Rob Couteau
Wobbling to and fro
Between ship and iceberg, effigies of wooden saints bob and weave: heaving in storm, cresting in foam, as darkness gives way to dawn.
“For beauty, I would drown.”
“No, foolish boy. For love you would endure all, if only guaranteed another breath.”
While tumbling waves plash rotting saints the bodies of all things weep and laugh, whether virginal shy or clenched in doom.
In distant lands a farm girl, lingering in shadow, is accompanied by a sad-eyed lap dog and a bellowing ass. Her mill, never idle, wobbles to and fro. She remains unaware of saints driven by swelling tide, grinding and pressing lips together. But she’s proud of her mill, which processes neither wheat nor flour.
She rides a mill-wheel round and round and up and down. Even in noontime brightness she grinds away, following the ebb and crest of saintly waves.
For all things partake in a great love chain of being.
Frozen in time
Yes: stare long and hard into the mirror of existence. But be careful what you focus upon. Blake said it best: “I can stare at a knot in a piece of wood until I’m frightened of it” – and he wasn't kidding.
Once, I peeked into an outhouse and saw the Savior kneeling, sucking a prostitute’s toe. Fatigued from walking disconsolate streets, she’d lost all hope, and he sought to reassure her, to assuage her pain.
Once, I stared at a rabbit until it froze. Before I could tender it a blessing, a fox crept up and walked off with his dinner dangling from crimson fangs.
Once, while the men of the village were away, carving wooden bowls, I crouched beside a girl hulling corn and pounding meal. Noting my presence, she gazed up and asked: “Are we going to be saved, or not?”
If you stare long and hard, a moment arrives when you realize: We are the ones who will be eaten.
Architecture of melancholy
On a whim, I entered a Parisian cathedral and sat beside a pew of shriveled widows draped in black. At first, I hardly noticed them. I wasn’t there to pray – heaven forbid! – but to admire Gothic architecture.
What was it that drew my attention from the vaulted arches to the widows’ aching laments? Without warning, their melancholy seemed to well up from floor to spire, filling the air around me with palpable heartbreak.
Those wizened women stayed with me. Over the years they lingered in my breast like shadows filtering through dusty chapels. Harboring stubborn hope, kneeling before a specter that dangled a prospect of deliverance if only they could utter the proper incantation, they put Pandora's box to shame.
Greek myth has nothing on them.
Hidden portrait
Perhaps you can imagine the artist, brush in hand, painting red and blue trees. But can you picture Paul Cézanne leaning headfirst into a winter wind howling along Broadway and 42nd Street? How would he digest those mountains of light: digital billboards, flashing at Times Square? No doubt, they would fascinate and confuse him. Such gargantuan displays! But lacking the luminosity of his tiny canvases. How to explain it?
Once, disgusted by an all-consuming effort he’d expended upon perfecting a portrait, he tossed it into the branches of a nearby tree. He left it there for days: despite the rain, the wind, the beauty of his still-moist brushstrokes.
For one often dreams of abandoning the very thing to which we will sacrifice all.
Princess, snake
Don’t be too impressed by the snake. He’s here simply to remind you of things that crawl beneath the surface.
Black is his royal color.
Purple, his majestic tongue.
Green, his eyes: the old rebirth routine.
His toxin heals the malcontent but is available only to those willing to get down on hands and knees. If you insist on walking with your head in the clouds, a bite will bring you to heel.
Since like attracts like, a princess who falls in love with a serpent is imbued with cold blood and possessed by a haughty manner – until she’s compelled to sleep with this slimy reptile.
But only if she sips its poison will she obtain the treasured status of being a lowly human once again.
Leaping dogs of the dead
In a sunny cemetery, she fed me grapes. Between weathered tombstones, I imbibed her wine. Wild dogs howled as she peeled an orange, slice by gleaming slice, our lips wet and sticky.
Her laughter echoed upon granite markers: pointless souvenirs of memory. Yes, she shamed the dead: the dead of Brooklyn, dead that only know Brooklyn, and the “only the dead know Brooklyn.”
Under setting sun we fell asleep, her hair the color of wheat. How many canines leapt over her supine flesh? When we awoke, we were locked in, but watched over by faithful beasts.
Unlike Persephone, I had no desire to escape the underworld.
Why scarab beetles dance on balls of dung
On that day, Rome showed no mercy. Smoldering fire, trails of ash, all hope extinguished. Tongues of gods severed at the root, slaughtered like pigs on a platter.
Wolves come up smelling like roses when compared to men.
Limpid-eyed girls seated at somber tables in a library study history’s lengthening shadow. Money, murder, madness .... They turn pages and yawn as squirrels scamper past sorcerers; and dragonflies hover over lakes of blood.
In a country of lost and broken roads, fables will one day be cataloged correctly, in the nonfiction section. And history books will find a proper place, between poetry and prose.
“Just keep an eye on that ball of dung, pushed by a patient beetle.”
Portraits from afar
The dead may disappear without a trace, yet some continue to play hide-and-seek. Stubbornly refusing to vanish, they take refuge in our dreams.
When I encounter them, they’re often engaged in mundane affairs. An uncle dressed in a blazer from the 1930s returns to walk his beloved dog. A recently deceased companion is seated at a bistro table, eating spaghetti. It’s as if they’re on holiday from Hades, reenacting roles prepared for them for centuries.
Sisyphus was permitted to return to earth to arrange his own funeral, but the spirits of my acquaintance engage in banal activities, as if posing for snapshots from everyday life. As the dreamer, I grow troubled. For these loved ones now appear incarnate – as if death never struck – yet I know this cannot be.
Eventually they disappear again. Decades pass until they pay another visit, but by then I harbor no doubts that they're truly disembodied. For they speak of things unfathomable and express no interest in returning to their mortal coil.
No mystery in that.
Wings
“So, you're in love again – idiot!” you shout at your reflection in a mirror. “You know how this will end, don't you? Blazing along like a shooting star, you imagine even the heavens are jealous of your glory. You gaze longingly as your spine tingles and your waxen wings begin to melt. ‘How could things be otherwise?’ you effuse ecstatic, gripping a gilded trophy with the eagerness of a child fondling a toy.
“But when darkness descends, you plunge headfirst into a miasma. It was all meant to be, all right. Now, you're in your proper place – flat on your bottom! Even worms are better off. At least they have a purpose, tunneling through mire. But what good is a man? He's merely victim of one illusion after another. But after all, someone must don those ersatz wings.
“Yes, you're in love ...”
Where were you leading me?
Mermaid, please. Don't judge me too harshly. I followed you into darkening depths, but it was difficult to keep up with the faint glow of your tail, undulating like a giant hand waving goodbye.
Before you disappeared into that murky abyss, a single ray of light cut across my path in a pencil-thin line. It was my last chance. I could turn round and follow it up, to the ocean’s lid, or else be lost in that pitch black netherworld.
Besides, even you will admit: there’s a hint of danger in the way you wiggle your hips.
A blink of time
The first man to ever love a woman – imagine his plight! For a moment, the world seemed different. Objects assumed a strange glow; and, if he tugged at a thread, unexpected patterns appeared in its unraveling.
Imagine his grief when all this was lost. He could barely manage to cover her corpse with a blanket of wild grass. Even then – when men spoke only of fire, air, earth, water – somehow he realized that flowers must be gathered. That something in their blooming and wilting offered a correspondence, a bereaved understanding. That their scent filled the lungs with hope.
All this occurred in a blink of time.
Jaded angels
The laughter of men echoes in angels’ ears like shrieks of horror. Theirs is an inverted world: they comprehend things we do not, for they view them properly, reversed in a mirror reflecting our sorry abode.
When cherubs hover beside infants, they perceive fully grown men and women, crayons in hand, constructing blueprints replete with spherical eggs. Some fledglings die at noon, others at midnight. Some chase their own tails and drop from dizzying exhaustion. Others hatch into hardy young Turks with swollen cheeks.
They will confuse even the most jaded of angels.
Sophia
Upon awakening, the deity would ask Sophia to gaze out a window:
“What do you see?”
“Nothing.”
But one day, while scanning alchemical texts, Lucifer took a long swig of whiskey. His eyes blurred: he mistook salt for sulfur as mercury slipped between his fingers and the Divine Fire broke through a glass beaker. Shortly afterward, a goat was heard to cry out.
“What is it?” the deity growled, awoken from his slumber.
“A goat, braying with birth pains.”
“That boy Lucifer must finally have begun his work.”
From this bellowing beast, everything came out from hiding. It gave birth to wands, swords, cups, diamonds.
“A real mess,” said Sophia. “What are you going to do now?”
“I’m going to visit my mother.”
The following morning, Sophia was abandoned in a wilderness terrorized by a monstrous jackal. But she was said to be clever. She fenced herself in round four stockades garlanded with morning glory. When the jackal arrived, it poked and prodded. It tested every crevice and humped every hole, but it could not break in.
“My enclosure is shut tight – impenetrable – in spite of your enormous length and girth,” Sophia taunted. “Nowhere is there another woman like me. Abandoned by God, yet I refuse to make a pact with the Devil!”
This hungry jackal was not to be outwitted. The next evening, it snuck back and ate morning glory seeds, then disguised its voice to resemble that of a young girl. Sophia was convinced she’d found a heartfelt companion: “Just like me, she's a darling jettisoned into the wild!” But as soon as she undid the stockades, she was eaten alive.
Meanwhile, the deity had consulted with his mother to ask for Sophia's hand in Divine Marriage. But now, all he found were her bones, strewn carelessly about. With ax and spade, he buried her defiled remains. To this day, women bereft of God come knocking on her grave:
“Come out, come out!” they chant.
“Go away, go away!” Sophia intones from beneath the earth. “Not even jackals care to dance with my bloody skeleton. There's nothing left.” But the women are insistent:
“We love you more than God.”
Gardener
It’s not always easy to discover a link between past and present. At first, she bore only a faint resemblance to the girl I once knew. Little did I realize that her mother had abandoned her after the fowls in the village had mysteriously perished.
Once she came of age, she escaped to Paris. Strolling beside the Seine, she appeared like a wide-eyed Madonna – stealing my attention from the looming cathedral and its clusters of ivy cascading over high walls, churning in muddy water. Her gaze, veiled in silk, wove its deceit. For I was still a virgin to crude fetishes, morbid emotions, and ceremonies involving crocodile skin.
Eventually I lost all trace of her scent. Rumor had it that she’d vanished under a deadening snowfall somewhere east of Transylvania. When our paths crossed again, she failed to inform me that her bed, covered in oak leaves, was infested with frogs. It wasn’t until I visited her homeland that I learned the following:
While still in her early twenties, three times, sundials cut from granite blocks pointed to rendezvous with suicide. But she failed even in those attempts. Waking in a hospital under blinding light, instead of being grateful she felt exposed, although the doctors didn’t know the half of it. Pagans believe that stars are living creatures, but the lamps in her orbs now effused the glow of gas lighting.
Soon, a new plan was hatched. If she could convince others to question their sanity, they'd be forced to inhabit her weedy garden.
Creepers not uprooted in youth may result in permanent infestation. Trunks thicken, runners swell, tendrils sprawl. But when she enslaved me as her gardener, she failed to inform me that my job was to nourish weeds instead of destroying them. No wonder the tools in her shed were rusted, antiquated, broken.
When I drowned her creepers under a deluge of sulfur, she let go her grip and bid me farewell. How was I to know that she’d fallen in love with her own disease? As soon as I escaped, her thorny tendrils sprouted again, camouflaging the corpse of a misbegotten youth.
Only when I fired a musket at her feathered effigy did I become a man again: free.
Between ship and iceberg, effigies of wooden saints bob and weave: heaving in storm, cresting in foam, as darkness gives way to dawn.
“For beauty, I would drown.”
“No, foolish boy. For love you would endure all, if only guaranteed another breath.”
While tumbling waves plash rotting saints the bodies of all things weep and laugh, whether virginal shy or clenched in doom.
In distant lands a farm girl, lingering in shadow, is accompanied by a sad-eyed lap dog and a bellowing ass. Her mill, never idle, wobbles to and fro. She remains unaware of saints driven by swelling tide, grinding and pressing lips together. But she’s proud of her mill, which processes neither wheat nor flour.
She rides a mill-wheel round and round and up and down. Even in noontime brightness she grinds away, following the ebb and crest of saintly waves.
For all things partake in a great love chain of being.
Frozen in time
Yes: stare long and hard into the mirror of existence. But be careful what you focus upon. Blake said it best: “I can stare at a knot in a piece of wood until I’m frightened of it” – and he wasn't kidding.
Once, I peeked into an outhouse and saw the Savior kneeling, sucking a prostitute’s toe. Fatigued from walking disconsolate streets, she’d lost all hope, and he sought to reassure her, to assuage her pain.
Once, I stared at a rabbit until it froze. Before I could tender it a blessing, a fox crept up and walked off with his dinner dangling from crimson fangs.
Once, while the men of the village were away, carving wooden bowls, I crouched beside a girl hulling corn and pounding meal. Noting my presence, she gazed up and asked: “Are we going to be saved, or not?”
If you stare long and hard, a moment arrives when you realize: We are the ones who will be eaten.
Architecture of melancholy
On a whim, I entered a Parisian cathedral and sat beside a pew of shriveled widows draped in black. At first, I hardly noticed them. I wasn’t there to pray – heaven forbid! – but to admire Gothic architecture.
What was it that drew my attention from the vaulted arches to the widows’ aching laments? Without warning, their melancholy seemed to well up from floor to spire, filling the air around me with palpable heartbreak.
Those wizened women stayed with me. Over the years they lingered in my breast like shadows filtering through dusty chapels. Harboring stubborn hope, kneeling before a specter that dangled a prospect of deliverance if only they could utter the proper incantation, they put Pandora's box to shame.
Greek myth has nothing on them.
Hidden portrait
Perhaps you can imagine the artist, brush in hand, painting red and blue trees. But can you picture Paul Cézanne leaning headfirst into a winter wind howling along Broadway and 42nd Street? How would he digest those mountains of light: digital billboards, flashing at Times Square? No doubt, they would fascinate and confuse him. Such gargantuan displays! But lacking the luminosity of his tiny canvases. How to explain it?
Once, disgusted by an all-consuming effort he’d expended upon perfecting a portrait, he tossed it into the branches of a nearby tree. He left it there for days: despite the rain, the wind, the beauty of his still-moist brushstrokes.
For one often dreams of abandoning the very thing to which we will sacrifice all.
Princess, snake
Don’t be too impressed by the snake. He’s here simply to remind you of things that crawl beneath the surface.
Black is his royal color.
Purple, his majestic tongue.
Green, his eyes: the old rebirth routine.
His toxin heals the malcontent but is available only to those willing to get down on hands and knees. If you insist on walking with your head in the clouds, a bite will bring you to heel.
Since like attracts like, a princess who falls in love with a serpent is imbued with cold blood and possessed by a haughty manner – until she’s compelled to sleep with this slimy reptile.
But only if she sips its poison will she obtain the treasured status of being a lowly human once again.
Leaping dogs of the dead
In a sunny cemetery, she fed me grapes. Between weathered tombstones, I imbibed her wine. Wild dogs howled as she peeled an orange, slice by gleaming slice, our lips wet and sticky.
Her laughter echoed upon granite markers: pointless souvenirs of memory. Yes, she shamed the dead: the dead of Brooklyn, dead that only know Brooklyn, and the “only the dead know Brooklyn.”
Under setting sun we fell asleep, her hair the color of wheat. How many canines leapt over her supine flesh? When we awoke, we were locked in, but watched over by faithful beasts.
Unlike Persephone, I had no desire to escape the underworld.
Why scarab beetles dance on balls of dung
On that day, Rome showed no mercy. Smoldering fire, trails of ash, all hope extinguished. Tongues of gods severed at the root, slaughtered like pigs on a platter.
Wolves come up smelling like roses when compared to men.
Limpid-eyed girls seated at somber tables in a library study history’s lengthening shadow. Money, murder, madness .... They turn pages and yawn as squirrels scamper past sorcerers; and dragonflies hover over lakes of blood.
In a country of lost and broken roads, fables will one day be cataloged correctly, in the nonfiction section. And history books will find a proper place, between poetry and prose.
“Just keep an eye on that ball of dung, pushed by a patient beetle.”
Portraits from afar
The dead may disappear without a trace, yet some continue to play hide-and-seek. Stubbornly refusing to vanish, they take refuge in our dreams.
When I encounter them, they’re often engaged in mundane affairs. An uncle dressed in a blazer from the 1930s returns to walk his beloved dog. A recently deceased companion is seated at a bistro table, eating spaghetti. It’s as if they’re on holiday from Hades, reenacting roles prepared for them for centuries.
Sisyphus was permitted to return to earth to arrange his own funeral, but the spirits of my acquaintance engage in banal activities, as if posing for snapshots from everyday life. As the dreamer, I grow troubled. For these loved ones now appear incarnate – as if death never struck – yet I know this cannot be.
Eventually they disappear again. Decades pass until they pay another visit, but by then I harbor no doubts that they're truly disembodied. For they speak of things unfathomable and express no interest in returning to their mortal coil.
No mystery in that.
Wings
“So, you're in love again – idiot!” you shout at your reflection in a mirror. “You know how this will end, don't you? Blazing along like a shooting star, you imagine even the heavens are jealous of your glory. You gaze longingly as your spine tingles and your waxen wings begin to melt. ‘How could things be otherwise?’ you effuse ecstatic, gripping a gilded trophy with the eagerness of a child fondling a toy.
“But when darkness descends, you plunge headfirst into a miasma. It was all meant to be, all right. Now, you're in your proper place – flat on your bottom! Even worms are better off. At least they have a purpose, tunneling through mire. But what good is a man? He's merely victim of one illusion after another. But after all, someone must don those ersatz wings.
“Yes, you're in love ...”
Where were you leading me?
Mermaid, please. Don't judge me too harshly. I followed you into darkening depths, but it was difficult to keep up with the faint glow of your tail, undulating like a giant hand waving goodbye.
Before you disappeared into that murky abyss, a single ray of light cut across my path in a pencil-thin line. It was my last chance. I could turn round and follow it up, to the ocean’s lid, or else be lost in that pitch black netherworld.
Besides, even you will admit: there’s a hint of danger in the way you wiggle your hips.
A blink of time
The first man to ever love a woman – imagine his plight! For a moment, the world seemed different. Objects assumed a strange glow; and, if he tugged at a thread, unexpected patterns appeared in its unraveling.
Imagine his grief when all this was lost. He could barely manage to cover her corpse with a blanket of wild grass. Even then – when men spoke only of fire, air, earth, water – somehow he realized that flowers must be gathered. That something in their blooming and wilting offered a correspondence, a bereaved understanding. That their scent filled the lungs with hope.
All this occurred in a blink of time.
Jaded angels
The laughter of men echoes in angels’ ears like shrieks of horror. Theirs is an inverted world: they comprehend things we do not, for they view them properly, reversed in a mirror reflecting our sorry abode.
When cherubs hover beside infants, they perceive fully grown men and women, crayons in hand, constructing blueprints replete with spherical eggs. Some fledglings die at noon, others at midnight. Some chase their own tails and drop from dizzying exhaustion. Others hatch into hardy young Turks with swollen cheeks.
They will confuse even the most jaded of angels.
Sophia
Upon awakening, the deity would ask Sophia to gaze out a window:
“What do you see?”
“Nothing.”
But one day, while scanning alchemical texts, Lucifer took a long swig of whiskey. His eyes blurred: he mistook salt for sulfur as mercury slipped between his fingers and the Divine Fire broke through a glass beaker. Shortly afterward, a goat was heard to cry out.
“What is it?” the deity growled, awoken from his slumber.
“A goat, braying with birth pains.”
“That boy Lucifer must finally have begun his work.”
From this bellowing beast, everything came out from hiding. It gave birth to wands, swords, cups, diamonds.
“A real mess,” said Sophia. “What are you going to do now?”
“I’m going to visit my mother.”
The following morning, Sophia was abandoned in a wilderness terrorized by a monstrous jackal. But she was said to be clever. She fenced herself in round four stockades garlanded with morning glory. When the jackal arrived, it poked and prodded. It tested every crevice and humped every hole, but it could not break in.
“My enclosure is shut tight – impenetrable – in spite of your enormous length and girth,” Sophia taunted. “Nowhere is there another woman like me. Abandoned by God, yet I refuse to make a pact with the Devil!”
This hungry jackal was not to be outwitted. The next evening, it snuck back and ate morning glory seeds, then disguised its voice to resemble that of a young girl. Sophia was convinced she’d found a heartfelt companion: “Just like me, she's a darling jettisoned into the wild!” But as soon as she undid the stockades, she was eaten alive.
Meanwhile, the deity had consulted with his mother to ask for Sophia's hand in Divine Marriage. But now, all he found were her bones, strewn carelessly about. With ax and spade, he buried her defiled remains. To this day, women bereft of God come knocking on her grave:
“Come out, come out!” they chant.
“Go away, go away!” Sophia intones from beneath the earth. “Not even jackals care to dance with my bloody skeleton. There's nothing left.” But the women are insistent:
“We love you more than God.”
Gardener
It’s not always easy to discover a link between past and present. At first, she bore only a faint resemblance to the girl I once knew. Little did I realize that her mother had abandoned her after the fowls in the village had mysteriously perished.
Once she came of age, she escaped to Paris. Strolling beside the Seine, she appeared like a wide-eyed Madonna – stealing my attention from the looming cathedral and its clusters of ivy cascading over high walls, churning in muddy water. Her gaze, veiled in silk, wove its deceit. For I was still a virgin to crude fetishes, morbid emotions, and ceremonies involving crocodile skin.
Eventually I lost all trace of her scent. Rumor had it that she’d vanished under a deadening snowfall somewhere east of Transylvania. When our paths crossed again, she failed to inform me that her bed, covered in oak leaves, was infested with frogs. It wasn’t until I visited her homeland that I learned the following:
While still in her early twenties, three times, sundials cut from granite blocks pointed to rendezvous with suicide. But she failed even in those attempts. Waking in a hospital under blinding light, instead of being grateful she felt exposed, although the doctors didn’t know the half of it. Pagans believe that stars are living creatures, but the lamps in her orbs now effused the glow of gas lighting.
Soon, a new plan was hatched. If she could convince others to question their sanity, they'd be forced to inhabit her weedy garden.
Creepers not uprooted in youth may result in permanent infestation. Trunks thicken, runners swell, tendrils sprawl. But when she enslaved me as her gardener, she failed to inform me that my job was to nourish weeds instead of destroying them. No wonder the tools in her shed were rusted, antiquated, broken.
When I drowned her creepers under a deluge of sulfur, she let go her grip and bid me farewell. How was I to know that she’d fallen in love with her own disease? As soon as I escaped, her thorny tendrils sprouted again, camouflaging the corpse of a misbegotten youth.
Only when I fired a musket at her feathered effigy did I become a man again: free.
