Here’s something: a first

whir, the next step…a few
feats more. I’ve “already”

retched…reached, I mean;
taken the jump so to speak.

It seems right. And so
the so-called story as it exists

in the so-called here-and-now.
     •
That to mount his defence Sidney should with one hand palm like a little oiled apple

the pommel, so to speak, of one of Pugliano’s stabled stallions (besaddled “I knowe not

by what miſchance”) while with the other (polite nod, heel-of-hand-to-face, downswept-
doff-like-wave) announce himself logician first (“peece of a Logician”—crumb enough

of one, syllogists being a sort of dry biscuit, to’ve resisted the temptation to wish himself

a palomino or Percheron, the captivating flame of Iohn Pietro’s equine ardors aside:
the tear-stained hay bale homilies (…and whilst lifting to the lips of my beloved Lippizaner

an infusion of honey and essence of orange blossom in a little silver finger bowl once

     owned,

as it chanced to happen, by her ladyship, the Duchess of Malfi…), the vivid troughside
sermons (…with but a tin of custard and these two tiny castanets, in a little alley behind

a public stables near the docks of Swansea, I once soothed a skittish Andalusian, bless

her dear sweet delicate soul; she belonging to the captain of a Spanish schooner (la belle

of the lot!) I’d met that afternoon over a game of draughts in a booth at the back of The

     Poop

& Rudder…), the tender tack room recitatives (…and now, if I may, my first eyeful

of an unbloused bosom, that of my boyhood milkmaid Genevieve gigglingly bent to groom

the foreleg of a big bay mare (or was she a chestnut?) with a Grecian loofa and mohair

brush, grandfather seated before her on a little wicker chair grinning ear-to-tufted-ear;

I having one rainy summer Sunday by chance chased from the barnyard into the stables
a pair of fatted hens only to behold there the pater of our familias (humming all the while

an old sea shanty of which he’d always been fond) extract through his undone fly the

     entire

pink mass of his privates, select the chief part, and in full view of that poor unknowing
animal start to rub his glossy shaft like Aladdin his magic lamp (soon abetted, no less,

by our befreckled milkmaid! the little German hands of whom had, like the gentle jiggle

of her name itself, worked their rhythmical magic on every udder in the barn, a simple
fact the sobering significance of which I fully grasped (Gesundheit!) in a sudden flash

a decade hence, upon falling to the floor of a brothel in Hoofddorp, overcome by madam’s

house specialty: with one hand “the fist of ecstasy,” with the second “the fist of bliss,”
a nifty twist the like of which is seldom met with, I can assure you), the scene then ending

with a snort (grandpapa? horse?) and two laughs (mine of disbelief, Ginny’s whinny-

like titter, of surprise), the one, as luck would have it, in chorus with the other, and so,
gift of that timely eclipse, I remained undiscovered (hidden away between a forsaken

horse blanket and overturned handbarrow) and with me the secret shame of my own

unsaintliness: how my innocence was lost that day, taken by my own hand, as it were,
atop a pile of hay; stirred by the leathern frankincense-like fragrance of bridles,

     nosebands,

browbands, saddle pads…provoked by the sight of throatlatches, breastplates, halters,

whips, crops, girths…inflamed by the calambac-like perfumery of dry straw, turnip tops,
fresh dung, horse sweat; “…the ill-effects of an unfortunate fall…” (per mother (stage left)

atop a taboret to assembled servants in the hall, she being but the height of an ornamental

hedge of holly) summoned, as it so happens, my dear nonno that very noon to eternal rest;


The wisest men do not lose their

jest even in the hour

of death, so let us be merry.

For here lieth Lorenzo beside

his beloved junipers, done unto

his end from excess joy.


his pale, dimpled, plump-faced playmate (an orphan from…Strasbourg, if memory

serves) I saw again only once, softly singing to herself at a little table beneath the kitchen

window one morning wearing only slippers and a bonnet arranging poppies in a vase,

whom soon after which was sent to a distant cousin’s country estate (near Padua? Pisa?

Parma? somewhere beside the banks of the Po deep in green Piedmont? no matter)

where she disappeared one winter whilst crossing a frozen pond to deliver a basket of eggs
to a neighboring farm, departing behind a clump of rushes into a cold but colorful coda

by way of an angler’s innocently un-marked hole in the ice…), the enthralling little patties

of horsy hyperbole placidly pinched off atop a pinto or painted pony while roaming
shamrocked pastures, little green paddocks, long country lanes (…how now! to tame

an Appaloosa with a tambourine is but the work of a wet nurse…), the somber soliloquies

delivered in the midst of calming a finicky filly, fawning over a colicky colt (…to “marble”

at one’s misfortune, as if to pulp oneself into the endpapers of a bad book, may we presume

to know better…) or hissed through a split lip (…for surely this is but love or friendship,

or merely a ray of sun that gleams in the eye of this beast…) while fending off (…not ill will

for me…) with a horsewhip (Fermo!) and suddenly headless hayrake (Attento!) the wild-

eyed kick (Ecco!) of a foaming Arabian), poet second (“my vnelected vocation”), so too

I’ve “ſlipt” (whoops): having “this”—say, bamboo bookmark, fauxly kanji’d to boot, iron
weathervane in the shape of a pair of napping loons, split muskmelon, lettuce leavings,

moldy bolt of muslin, chisel-and-wooden-mallet’s phit-phit-phit, little blue dish of caraway

pips—as much a delphinium or daisy or aster or asphodel its turning-toward-sunness.
     •
Like this, and I would put up not down—not

because of tempo, because of sound—a map

of my own movement: from a simple journey

a few stone’s throws away to what shapely

manifold of dovetailed doublings and wrinkled

rabbets, dadoes, mortises and miters I fantasize

the so-called trek might knit me into if only it would.