The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

The green did em down day by day. Carson died of a stick

in his boot. His foot swole up and when we cut away

the boot leather, his toesies were as black

as the squid’s ink that drove Manning’s heart.

Reston and Polgoy, they were stung by spiders

big as your fist; Ackerman bit by a snake what dropped

out of a tree where it hung like a lady’s fur stole

draped on a branch. Bit its poison into Ackerman’s nose.

How strong a throe, you ask? Try this:

He ripped his own snoot clean off! Yes! Tore it away

like a rotten peach off a branch and died

spitin his own dyin face! Goddam life, I say,

if you can’t laugh you might as well laugh anyway.

That’s my goddam attitude, and I stick by it;

this ain’t a sad world unless you’re sane.

Now where was I?

Javier fell off a plank bridge and when we

hauled him out he couldn’t breathe so

Dorrance tried to kiss him back to life

and sucked from his throat a leech as big as

a hothouse tomato. It popped free like a cork from

a bottle and split between em; sprayed both with the claret

we live on (for we’re all alcoholics that way, if you see my figure)

and when the Spaniard died raving, Manning said

the leeches’d gone to his brain. As for me, I hold no opinion on that.

All I know is that Javy’s eyes wouldn’t stay shut but went on

bulging in and out even after he were an hour cold.

Something hungry there, all right, arr, yes there was!

And all the while the macaws screamed at the monkeys

and the monkeys screamed at the macaws and both

screamed for the blue sky they couldn’t see,

for it was buried in the goddam green.

Is this whiskey or diarrhea in a glass?

There was one of those suckers in the Frenchie’s pants –

did I tell you? You know what that one ate, don’t you?

It was Dorrance himself went next; we were

climbing by then, but still in the green. He fell

in a gorge and we could hear the snap. Broke his neck,

twenty-six years of age, engaged to be married, case closed.

Arr, ain’t life grand? Life’s a sucker in the throat,

life’s the gorge we all fall in, it’s a soup

and we all end up vegetables. Ain’t I philosophical?

Never mind. It’s too late to count the dead,

and I’m too drunk. In the end we got there.

Just say that.

Climbed the high path out of all that

sizzling green after we buried Rostoy, Timmons,

the Texan – I forget his name – and Dorrance

and a couple of other ones. In the end most went down

of some fever that boiled their skin and turned it green.

At the end it was only Manning, Revois, and me.

We caught the fever too, but killed it before it killed us.

Only I ain’t never really got better. Now whiskey’s

my quinine, what I take for the shakes, so buy

me another before I forget my manners

and cut your fucking throat. I might even

drink what comes out, so be wise, sonny,

and trot it over, goddam you.

There was a road we came to, even Manning agreed

it was, and wide enough for elephants if the ivory hunters

hadn’t picked clean the jungles and the plains beyond em

back when gas was still a nickel.

It bore up, that road, and we bore up with it on tilted slabs

of stone a million years jounced free of Mother Earth,

leaping one to another like frogs in the sun, Revois

still burning with the fever and me – oh, I was light!

Like milkweed gauze on a breeze, you know.

I saw it all. My mind was as clear then as clean water,

for I was as young then as horrid now – yes, I see

how you look at me, but you needn’t frown so, for

it’s your own future you see on this side o’ table.

We climbed above the birds and there was the end,

a stone tongue poked straight into the sky.

Manning broke into a run and we ran after, Revois

trotting a right smart, sick as he was.

(But he wasn’t sick long – hee!)

We looked down and saw what we saw.

Manning flushed red at the sight, and why not?

For greed’s a fever, too.

He grabbed me by the rag that was once my shirt

and asked were it just a dream. When I said I saw

what he saw, he turned to Revois.

But before Revois could say Aye or Nay, we heard thunder

coming up from the greenroof we’d left behind,

like a storm turned upside down. Or say

like all of earth had caught the fever that stalked us

and was sick in its bowels. I asked Manning what he heard

and Manning said nothing. He was hypnotized by

that cleft, looking down a thousand feet of ancient air

into the church below: a million years’ worth of bone and tusk,

a whited sepulcher of eternity, a thrashpit of prongs

such as you’d see if hell burned dry to the slag of its cauldron.

You expected to see bodies impaled on the

ancient thorns of that sunny tomb. There were none,

but the thunder was coming, rolling up from the ground

instead of down from the sky. The stones shook

beneath our heels as they burst free of the green

that took so many of us – Rostoy with his mouth harp,

Dorrance who sang along, the anthropologist

with the ass like an English saddle, twenty-six others.

They arrived, those gaunt ghosts, and shook the greenroof

from their feet, and came in a shuddering wave: elephants

stampeding from the green cradle of time.

Towering among em (believe what you want)

were mammoths from the dead age when man