[spectre] THE VENUS-BERG AT THE END OF TIME

[Séamas Cain]

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THE VENUS-BERG AT THE END OF TIME

     by Séamas Cain

     Venus and Tannhäuser saw not a sea’s edge the same, and the wolf storm
the xylophone the same, wrapped around them for adolescent pity or for
child-like mercy.  Milky foam was pulsed underneath them, and shaken round
them, like the pulses of all waterfalls, or the pieces of straw thrown out
of the barns on the gray prairies of the sea’s edge, like the pulses of the
leaking bees and wasps among the swarms of locusts and rice over sand on a
prairie of birds and sand on the green of the grasses to clatter all gas in
a washer.  Venus herself, moving, as though the fit double of the landward
mountain of her love, flits and scrapes the wood of one old woodcut before
Tannhäuser, like the dripping of men longing for rest among the cubes of a
heron of vinegar the sweet or the sours of that vinegar.  Tannhäuser looked
around him but immense trees grew taller beside the white lakes.

     Old silence had dropped a murmur in the gray rainfall of tangle of
view.  Weasels refused to live there, where Venus imposed a silence on the
sighs or the murmurs of rain.  The weasels fled in quiet horrors out of the
mountain cave of her cold “love.”  A saddle for Venus, a type of harness,
revolved brightly around her abdomen.  A dog, in the mild warmth of the
cave, was cowering away from the saddle.  It feared the prowess of Venus
with incandescent cotton.  Thus dog and weasel fled, and other dogs or
weasels followed, from the old sentinels of Venus and her mild theorems in
the cave.  Venus saw the desire of immortals in a chink of equilibrium in a
rover on the chase with an enormous plunder of seaweeds over my finger-tips.

     Tannhäuser, ballad-singer, splintered a slide of tears or sweeping
verdure of molar as crayfish after the warmth of lips with Venus.
Tannhäuser, the wanderer, fled ivy, and hours rolled long in his riding the
spine of the preachers that mourn spine before us, his dripping hazel.
Tannhäuser fled from the mountain cave.  He sensed not a sea’s edge the
same, or the wolf storm the storms, or the xylophone storm, the same,
wrapped around him for all adolescent pity or for child-like mercies before
him.  He would be pulsed forever by silence, seaweeds, loneliness, and
tragedy.

     Music, when buried through a great door with a thud as querns ride off
on the slight thud of a violet.  Tannhäuser was standing at that door, but
then came in, glimmered on the floor, with a spider’s-web as it assails a
pale light.  Music journeyed round the halls of this pale light, like goats
that howled or chewed on the thumbs of Tannhäuser, those very bright and
conformistic thumbs.  Music, raucous, was found deep sunken in a brick
wall, vocative curls at the wall or green curls against a bridesmaid among
thousands of stacked doors crumbled beyond a dim prairie; but “Four” was
the number of the prairie!  “A palm-tree vomits clocks into the shivering
night,” Tannhäuser said.  They made a bubbling strain, for the blue screams
of the oars and the gnats, on the stony and bare edge of silver turf and
rollercoasters.  “My music would be as dry as a purple withered sedge for
glucose as glucose moves,” Tannhäuser said.

     “I, for a strange sound, or for the stars as stars, the rhythms of the
much larger constellations, am speaking to myself in pure but unknown
language,” he said.  Vowels become the sowers of coral and the thumping of
the ancient clocks, with torches thrust between the slimy pinnacles that a
consonant was starving to reveal.  However, the music of Tannhäuser, made
out of endless carven flagstones, followed a humpback cyclist as he turned,
and moved, and turned again again beyond the old turf-bank, where shadowy
jags flowed into shadowy jags, and six weasels cast down tempests in the
self-same place, round a squall and round the varnish of the squall, all
trades looked down on a tavern peacock, hour by hour and the higher dome, a
wave-length of leathers or wave-length of hummings had been humming at a
mule alone.  Pillarless, multitudinous, the music of the maestro Tannhäuser
sounded like crinkled ailments in a teapot, the mob said.  Thus this
composer waited, and the very leisured rabble threw amethyst or sod at him
as his musicians sighed and hoped for better times.

     Séamas Cain,
     Northampton, Massachusetts

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