In a dream I left camp to walk to town
but the road stopped, was closed,
& I stepped off into a line of trees
coming out then into the open on a path alongside an uphill pasture
where a girl was riding a horse bareback, she
was very dark & big boned, riding barefoot w/ no stirrups through
geese & Muscovy ducks,
she rode uphill toward the crest, where the sky was deepest blue where it touched
the crest.
By the pasture's bottom-most fence — alongside the path —
some white men in suits were following a short black man, likely her father I thought,
w/ white hair & a neat white goatee, courting him I thought:
he had one leg, the other off way high up, & got around the site
w/a single cane, in shorts
which flapped empty from the other,
the white men trotting to keep up, their neckties flapping over
their round shoulders.
He spotted me & called "We have some things in common" & further, leaning
across the fence to speak quietly, sd he'd been pleasuring 2 women,
one black & one white, when it happened, the blood
to the leg having "herniated" because of fucking them
at the same time, he sd,
in & then to come back up in the current,
he sd, surfacing — the blood did — in the current.
it had been hanging out of the socket on its own threads focusing crazily
when the doctors came he sd & they gave him something to drink that tasted like wild
strawberry, bitter & sweet at once,
* * *
Further on up the path I lost the direction but got back just at dark
through some different paths, back to the barrier that had closed the road
I'd left camp on:
I knew now it was the countenance
of the man's woods that began at the line of trees there
that attracted me,
the woods of that country, from where the road stopped, his fields too.
I saw a big animal in the trees alongside & thought it a deer or moose
but it was a horse leaping over fences in front of me & then
there were more horses leaping the fences in the moonlight.
no longer to town but further in,
the way frozen into a bad initial climb
on which I could get no purchase because of the ice:
so I went to the house — it was white, clapboard — & up on its big porch
& was met there at the door by a chinless white man, sweet & foppish both
my chinless Englishman was, who sd the man I was for was in the tub but that he
could use the electricity to melt the ice & threw a massive switch like in the movies
that caused crackling & popping outside & flashes at the edge of sight, at the edges
of the picture,
framing it briefly
beyond the porch,
the white man explaining that they were in competition with the H.B. Company, which owned the horses I'd seen earlier,
that the gentlemen of that company were trying, as always, to buy them out,
which was to attempt, he sd, an impossible task:
lost on the roads I came to on which the signs
were ambiguous & at a gas station I askt directions & they sent me
up the rocky rd that intersected the main road there
the name continuing way on into the uplands even further, past
the pavement's end —
so I took it, climbing over the rocks, a jumble
of rocks until I got finally to some stairs
up to a door in the side of a red wooden house perched
at the top, in the rocks at the top
of the hill.
"Giscomb portage"
Someone sd how civilization had now reached a tentacle up the river (how it had
as if for them — he & his companions — to come to, how
After several false discoveries Giscomb portage finally stole into view
around a bend out there in the description, how after all that here was the stage-door
for the civilized boys to come to