WAKING DREAMS

 (An historical literary meditation dedicated to the followers of Virgil Parthenias, my double, my doppelgänger, literary parents and siblings, secret sharer, inspiration and copyist, – mon semblable, – mon frère! Frank Andrick, Gérard de Nerval...Nadar, Rodin...)

Cranial Nadar’s framed Nerval will sleep in my true dreams from this day on, defamed, the way the road is a kind of life confused with the night. Rodin smoothed such beauty out of hand and cold stone while Nerval’s fever revealed, in a peal of leprous bells, ravens sleeping in the tower struck down. That collapsing of ear and door, of rank and file, rood and pillar,  the livelong day in the nick of time, in the might of our kinship and piss.

Then the resurrection. No peut-être’s ruse to be surrendered back and forth regardless of the heart’s needles. Further from the center, along the city’s margin, the double’s pen creeps up and down to Hell and back between the drunk, the dawdling, and the debauched, wishing on the vaginal star that came and took him down off of the Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, careful not to destroy anyone in its path.

Justicia is armed against them, arms them against Misericordia’s staying hand. Handy that, yesterday’s excuse of precedent as a philosophical platform for taking arms against a sea of have-nots, hoping to take something home, and harming them once again with desperation’s helping hand slap. “Don’t touch that!” gavels the judge, regarding the flimsy points of law, “you might break it.”

Alone with the night and a princess’ broomstick, the geography of the city betrays you at last. A descent to end the circling, you dangle between Heaven and the deep blue pavement: hands nailed to a cross, yesterday's god couldn’t get down to help you either up to or down from. Our Lady of Enlightenment put you too rudely out of doors that night, your taunting aunt Ada has her note.

“Merde!” you said, “the mere gawking of this madre dei corvi cawing will be the death of me.”  And it was. You saw to it with the saw-toothed practitude of the night both black and white.

The final gripe upon your pyre will be male, your lame coffin-brother’s translation from sloppy Montmartre to Père Lachaise. Death, the ultimate double. Finally to your grassy knoll of impacted cranial worms as they translate you back to solitude. The world will always have its regrets for being made in man’s image. You, and all of the followers of Virgil, will have Febilia’s fire and the night to make it shine.

10/1995

NYC