Children of the Albatross (16 page)

“Djuna,” said Michael, “I see all your thoughts
running in all directions, like minnows.”

Then immediately he knew this in her was a
symptom of anxiety, and he avoided the question which would have wounded her:
“Has Paul’s father sent him to India?”

For in the way she sat there he knew she was
awaiting a mortal blow.

At this moment there appeared on the
marble-topped tables the stains of drink, the sediments and dregs of false
beatitudes.

At this moment the organ grinder changed his
tune, and ceased to shower the profligacies of
Carmen.

The laughter of Pagliacci bleached by city
fumes, wailed like a loon out of the organ, so that the monkey cornered by a
joviality which had neither a sound of man or monkey rattled his chains in
greater desperation and saluted with his red Turkish hat every stranger who
might deliver him from this loud-speaker tree to which he had been tied.

He danced a pleading dance to be delivered from
this tree from which the twisting of a handle brought forth black birds of
corrugated melodies.

But as the pennies fell he remembered his
responsibilities, his prayer for silent trees vanished from his eyes as he
attempted a gesture of gratitude with his red Turkish hat.

Djuna walked back again into her labyrinthian
cities of the interior.

Where music bears no titles flowing like a
subterranean river carrying all the moods, sensations and impressions into
dissolutions forming and reorming a world in terms of flow…

where houses wear but facades exposed to easy
entrances and exits

where streets do not bear a name because they
are the streets of secret sorrows

where the birds who sing are the birds of
peace, the birds of paradise, the colored birds of desire which appear in our
dreams

there are those who feared to be lost in this
voyage without compass, barometers, steering wheel or encyclopedias

but Djuna knew that at this surrender of the
self began a sinking into deeper layers of awareness deeper and deeper starting
at the topsoil of gaiety and descending through the geological stairways
carrying only the delicate weighing machine of the heart to weigh the
imponderable

through these streets of secret sorrows in
which the music was anonymous and people lost their identities to better be
carried and swept back and forth through the years to find only the points of
ecstasy…

registering only the dates and titles of
emotion which alone enter the flesh and lodge themselves against the flux and
loss of memory

that only the important dates of deep feeling
may recur again and again each time anew through the wells, fountains and
rivers of music…