The Pens of Roosters
Lines from the lawyer Zachek from Prague: "I met a beautiful Czech woman who read your book, Narod, to her grandmother on her deathbed. You would love her, but she is much too beautiful for you. I will keep her for myself."
A photograph of the writer–in–exile in a Panama hat holding a wooden pig painted black and white, handcarved by Felipe Archeleta of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Something surreal
Something exotic
Something erotic
Spontaneous
The woman photographer from "Invisible Life" takes the wooden pig in her hands and kisses the pink snout. The exile slips the camera from her shoulder, slowly unbuttons her blouse, stands back and shoots, shoots, shoots the moment in Tri–X 400 black and white.
The next time is never.
Now is present perfect.
Green trees exchange their crowns for gold.
Unseen watercolors, unframed.
Smoke.
Brandy.
Grombrowicz: "A dog flies, a bird barks."
The lover on the line committed herself for observation and calls the exile upon her release a month later, 3:45 A.M. "My doctor advises I restructure my habits."
Can assumptions be based upon logic?
Tisnikar's Crow, hanging above the bed, watches the lady photographer, bare to the waist, bare to the toes, cuddle the wooden pig under one arm, and make love with the other to the exile who has disappeared into Tisnikar's Crow.
Colored pencils transform the artist's drawing of the exile's room to black and white.
"The fire of song consumes the pens of roosters," Petre Ghelmez writes from his Romanian village.
It's perfectly understandable to want to live the rest of one's life with the one one loves when making love, they tell each other.
In the dark well awaits the stairway.
The wildman from Minnesota puts his arm around the shoulder of the exile, pulls the zipper of the exile's vest up and down up and down, whispering: 'Light snow, light snow, light snow.'
The rural is no place for strangers.
No place for friends.
Earth, roots, stones, bones, crows, and roosters.
Na schodech olsanskych hospod
poslouchaval jesm neavecer
nosice mrtvol a hrobniky
kdyz zpivali sve neurvale pisne.
–Jaroslav Seifert
[I stood on the tavern steps in Olsany
in the evening––I used to listen
to the men who dug graves and shouldered corpses
as they sang their cynical drinking songs.]
The pocket skeleton from Christonovich, the village potter, peeks from the exiled writer's vest at the pen moving over the white paper as the rooster crows.
Love the emptiness which is the vessel.
Love the bones.
He paints a skeletal Mexican rooster for her, crowing black hearts and white crosses.
The artist within the writer's bones paints and pens the skeleton's message whispered over his shoulder by Jose Guadalupe Posada (Death's satiric messenger) cracking jokes and skulls in a common tongue.
"Posada was so outstanding that one day even his name may be forgotten," said Diego Rivera.
I never finished reading your angry letter to me, the exile pens a note to the lady photographer.
We meet,
we leave everything undeveloped.
The writer receives a check in the mail for fifty dollars, spends twenty on lunch with a woman he once loved, three on newspapers and magazines he will never read, and gives what's left to a friend who has traveled a long distance to tell him of the disaperados of Guatemala.
This is how I live, he tells the darkness.
At a conference on rural culture in a small village on the plains, he meets a woman obsessed with writers and tells her the story of the wife of the late novelist James Jones who replied when asked what she did working for a New York publisher: "I fuck writers."
This could go on forever, swears the writer–in–exile. Fortunately, he has no choice.
If it ends it continues.
This is the forgetableness of art.
The destitution of desire.
Ekleksographia:
Wave Two
March, 2010
Fiction
Norbert Blei
Norbert Blei, of Czech descent (Kadlec/Chapek), was born in Chicago, and grew up in a Czech–speaking, neighborhood culture. Many of his short stories, novels, essays and books reflect his connection and fascination with Eastern Europe. In 1969, he left the city for a simpler, quieter, less expensive life of living and writing in rural Wisconsin. He is an award–winning author of eighteen books.