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where the dead keep their own small metropolis.
Bleak. Death.
Earth packed with samples of the casketmaker’s trade,
Encampment of the damned.
dripping lepers prowl unbelled.
dementia praecox.
Schizophrenia See stella maris and the passenger
heavy old river with wrinkled face.
The dead man was still lying on the bank under his blanket
Corpse to start
he reached the houseboat
From all old seamy throats of elders, musty books, I’ve salvaged not a word. In a dream I walked with my grandfather
Dream. Image. Subconscious pre language.
He lies in Woodlawn, whatever be left of the child with whom you shared your mother’s belly.
Twin brother
Believing this ghastly circus reconvened elsewhere for alltime.
Afterlife
He said that he might have been a fisher of men in another time but these fish now seemed task enough for him.
His uncle was standing in the doorway.
the window and its skewed replica on the far wall,
Did you tell them where I was?
Who?
Since I got out,
Jail?
I saw your mother,
You just cant stand them nor them you. A funny little smile crossed the uncle’s face. Well, he said. I dont think I’d go so far as to say that. Now of course they’ve never done me any favors. Tell me about it, said Suttree dryly.
You’re a funny fella, Buddy. I cant imagine anyone being more different from your brother. Which one?
just wondered why it was supposed to be a secret. What did he die of? He was stillborn. I know that. I dont know why. He just was.
Guilt?
I know they dont like you, he doesnt.
His father?
Are you an alcoholic? No. What are you smiling at? I’m no goddamned alcoholic. He always called you a rummy. I guess that’s not quite as bad. I dont give a damn what he says. He can
When a man marries beneath him his children are beneath him.
I’m saying that my father is contemptuous of me because I’m related to you.
What do you suppose he thinks of his wife? They get along okay. They get along okay. Yeah. John, she’s a housekeeper.
That’s my sister you’re talking about, boy. She’s my mother, you maudlin sot.
He wedged his knuckles in his eyesockets and rested his head against the boards.
Father Hatred. Oedipal
A firefly there. And there.
Imagery
The last time I drank some of that shit I like to died. I stunk from the inside out. I laid in a tub of hot water all day and climbed out and dried and you could still smell it, I had to burn my clothes. I had the dry heaves, the drizzlin shits, the cold shakes and the jakeleg. I can think about it now and feel bad.
See bar in cannery row
It is overcast with impending rain and the lights of the city wash against the curdled heavens, lie puddled in the wet black streets.
Abrupt tense change
in a dream I was stopped by a man I took to be my father,
Yet it was not my father but my son who accosted me with such rancorless intent.
She wrote. He watched.
He watched the shape of her underclothes through the thin white uniform.
castoff and broken and useless debris rotting under the late summer sun.
Dystopia
Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons.
What do you aim to do? Hell, I dont know. It’s about too late to do anything. He’s damn near screwed the whole patch.
It’s him. I hope it is. I’d hate to think of there bein two of em.
Harrogate grinned uneasily. They tried to get me for beast, beast … Bestiality? Yeah. But my lawyer told em a watermelon wasnt no beast. He was a smart son of a bitch. Oh boy, said Suttree.
his eyes swung toward Suttree with a schizoid’s alacrity.
Schizophrenia Again
In this year nineteen fifty-one.
over a mooncobbled sea.
dwarfs
The kid
Cornelius Suttree.
I spilled something on me, he said. You smell like you been dipped in shit.
he called through the bars to his friends but they didnt answer. A voice somewhere asked why he didnt shut the fuck up.
What do you want?
The moth. What about sut. The rest of us.
It smelled richly of leather and mildew and something else.
Iceberg. Death? Blood?
He’d come from the dwellingstreets of whites to those of blacks and no gray middle folk did he see.
Are you warshed in the blood.
