The entrance of L’Amoroso at the Grand Concourse for Skeletons
1. The plane came in limping down the runway. Arriving for the banquet of the skeletons, L’Amoroso (his woven bag filled with parchments, sonnets and sonatas, the plumed articulation of a wild bird’s soaring) crosses the tarmac, glides through the trembling doors: fragrant bursts of pine forest, of dark earth and rising ocean mist, ooze from his bones. A flotilla of doves, willow-branch-laden, brush his coiffed and perfumed head. He enters a room of candelabra, of massed candles, gold brocade, escorted by two lutes, a zither, five violas. A scurry of page-boys, lords and ladies, suddenly stock-still, all hushed for his passage. In the frilled garb of half-naked choristers two sopranos, a contralto weave their voices towards some inner Spring. On a star-painted floor of darkness two actors, their bodies draped in silk, mime the fifteen poses of the sacred lovers. In vestibules to right and left flutter the red fleur-de-lis of Florence. High horns float gold ripples of La Serenissima. The centre aisle becomes the Grand Canal as across mirroring conflicted waters embroidered notes and coins sail back and forth while, to each side, stone, metal, glass press downward into earth. From elaborate doorframes pre-fabricated word-skeins glitter a thousand ideograms for ‘Welcome’. All breath extols this geography of love to which the lutes ascend. Meanwhile the conference of skeletons by moonlight has begun. L’Amoroso enters the chamber of xrays where everything inside him is outside him, ribs and tubing, twirled spirals of the ear, the listening purple flora of the gut. And beyond that lies the room of darkness where only the eyes, nose and mouth glow green and pink beyond the steady mist of gathering black. Stripped of his entourage he wades in. Tall and elegantly gaunt, a trawler in the velvet cape of a young prince, he skims the waters of this psychic reservoir, his body a net loosely woven to fit the heart’s detritus, while his curled magician’s sandals stride the flood. There is a cupboard known only to the fish who are reborn each day from the saint’s recurrent nightmare of earth’s death. In this cupboard lie the dreams L’Amoroso must invent: the mountain that became a moon-struck eagle; his days in the tabernacle of fire; his life among the white stone trees, the white flowers, a snowscape where his face is hidden by the wind-dusted scree on a lake’s frozen surface. And the cupboard opens its own several faces as storage space for the afterlife of broken computers, as the one darkness where the skeletons won’t go, or the mind’s inner signal box for lost trains, while on a shelf L’Amoroso finds a motel room that fits inside the palm of one hand where over and over two lovers copulate their mouths their genitals their souls awaking each other into knowing hour after hour for ever and from the ream of notes for still-unwritten sonnets tucked somewhere in the third drawer on the left L’Amoroso’s hand pulls out the phrase “I must into the vale of Avalon to heal me of my grievous wound.” 2. Tucked under the door to my apartment a note on florid parchment: << Por favor la sua presencia está invitado al gran concurso de los esqueletos afin que podía cenare conmigo ese notte El señor L’Amoroso.>> and straightaway I am transported under earth, down caverns, through forests, hurried by palanquin across tottering gorges, halted on a bridge below a waterfall. A fine mist passes through me as I rise to stand at last at one with the sky. Meanwhile at my back I hear the whirlwind of skeletons approach. A chaos of air swirls overhead and I step into the altered hall of endings. Venice. 1610. The lords and ladies chatter, the banners are assembled. The high horns blazon while outside on the runway el señor L’Amoroso taxies in. |
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