GIGANTOMAQUIA: TOMORROW, NOT IN SHANGHAI

"...despues de tronar y aterrar al mundo con su estruendo,
despeja las nubes y devuelve al cielo su claridad" Ovid-Tristes, Libro 2


I'm mindful of the aeroplane that may not fly tomorrow above this long crooked silver storm cracking over Shanghai's glinting night
whilst in this port of refuge,a blond innocuous hotel where, enmired below the thermodynamic story,Picts Philistines Boetians Scots Belgians not to mention pilots Getas
are disappearing into neither light nor darkness but a smudge.

An Alexandrian slave- borne knowledge of technique and resource, la stupeur melancholique, sealed within me is my enemy, the scholiastic nature I didn't choose; the Emperor's
ocean joy of old time which was before me, a fish taken in an evil net where, in the evil gladness of my heart, vegetable gold stirred into the sky swells to seawater.

You will do nothing contrary to our good business relations: beware of him, he is the thief- in- law, dipping into ink a pen which will rupture
the tympanum of that inner ear, prince of the air, ever alert to the voice of mockery.

There in an awkward smokey space, my lair, I read by the light of bagged fireflies or the reflected glow of the Andes' snow, can cast out the fear that is not perfect in love, and live an endlessly
everyday life, morning bell and evening drum, cloth of gold inlaid with modesty; watching skepticism openness confidence pass into foggy air.

Meanwhile, to encourage the aeroplane to rise above the streaming clouds, I draw breath
in this white rather Palladian interior
as if unicorn phoenix tortoise dragon (most favourable auspices for me) were mist enfolded in the
revolving restaurant door downstairs.

And were I to waken after this instructable operation in a diagonal bed with something
abominable something abysmal (NOT IN NATURE)
the masked portrait of a surgeon, say, faithless and hopeless not as we, as we should be,
not substantial but adverbial,
he would come to us from heaven as one unknown, in vain and hidden not in uniform; the hired stranger comes to us unknown, ungraspable as chloroform: and
all defenestration attempts aborted by everyone (I know, with certainty) to be as casual vague
and unreliable as the square glass luminous eye
squaring up to me in this hotel room: a girl murderous Cordelia curved smile, the curve of a Chinese sword, teeth bracketed together fatal Countess flaunting
fallopian tubes behind the shadow of her short- cut widespread dark blue pubic hair to the points where
the New Fourth Army and the Eighth Route Army, packed in solid rows as if Japanese gas tins, melt into air.




David Colledge: Shanghai, China 2004







    






     






















    











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