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- The Feast of Saint Valentine
- (second draft)
- Michael Cuesta
- A carrot is as close as a rabbit gets to a diamond
- ~ Don Van Vilet
- I
- (Setting the table)
- Let us set the table together then,
- For this fourteenth of February
- Some crackers and some lettuce,
- And a rusty tin can too
- For each attendant of our feast.
- Here they come now, like a reluctant rain
- Falling far too late over a dying land.
- Emptiness fills the room, fills it to bursting
- As our guests find their seats.
- The unbearable plainness of the evening
- Seems somehow contrary to that old saint
- Who lies headless in the name of love.
- Past the window wanders wistful winter
- Without even the familiar company of snow
- Setting the mood for the feast ahead
- All the while, a sullen minstrel makes his entrance,
- Dressed with bells and plumes of paradise;
- His stride is both a flock of birds and their cry.
- The lightness in his steps, the lightness in his arms
- Distinguish him from such shades as he is purposed
- To entertain for an evening.
- A man amongs’t them speaks:
- Tell us troubadour, what say you of such subject, of
- These wretched relegated in death to tin sepulcher
- Poets say ‘the bottom of the sea is cruel’
- And yet, I can scarcely conceive anything
- More savage, more senselessly wicked than
- This lonely rock by which I built my home.
- From sea-brine to salad-bed our lunch had traveled.
- This must signify some truth of the world.
- All around his sentiment of sadness was echoed
- By faces yet to weary to wear their frowns,
- Whose eyes separated them from the
- World like a plexiglass screen.
- Sing to us, troubadour, of the founding
- Of fisheries, of universities,
- Of ships and seas and raw sardines
- And king Oscar’s salt stained spleen
- Thus spoke the troubadour to the pilgrims:
- At the edge of a dock, young Oscar,
- Outcast undergraduate, peers into the
- Mirror of black waves and recalls his life,
- Absurdity, banality, heartbreak and all
- II
- (An Angel)
- The sun is rising, but remains
- Unfelt In the university’s roots.
- Deep down is a room where Oscar
- Lives in search of an element
- Of an equation of a theorem
- In a system that is not his own.
- His will itself is not his own;
- In this sense, a slave to his studies,
- Bespectacled by sleepless semesters
- Of reading postulates and equations
- And philosophical theorems.
- In his cell stationed in the windowless
- Solitude, Oscar turns to find his
- comfort from books of poetic excess
- Of romantic flourishes and sublimity
- Glimpses into worlds of white roses
- Of romance both forbidden and forlorn.
- It was in this way that the book became
- The sole comfort of his soul, and it was
- By its words that the Angel visited him
- Born from the center of a rose,
- Her eyes shined like syrup
- Her hair was alive with ivy.
- Her savage brightness blurred
- and dimmed the world surrounding them.
- when she spoke to the world,
- The sound of cicadas answered,
- And when she was silent, the wind
- Held its breath with anticipation.
- Under a florescent skyline she taught him lore
- Of the stars overhead, of their whispering
- Flickers, and their supernovaed funerals
- She recited to him truths of the world
- So obtuse that Kant in all his indecipherable
- Wisdom could not obfuscate further, though
- Men in square hats often told him that
- Though they could not make north or south
- Of such things, there was a genius in her words
- That dazzled the dominion of the mind.
- He asked which kingdom was her home.
- The holy messenger answered ‘Angeland.’
- A world, she told Oscar, where the
- Living and the dead cohabitate,
- Where poverty and plenty, war and peace
- Have themselves become indiscernible
- Where concubine and cobbler are rendered
- As noble as a pyx anticipating Sunday service.
- When she spoke of such phantasmagoria Oscar’s
- psyche forgot its pains and he was at peace
- It was in this way, that is to say, by her light
- (The room was so dark without her he mused)
- That she squashed the poverty from his spirit.
- But on occasion, she would trouble Oscar with
- Talks of departure and of death, for she said
- That all angles must one day return to that land
- Which begat them, and with this the room would
- Go cold and dark once more, and Oscar was afraid.
- Despite these stray, grey clouds he felt at peace,
- And a greater companion he had yet to know.
- And One day she was gone.
- And the two never spoke again.
- That night he asked her memory
- Why and where. She smiled sadly
- and beckoned him to follow her
- to Angeland, to cross the seas
- to a place at the edge vision
- where the blue of the sky
- and the blue of the water
- Meld into one meridian.
- There She had told him
- She awaited his return
- And would continue to
- Wait, till death take them.
- Again undistracted from his studies, Oscar
- Regarded his life’s work splayed on the desk.
- Such a messy thing his dissertation had been,
- So unlike the words of poets or of angles.
- He decided that this would be the day that he
- Would abandon sordid intellectualism, and
- Reanimate himself as a romantic warrior,
- Set on a sally across the world to that
- That place yet unknowns to mortal man.
- Untethered from university life, with
- His dissertation filed away in some
- Draw, unfinished and forgotten,
- Oscar assembled what wealth he had
- (a modest student loan it turned out)
- And departed seaward on his journey.
- The sun, that untamed and savage thing
- Seared his skin. He could only stand to bear it
- As reflected on the surface of a lake or a window
- Or as a tidy diagram on some JSTOR submission.
- What wonders, he thought, these years of seclusion
- Had done to him, as he squinted at the unknown world.
- And as he passed the unfamiliar faces, it struck him that
- He saw this street thousands of times as a child
- But hadn’t gone down it until just today.
- There was still so much yet unknow to him
- He marveled, buying a bus ticket to the sea
- And wondered what roads yet awaited him.
- III
- (Across the Ocean)
- At the edge of the waters
- Oscar gazed upon the vessel
- That would bear him off
- To a land sublime; The Adonais;
- Helmed by the sea-captain Sordello
- And Crispin, his first mate,
- Set to circumnavigate the world.
- For the nominal charge
- Of every dollar to his name
- They would suffer him as stowaway
- And carry him to the firmament
- That separates the earth from the heavens.
- Always the inquisitor, Oscar asked Sordello
- what they sought at the edge of the sky
- So far from the comforts of solid things,
- So far from the world where the wind
- Was mere vexation of leaves as opposed
- To artificer of prosperity or death.
- And Sordello answered in sentence
- So impenetrable and obtuse, that it’s
- Hardly worth repeating, let alone remembering.
- Forgive my father said Crispian,
- His words are choked by nonsense.
- The men aboard say he was driven mad
- By the music of merpeople and them
- symphonies of sunken bassoons,
- whose notes are bent to sound just
- sour enough to natives the
- More solid parts of the world,
- And by the hand of fire that stands
- As protector to the waters of Pandemonium.
- He was once called the most brilliant
- Philosopher in all the world, perhaps
- only because he is the least understandable.
- Regardless, a finer navigator never
- Skimmed the watery face of Gods grey Earth.
- As windward seafarer, Oscar stood solitary
- From all other men, he alone was stranger
- To this Protean kingdom and its court.
- It was here that Oscar abandoned
- The opulence and the comforts
- Of soil, and set his sights
- To sea, to that landless latitude
- Where his candle burnet patiently for him.
- Only now would he discover a world
- Lacking in the terseness of theorems.
- The men at the galleys, he noted
- Spoke seldom, if at all of maters
- Philosophical or poetical, seemingly
- Preconcerned with matters of must-do
- And daily wages, and occasionally, of ale.
- More so, Oscar leaned to be suspicious
- Of the elements, least they conspire against him.
- One moment a stray gale would drop him to
- The deck, and another, a gull stole
- The ham away from his sandwich.
- On one particularly irksome occasion
- His spectacles were taken by sea spray
- And fell starboard side into the sea.
- Fearing blindness, feeling lucidity,
- Oscar discovered that one hardly needs
- To see well to appraise the elements of nature,
- To appreciate the vastness of the waters
- On its journey The Adonais bore witness to
- Curiosities much unlike those he knew from
- Either in the yellowed paged textbooks
- Or from the bleeding tongues of poets.
- Things like mountains of carbon and sulfur
- Oozing black smoke like furnaces
- Or peopleless cities of glass which
- Prismed the sun endlessly in rainbows
- Or opium dens inhabited by black eyes and bodies limp,
- But Oscar only saw these things as specter regards its life.
- A man of the galley suffers the whims of the winds
- And the vaulting of the tides he considered,
- Coming to resent his life as pilgrim of the seas.
- The words of his book were no longer romantic fixture
- As they were leering in arms against his spirit.
- As if product of the resentment of his lot
- The hand of fire descended out of the sky.
- The blackness of smoke, and whiteness of fire
- Dazzled his vision like no artifice had before.
- He held his book out so that it may shield him
- From this creature more frightening than
- The romances of his imagination would ever allow
- And more terrible then the abstract sufferings
- He had spent so much time disserting in school,
- Yet in an instant, his corpus of verse vanished
- Into ash, and the ashes were tossed uselessly
- Uselessly onto the eddies of the wind. surely
- Oscar thought, past this burning aberration
- Lay the land Of Angels. Oscar would not allow this
- Final obstacle to be the un-doer of his quest.
- He, Sordello, Crispian and crew quixotically
- Took arms against the inferno, but before
- He could discern butt form barb
- Of his harpoon, a flame fed updraft
- Overtook Crispian and threw him to the waves.
- The pitiless water, wrought black as iron
- Flung him from peak to trough to peak again.
- He was half drowned and fully trapezed
- A dozen and a half times before being given
- To a rocky Isle. In the distance, the vessel that
- From which he fell was shredded by the flames
- Of the demon, and its crew were taken
- By the maelstrom. Oscar alone, clinging to a
- Stony shore escaped to tell of such horror.
- IV
- (The Undine)
- Sputtering to shore against
- Limp seaweed shackles Oscar
- Saw A daughter of Poseidon
- singing in the shallows to the
- music of a half drowned synclaver.
- Her dress was woven of sea wrack
- And cracked shells speckled
- The disarming plainness of her hair.
- Brushing the kelp from his eyes,
- He asked her if she knew the way
- To a kingdom called ’Angeland”
- When her brow furrowed at the name
- And she spoke in unfamiliar tones
- Oscar fell to his knees, fell to the sand
- And wept for seven years.
- As he cried, the naïve romanticism
- Which polluted his blood as youth
- Bled its way out of his eyes.
- Whatever feathers still winged
- The angel in his imagination
- Had been plucked away
- Until at last she remained stark
- And unadorned as the sea nymph
- At his side, in all her plainness.
- The Angel who he had knew,
- Thought he had known, would
- Have led him to a fiery death
- At Sea If destiny had not objected.
- He sat in tears, thinking of the
- Things he brought with him
- That were lost: his glasses,
- His book of verse, his student loan.
- Yet most significantly, Oscar’s spirit
- Once held fast to its delusions
- Had been scrubbed clean of its old
- Idealism by fire and grinding waves,
- And he stood in the fulcrum in the sea
- He no longer could answer who he was.
- Even if an easy way back to shore
- Was revealed to him Oscar wasn’t
- Sure if he had spirit enough left
- With him to return to the peopled world,
- Strength to tell them of his folly.
- He looked to that sympathetic Nymph
- Beside him and asked if there remained
- Anything in the world worth coveting
- She smiled softly and said
- ‘That every sinner needs a saint,
- Every Helena, Its trembling Emperor.
- For Without Rome there couldn’t be Carthage
- And without salt, we’d suffer no sugar.
- There in the sweetness of life lies,
- And that is the truth of the matter’
- he mused upon her word, and for the first time
- Saw how the salt and sand that caked her skin
- Were the same that caked the world around her,
- The same that now clung to Oscar’s own skin
- After seven painful years laying in the shallows.
- For some time the two of them spoke,
- Spoke of the sorrow under the ocean
- Of the lamentations of leviathans
- Of the cataclysm that swallowed Atlantis
- (which as it turned out, was once her home)
- Of poor Phleabas and his death by water
- And at last, spoke of schools of Sardines
- struggling against the churning of the sea.
- She told him they of all creatures
- Of the sea have the hardest lot:
- Before they are born
- The currents bluster on
- And after they die
- The currents bluster on
- Loosing their bones to
- An abyss beyond reckoning.
- If they can bear to live
- Against the blustering deep
- Having done no wrong to incur
- The demiurge’s wrath
- Then surely, we can too
- She said, preparing a cup
- Of coffee for the day’s work ahead
- V
- (King Oscar)
- Oscar’s taken to sail and hempen net
- for no clod remained in the world
- nor in the imagined world that
- could kindle his dimmed spirit,
- He gave himself back to the waves
- Not in defiance of fate or spite of sea-god
- or as stowaway traversing a strange world
- But rather as Ulysses made fish monger,
- As undertaker of the ocean,
- As a man who reached over the
- Deep, and mastered it. In this sense,
- Seafaring Oscar was Made king
- neither by grail not gallantry
- but by the denizen of the deep
- And steady supply and steadier demand.
- What whispers of desire remained
- In me of Angeland had all sizzled out
- like spit in a fire, had echoed away
- as the cry of an albatross far from its roost.
- The promethean spirit was eaten away
- By the salvage beaks of the gulls.
- He was born anew as placid pragmatist
- No longer seeking that which wasn’t there,
- The nonsense words spouted from that
- Absurd angel no longer vexed his spirit
- Or moved his body with asinine desire.
- The stars no longer spoke to him of portents,
- But only of matters of north and south.
- Indeed, It wasn’t until Oscar rejected the stars,
- And opened his eyes to the ugliness
- In the waves and the plainness of the isle
- that he was able to ascend from
- Absurd figure to comic actor.
- It’s the purveyor of prose, he thought,
- Who can vanquish tragedy on the pike.
- Now, a pale complacency washed
- Over him in his makeshift shanty
- With only sea nymph as compony
- (Here name was Annie it turned out).
- The only thing he searched for now
- Was that most common of fish
- Lucrative for business and robust
- enough to get him through the day,
- predictable enough to provide steady work
- And Simple enough never to lose fashion.
- At last, coronation: Oscar ascended to the
- Throne of a respectable fishery and exporter of
- Canned goods. Kingdomless and adorned
- By kelp-woven laurel crow, Oscar was
- content enough to watch the Moon
- Excuse the sun out of the sky, and at dawn for
- The roles to again be exchanged. These things
- No longer pained his eyes as they had long ago.
- How peculiar, he thought, to feel the open air
- Above you and the stillness of the world below
- And more peculiar still that these things would
- Have for so long a time have been unknown to him.
- He couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of such things.
- No need, after all, to be blinded by the sun
- While the waters around him glittered so softly,
- And what waste to be consumed by a muse
- When the world houses such multitudes.
- VI
- (What was gained)
- Having set his life in front of him in his memory
- Oscar mused upon it all. If he had known what
- He knew now as an undergraduate, would things
- Have changed, would he have been better off?
- Or were pilgrimage plight and repentance
- Each necessary to bring him to where he was
- As each act stands as antecedent to the resolution?
- Whatever embers of the day that yet remained
- Were dimming. All around him, the shadow
- Was cast upon his kingdom, and its people
- Would soon be at peace in their homes.
- He should go home too least Annie begin to worry.
- On his way across the beach, he wondered
- If the University noticed his work was incomplete
- Or if Sordello and Crispian had survived their
- Encounter with the hand of fire (and if they did
- Whether they would embark again, harpoons
- In hand and cannons ready to do battle with it).
- Last of all, he wondered if the Angel still
- Thought of him. Though that was only a wonder,
- A disinterested query directed toward the universe.
- Inside, he filled in the day’s figures in his ledger.
- Outside, the waves continued in their undulations.
- The same pattern since the making of the world,
- That would continue long past the life of Oscar.
- He found comfort in the sound of the waves as he
- Lay in his hammock and peacefully drifted away.
- ***
- The troubadour, having reached the end of his tale
- Surveyed the faces seated at the table around him.
- He looked for any change, some sort of revelation
- In their eyes. He listened for an indication of an affirmation
- But was met only by vacant silence. Slowly, he set
- His eyes to the tin before him, and fork in hand
- Signified that at last that the Feast of Saint Valentine
- Had begun in honor of the outcast and affectionless.
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