Peach-poised, weightless, on a hard chair. Pleached, shaded, concealing glowing fruit. Pencil skirt. Uniform blouse. Notepad mortar-boarded on her pointy knee, sucking a pencil lead. Sharp: ready to take down every word. My amanuensis. Ready. Begin:
The Dragon Orchard
Blue flash of rock in the deep, the dragon-writhing, mist-shrouded bowels of the earth, granite-sinewed contortions of stone, petrified fearscape wreathed with fire.
O twisty dragons! (The nine sons of the Dragon King, and at least one from the Shahnameh. Ten dragons I counted.)
Far beneath the Manhattan schist, the Inwood marble, the Fordham gneiss. Somewhere under Washington Heights.
Like a snarling nest of cockroach mothers fat with tear-drop eggcases hanging off the ends of their long elegant abdomens, behind the wire shelves in a fetid storage locker on 151th Street, under canisters of mayonnaise, towers of deli pickles and styrofoam trays.
Intellectual dragons, coils of knotted flesh, their watered-silk integuments the color of blued steel, shooting livid fire and casting off flakes of light, ripples of noiseless energy.
Sheets of blue flame sloughing from their carved gemstone backs, their eel-smooth bodies like dandruff into the void, like autumn leaves from an orchard of dragons under my bed.
"The nine sons of the Dragon King...."
"....and at least one from the Shahnameh."
(Click on pictures to view full size.)
II
Wandering in the dragon orchard I met a girl. The visual essence of her flowering, fourteen year-old never-exfoliated, derm-abraded, spa-pampered skin seeped into my eyes and drenched my optic nerves, flooding my olfactory circuits and spilling over into my loins. Now, close to the flesh of things, I smell colors, or more precisely feel them, cupped in my hand like a breast or—in the case of many colors—like a middle manager’s abused, misshapen, leather-encased fifty year-old sweaty malodorous feet. Colors engendered in marketing surveys, developed by research teams and debated across conference tables, then manufactured in laboratories and chemical plants where the living, speaking surface of things (not colors—there are no colors in nature) is transformed into crematorium smoke to goose up our sunsets. Mortuary showroom colors. Hunter green. Harvest gold. The new black at nature’s funeral. The toxic skin color of waiting room furniture. The jaundiced, garish hue of twelve-packs of drumsticks in the supermarket poultry aisle, mummified in plastic.
The feet of my darling are watchful, timid and dusty, like small animals.
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