roshing to the Clo-Sol– Downtown, in real restaurants of reality, my mother and father, like shadows on a menu card sitting by a shadow-grill window with 1920’s drapes hanging heavy behind them, all an ad, saying “Thank you, call again to dine and dance at Ron Foo’s 467 Market Street Rochester,”—they’re eating at Chin Lee’s, he’s an old friend of the family’s, he knew me, gave us lichee nut for Christmas, one time a great Ming pot (placed on dark piano of parlor glooms and angels in dust veils with doves, the Catholicity of the swarming dust, and my thoughts); it’s Lowell, outside the decorated chink windows is Kearney Square teeming with life. “By Gosh,” says my father patting his belly, “that was a good meal.”
Step softly, ghost.
4
FOLLOW THE GREAT RIVERS on the maps of South America (origin of Doctor Sax), trace your Putumayos to a Napo-further Amazonian junction, map the incredible uncrossable jungles, the southern Parañas of amaze, stare at the huge grook of a continent bulging with an Arctic-Antarctic —to me the Merrimac River was a mighty Napo of continental importance … the continent of New England. She fed from some snakelike source with maws approach and wide, welled from the hidden dank, came, named Merrimac, into the winding Weirs and Franklin Falls, the Win-nepesaukies (of Nordic pine) (and Albatrossian grandeur), the Manchesters, Concords, Plum Islands of Time.
The thunderous husher of our sleep at night–
I could hear it rise from the rocks in a groaning wush ululating with the water, sprawlsh, sprawlsh, oom, oom, zoooo, all night long the river says zooo, zooo, the stars are fixed in rooftops like ink. Merrimac, dark name, sported dark valleys: my Lowell had the great trees of antiquity in the rocky north waving over lost arrowheads and Indian scalps, the pebbles on the slatecliff beach are full of hidden beads and were stepped on barefoot by Indians. Merrimac comes swooping from a north of eternities, falls pissing over locks, cracks and froths on rocks, bloth, and rolls frawing to the kale, calmed in dewpile stone holes slaty sharp (we dove off, cut our feet, summer afternoon stinky hookies), rocks full of ugly old suckers not fit to eat, and crap from sewage, and dyes, and you swallowed mouthfuls of the chokeful water– By moonlight night I see the Mighty Merrimac foaming in a thousand white horses upon the tragic plains below. Dream:—wooden sidewalk planks of Moody Street Bridge fall out, I hover on beams over rages of white horses in the roaring low,—moaning onward, armies and cavalries of charging Euplantus Eu-dronicus King Grays loop’d & curly like artists’ work, and with clay souls’ snow curlicue rooster togas in the fore front.
I had a terror of those waves, those rocks–
5
Doctor Sax lived in the woods, he was no city shroud. I see him stalking with the incredible Jean Fourchette, woodsman of the dump, idiot, giggler, toothless-broken-brown, searched, sniggerer at fires, loyal beloved companion of long childhood walks– The tragedy of Lowell and the Sax Snake is in the woods, the world around–
In the fall there were great sere brown sidefields sloping down to the Merrimac all rich with broken pines and browns, fall, the whistle was just shrilled to end the third quarter in the wintry November field where crowds and me and father stood watching scuffling uproars of semipro afternoons like in the days of old Indian Jim Thorpe, boom, touchdown. There were deer in the Billerica woods, maybe one or two in Dracut, three or four in Tyngsboro, and a hunter’s corner in the Lowell Sun sports page. Great serried cold pines of October morning when school’s re-started and the apples are in, stood naked in the northern gloom waiting for denudement. In the winter the Merrimac River flooded in its ice; except for a narrow strip in the middle where ice was fragile with crystals of current the whole swingaround basin of Rosemont and the Aiken Street Bridge was laid flat for winter skating parties that could be observed from the bridge with a snow telescope in the gales and along the Lakeview side dump minor figures of Netherlander snowscapes are marooning in the whorly world of pale white snow. A blue saw cracks down across the ice. Hockey games devour the fire where the girls are huddled, Billy Artaud with clenched teeth is smashing the opponent’s hockey stick with a kick of spiked shoes in the fiendish glare of winter fighting days, I’m going backwards in a circle at forty miles an hour trailing the puck till I lose it on a bounce and the other Artaud brothers are rushing up pellmell in a clatter of Dit Clappers to roar into the fray–
This the same raw river, poor river, March melts, brings Doctor Sax and the rainy nights of the Castle.
6
THERE WERE BLUE HOLIDAY EVES, Christmas time, be-sparkled all over town almost the length and breadth of which I could see from the back Textile field after a Sunday afternoon show, dinnertime, the roast beef waiting, or ragout d’boullette, the whole sky unforgettable, heightened by the dry ice of weather’s winter glare, air rarefied pure blue, sad, just as it appears at such hours over the redbrick alleys and Lowell Auditorium marble forums, with snowbanks in the red streets for sadness, and flights of lost Lowell Sunday suppertime birds flying to a Polish fence for breadcrumbs–no notion there of the Lowell that came later, the Lowell of mad midnights under gaunt pines by the lickety ticky moon, blowing with a shroud, a lantern, a burying of dirt, a digging up of dirt, gnomes, axles full of grease lying in the river water and the moon glinting in a rat’s eye —the Lowell, the World, you find.
Doctor Sax hides around the corner of my mind.
SCENE: A masked by night shadow flitting over the edge of the sandbank.
SOUND: A dog barking half a mile away; and river.
SMELL: sweet sand dew.
TEMPERATURE: Summer mid night frost.
MONTH: Late August, ballgame’s over, no more home-runs over the center of the arcanum of sand our Circus, our diamond in the sand, where ballgames took place in the reddy dusk,—now it’s going to be the flight of the caw-caw bird of autumn, honking to his skinny grave in the Alabama pines.
SUPPOSITION: Doctor Sax has just disappeared over the sandbank and’s gone home to bed.
7
FROM THE WRINKLY TAR corner Moody begins her suburban rise through the salt white tenements of Pawtucketville to reach a Greek peak at the Dracut border wild woods surrounding Lowell, where Greek veterans of American occupation from Crete rush in the early morn with a pail for the goat in the meadow–Dracut Tigers is the name of the Meadow, it is where in the late summer we conduct vast baseball series in a gray clawmouth rainy dark of Final Games, September, Leo Martin pitching, Gene Plouffe shortstop, Joe Plouffe (in the soft piss of mists) temporarily playing rightfield (later Paul Boldieu, p, Jack Duluoz, c, a great battery all in time when summer gets hot and dusty again)—Moody Street achieves the top of the hill and surveys these Greek farms and intervening 2-story wooden bungalow flats in dreary field-edges of Marchy old November dropping his birch on a silhouette hill in silver dusk-fall, craw. Dracut Tigers sitting there with a stonewall behind, and roads to Pine Brook, wild dark Lowell so swallowed me doom its croign of holobaws,— Moody Street that begins a den of thieves near the City Hall concludes ‘mongst ballplayers of the windy hill (all roar like Denver, Minneapolis, St. Paul with the activities of ten thousand heroes of poolhall, field and porch) (hear the hunters crash their guns in skinny black brakes, making deer covers for their motors)—up goes old Moody Street, past Gershom, Mt. Vernon and furthers, to lose itself at the end of the car line, top of the switchpole in trolley days, now place where busdriver checks yellow wristwatch–lost in birch woods of crow time. There you can turn and survey all of Lowell, on a dry bitterly cold night after a blizzard, in the keen edgeblue night etching her old rosy face City Hall clock to the prunes of heaven those flashing stars; from Billerica the wind came blowing dry sun-winds against moisty blizzard-clouds and ended up the storm and made news; you see all Lowell …
Survivor of the storm, all white and still in a keen.
8
SOME OF MY tragic dreams of Moody