
Tragedy roared ahead of us–all Lowell with bated breath was watching from a thousand parapets natural and otherwise in the Lowell valley. Our mothers had said “Be careful” and by noon they too, huddled in housewife coats, locked the door and suspended the ironing of the wash to come and peek at the river even though it entailed a long walk down Moody across Textile to the bridge-
Billy and I surveyed this remarkable sunny morning. The river came boiling in brown anger from the rivulets of the valley north, on the Boulevard cars were parked to see the river waving trees in its claw,—down at the Rosemont end of the dump a crowd was lined to face the Netherlandic havoc there, our little shitty beach in the reeds was now the bottom of the sea–I remembered all the boys who had drowned– “Tu connassa tu le petit bonhomme Roger qui etait parent avec les Voyers du store? ll’s a noyer hier—dans riviere–a Rosemont–ta beach que t’appele”—(Did you know the little boy Roger who was related to the Voyers of the store? He drowned yesterday–in the river– at Rosemont–your beach you call it.)— The River was Drowning Itself– It came over the Falls at the White Bridge not in its usual blue sheen and fall (among whitecaps snow) but sleered over in a brown and hungry slide sheen that only had to slip two feet and was in the foams of the bottom flood–the little children of the Orphanage on Pawtucket at the White Bridge were standing in watchful rows in the wire fences of the yard or down in the Grotto near the Cross, something huge and independent had come into their lives.
Dicky and I jumped down among the fenders and crap of the dumpslope, down to the water’s edge, where the flood just lapped up and fendered away in a sunkjunk beach of 90 degrees– We stood on this edge of this watery precipice watching with eagle eye of Indians in the plateau morning for a chickencoop roof to bump into our hands. It came pirouetting in bumps along the fendered shore–we hooked it at our mooring with a small piece of rope on one end (tied to a car bumper stuck in the ground for ten years) and the other end more or less held by a board bridge with rocks on it, temporarily–chicken feathers we found as we romped up and down the tin roof. It was a solid raft, wood on the bottom, tin on deck–it measured fifty feet by thirty, immense– It had slipped over the swollen Falls without damage. But we never bargained for any long trip on the Merrimac Sea–we thought we had it securely tied, enough anyway, and at some point the rope broke, Dicky saw it and jumped on the dump–but I was strolling along the outer, or flood, edge of the chickenroof and didn’t hear (from eternity roar of river) what Dicky wanted to say—”Hey Jack–the rope broke–come on back.” In fact I was dreamily standing surveying that tremendous and unforgettable monstrous rush of humpbacked central waters Flooding at 60 miles an hour out of the rock masses beneath the Moody Bridge where the white horses were now drowned in brown and seemed to gather at the mouth of the rocks in a surging vibration of water to form this Middle lunge that seemed to tear the flood towards Lawrence as you watched–to Lawrence and the sea–and the Roar of that hump, it had the scaly ululating back of a sea monster, of a Snake, it was an unforgettable flow of evil and of wrath and of Satan barging thru my home town and rounding the curve of the Rosemont Basin and Centralville Snake Hill by that blue puff figure castle on the meadow landlump in the rawmous clouds beyond– Also I was watching to see if the people in the Little Canada rock-cliff tenements that jutted over the river were evacuating their solidly founded homes at the hungry lip of the River’s brown torrential roar– Back of Laurier park the dump and the dumpshacks of Little Canada Aiken Street and old pest heur with his poolhall shack and come-alleys of dirtybook hookey toss-a-coin days that came later to make men of me and Dicky and Vinny and G.J. and Scotty and Lousy and Billy Artaud and Iddiboy and Skunk– In fact I might have been dreaming of Skunk, as Dicky yelled to me, the time Skunk was supposed to fight Dicky in the park-trail and somebody intervened in the long red dusk of ancient heroic events and now Skunk was a baseball star on our team but also his house in Rosemont was probably floating away– all of it was drowned … the dump, half the Laurier ballpark, tragic gangs of American Low-ellians were gathered on the opposite shore watching–in the wild sun-excited day I watched it
all from my foaming deck–higher than my head the deluge roared 200 feet away– The sun was one vast white mass of radiance suspended in the aurobus of heaven like an auriola, an arcade shaft penetrated it all, there were slants of heaven and bedazzling impossible brilliances illuminating all furyfied the tremendous spectacles of flood– High up there in the white of the blue I saw it, the silly dove, a pippione, an Italian love bird, returning from the Himalayas the other side of the world-roof with an herb wrap’t round its leg, in a tiny leaf, the Monks of the Rooftop Monastery have sent Tibetan secrets to the King of Anti Evil, Doctor Sax, Enemy of the Snake, Shade of Dark, Phantom Listener at My Window, Watcher With Green Face of Little Jewish Boys in Paterson Night Time when phobus claggett me gonigle bedoigne breaks his arse shroud on a giant pitrock black Passaic weyic manic madness in the smoony snow night of dull balls– A young and silly dove is yakking in the blue, circling the brown and slushy river with yaks of pipsqueak joy, demoniac manic bird of little paradise, come snowing from Ebon hills to bring our message herb–a pip-pione, weary with travel–now all eyes comes circling upon the flood, then veers in blinding day to the woods of flooded Lowell–a cape of ink furls upon the waters where Doctor Sax rows–a car comes to the meadow mud edge of the flood–Doctor Sax vanishes behind flooded bushes in a gloor– Moisture from trees in the gray drops plipping in the sullen moiling brown varnishy surface, full of skeel– The Dove descends, aims fluttering heart straight for the black arms of Sax upheld from his boat in gratitude and prayer. “O Palalakonuh!” he cries upon the desolated flood, “O Palalakonuh Beware!!”
“Jack! Jack!” Dicky is calling. “Get off the raft-the rope’s cut off–you’re floating away!”
I turn around and survey the damage–I take a quick run to the edge and look over at brown bottomless waters of the 90 degree dump and its receding from the last shoe hold fender at Dicky’s feet, a four-foot jump in just a second. .. I knew I could barely make it and so I wasn’t scared but simply jumped and landed on my feet on the dump and the raft wait out behind me to join humps of the main midstream, where it was seen pitching and diving like a gigantic lid–it could have been my Ship.
2
NEWS CAME TO US from subsidiary kids in the booming amazing morning like in a Tolstoy battle that the White Bridge was pronounced dangerous and nobody was crossing it, there were road blocks, and on the boulevard the River had found an ancient creek bed suitable to its new forward floodrush and used it to flow in a mad torrent across half of Pawtucketville and join its horror to Pine Brook deluges and a rush out back through already back-flooded Rosemont–further, news came of disasters in downtown Lowell, soon we couldn’t even get there, the canals were overflowed into, the mills were swimming, water was creeping in the business streets, pools were forming of whole redbrick railroad switch alleys behind the mills–all of it was just mad great news to us– The afternoon of the gray tragic flood-warning with my mother, I later returned with the gang to see the sandbag operations at Riverside Street where it dipped down lowest. Right there lived one of our grammar school teachers, Mrs. Wakefield, in a little white cottage covered with rose vines. They were piling sandbags across the street from her white fence. We stood at the sandbags, at the ripple up flood swell, and poked our fingers at them–we wanted the Flood to pierce thru and drown the world, the horrible adult routine world. G.J. and I made jokes about it–scuffled with each other yakking in the tragic emergency flashlights and oilcup flares as the river rose–after supper we saw that the sandbag wall was higher. We wanted a real flood–we wished the workmen would go away. But next morning we came and saw the great snake hump roar of the river’s strong left arm slamming through the sandbag place 20 feet high and pouring through the blind gawp windows of Mrs. Wakefield’s brown vine weedy cottage with its last rooftop slipping over in the whirlpool–behind her a street-ful of rushing water– G.J. and I looked at each other in astonishment and impossible glee: IT HAD BEEN DONE!