VIII. Un travail du cheval

 

VIII. Un travail du cheval 

Because it did this, this dawn bore no more resemblance to a peace-time dawn than the aspect of nature on a Sunday bears a resemblance to the aspect of nature on a weekday. 

-Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude (1947) 

There is perhaps no more complete a reality as a chair and a table. Still, there will always be people, Theodora Goodman said, and she continued to wait with something of the superior acceptance of mahogany for fresh acts. 

- Patrick White's The Aunt's Story (1948) 

Waning hall light, waist bare and agape peignoir never worn and suggestive of human cunning, camouflage or rapproachement—Nous faisons la grasse matinée, and rising from ruptured vacuoles and scraped cuticle as if they harbored elusive essential oil within the shadowed repertoire of instinctive behaviors—Reflections and foci of mirrors found unfavorably susceptible to the nettle 
Irritants of colleagues until the most influential and least bearing of the quitclaim, but then drained of them both the last dregs of the cask of amontillado—Age: thirteen thousand seven hundred and seventy-eight days—That Andalusian white grape distilled into the sherry glint of palomino 
Deletion of the chestnut base coat, whose white blonde highlights are now requisite to their class—Hatch chili peppers in the blistering sun, on that stream of Dylan, Agarrame, mi vida (1976)—Somewhere on high expectations of the relations of the baker’s son and the banker’s niece, who seeks perfection on that drive from Durango, and not the state Bolsón de Mapimí where on the eleventh of July 1970 an Athena test missile arches up from the test site on the Green River, is unexpectedly brought down by the radiolite cobalt-57 salting the retreating scarp of that infamous Zona de Silencio and hot spot of unmanned aerial projections—Confessions to say, rather than taken to heart, that Dolor(es) still wanted him; shockingly, at twelve or even decades later, and rendered in her usual feral delivery—No matter, HH signifying always the hierophant and censered Catholic, avers his retreat from her years later after a standoff somewhere at the ghost town of Shakespeare, New Mexico listing only now on the mind’s atlas—Not unlike that border of Seville and Málaga where chaparral yucca is not the soldier's bayonet but the Lord’s candle, and all the same cultivated by the exclusively pollinating Pronuba moth that once fascinated them, and required pullover in the States—In another life's Federico García Lorca highway of the Sierra de Yeguas with establishments set back from the road with the same mares in heat behind the bricked brise de soleil, and beyond the maternal specter of a play unfinished at the time of the dramatist’s death (9 August 1936)—Scene 
From a rodeo with what could be construed as the ferruginous bands of Mars, where a brutish dust-creased handler of the main attraction's Cougar Crème silver maned stallion cinches the contrived to be humane shearling bucking strap onto the mounted prey, and no less spurring on the flanks with the obligation to provide a wild ride or else be sent to slaughter, yet that eventuality put off, for today—Latter day reflecting upon the death of the Wisconsinite Harry Selfridge 
Stocking his shop's then unfashionable Western end of Oxford Street with necessities for cattle rustlers among the air spun powder and plate—Mounting Blériot’s poplar and linen skinned monoplane that in July 1909 completed the Channel in thirty-six minutes cross flight, where it remained until it was donated upon death of its founder to the British Museum (1947)—Downward, browsing with the establishment vitrines, and expensive, like most inherited things, a lacquered beech and horsehair époussette— 

Dorothy Brooke’s Animals in War Memorial (2004) halting their turn of Hyde Park, from an incongruous transit through Kensington Gardens, in the 1970s target of tar and swastikas, Sir Jacob Epstein’s monument to Rima (1925)—The much maligned agency for the protection of birds conceived by the naturalist William Henry Hudson, who writes in The Naturalist in La Plata (1892) Chapter 23 Horse and Man, To the free inhabitants of air we can only liken the mounted Arab, vanishing, hawklike, over the boundless desert—Through the means of perspiring latherin, secreted to quickly dissipate heat, which of course means to the stableman the epoussette  
To wipe the lathered pelt that is translated to the modern-day suit brush—Detached from a wave of schoolgirls, the nettles  
In the rough were speculated to treat laminitis—Roundabout, she thought she heard the voice of Violet Adams when they boarded at school, on that fragile evening she owned up to writing a poem about rocks, and far from the futile memorization of Gibbon emperors, Theodora Goodman turns to ask the gitane; Clara, from Triana, noting its Roman imprint for Trajan for that once pontoon bridge bidden suburb of Seville, she thought she heard nacre, which is mother-of-pearl, when she had taken leave of Elsie Rapallo—Glazed with pastis, each sending a peck farewell, she left just before covertly fingering and not finding an iridescent lining of her nautilus shell on the étagère, and the lady laying on her divan replete with Mignon the monkey, an arrangement rivaling Selfridge’s  
Window display—Greeting her further down, the gypsy housemaid sweeping a portico before the plaque of No. 6, where it states there that Napoléon decamped in Nice, and his troops bedded near the port of Villefranche-Sur-Mer with the 4th regiment until July 1793—So say the gitane, who was separated from her clan in a mistaken col in a snowstorm in the Pyrénées, where she filed among the deported Roma to Auschwitz, rounded up in the North, and hastened unnumbered toward the extension unfinished before liberation in October 1944, where the frailer found their chattels stowed in Canada; and then Clara was just a young girl, she queued among the particolored bedraggled with quilts on their hunching nude figures in Mexiko, speaking broken French and Basque—Intoning a romance Lorca composed for Lydia Cabrera, La casada infiel (1928) snatches of which Theodora caught with her Romance languages, montado en potra de nácar/sin bridas y sin estribos, mounting a nacre mare / without bridles or stirrups, which Theodora thought to mean nacre in that sunburnt country, of course, a palomino 
The human concern of the faithless wife; though a virgin, in the gypsy's telling, fled from the scene—Separative degrees of nevertheless continued life, supra vide 
 
In flight from Australia with her inheritance, the engaged Pullman cars were jewel box-lined with olive ceilings and wood paneling the same taking the Train des Pignes or the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe taking as she did a second-class ticket on the Cunard line, RMS Scythia, transported as she was across the Atlantic, la femme sole—Vide 
Infra, such were the interactions with women, of modesty taught and assumed, their four petticoats encumbering or an innate preference opposed respectability just as the wincing interlocutor from behind the lead, arms thrust in a sink, le rincement des verres of the man come in from the barn to the domestic of Meroë, Pearl Brawne—Convictions bedding underneath the péridot ceilings, intoning Mi corazón of Lorca’s drawings submitted to the Dalmau Gallery (1927), the heart as a pomegranate weeping seeds, and berthed above with the rhythmic tracks, she dreamt of her short tour of the fortress, the Patio de Comares—Stopping before a refreshing green hedge in the baked Alhambra that is the sefirah of foundation, and a cryptic allusion by Lorca of the Andalusian Generación del 27—As it would recall the imagery of Samuel Ha'Nagid, the vizier of Granada (1019), whose poetry stirs the subtext of “Rouge in Appearance” […] the mourner whose tears / fall with his heart’s blood—More certain, to speak of the union between a Mokumer diamantaire, Van Cleef, and a daughter of a precious stone agent, Arpels (1896), and their ensign or impresa or segno that would become either the four-leaf clover or Moorish quatrefoil of the Alhambra inset with carnelian or malachite (1968); though, it would be like this, the founder’s father-in-law, Salomon, dying at Auschwitz, 10 September 1942—After the boardinghouse tempest had blown itself out, from where Miss Roach surveys the scene 

From her London office, Theodora eludes the rapt Russians of Hôtel du Midi Nice listening after dinner to their German radio play, Books We Were Forbidden to Read, Bücher die wir nicht lesen durften—Tonight, with passages from the just fresh-from-exile, Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (1947)—Significantly, Mann’s wife was Katia Pringheim, after the complex number mathematician, as he foretells a philosophical skein of a composer affecting in writing the engraver-savant, Dürer, of which one pares and frames a buried gematria, and therein shrank from every connection with the actual because he saw therein a theft from the possible—Likewise, Dürer (1520) unsuccessfully combs the beaches of Noordwijk to the malarial Middelburg for stranded whales; perhaps toward fulfillment of a moral etching favored in Dutch interiors and in the court Maximilian I of a Leviathan, as anything else, up for sale, yet perchance to fill a Hapsburg cabinet of curiosities, dusted exclusively by the ostrich epoussette— 
 
Finding disfavor from the neologism of the verb form, épousseter, her unashamed flesh in an oxidizing cloud of roselight only the cellist Moriatis understood, posits a poem of fire as seen before a blink tucked into a tight alcove of an ox-eye window or espied from the upper door of a barn—The parabolam ignored by HH and Dolores nearly overheating on the road through Socorro, and receiving none—The Trinity Test (16 July 1945) revealed in 1.2-meter depth of vitreous pancake overlying the vaporized copper, calcium and iron contents of red and green trinitite descending gas-melt droplets of aphar, dust of the red Adam redeemed in Job (XIX.25)—The veneer she sheered off the edges of things, as when the Baroque altarpieces exhausted themselves, yielding a new cast of characters, pious but fond of bloodsport, which the Dürer school admixes into the red cope of St. Hubert, where he was formerly a frozen mite before the white stag, now a Bishop of Liège (708 C.E.)—Whereon the grounds of Versailles (November 1665) a mass is said before the release of the hounds by La Vénerie, just before the huntsmen interweave canvas barriers in the nettles 

To entrap the does—The king and his entourage change mounts several times, which is itself a study in painstaking politesse, and the grounds are themselves manicured for this game; the Swan’s Pond enlarged for Le Brun’s Apollo’s chariot upon which its driver is demanded ever more strategy and timing to yoke four horses abreast, emerging from the depths of whales facing the Sailor’s Gate (1660s)—Savagery stilled by the mouthpiece of which is meant taking the means very unnatural to it, the first deciduous incisors erupting before the foal is born, and becoming triangular by the first decade, and by then, the wolf teeth extracted to take the bit whether straight or jointed, contracted nonetheless—On a lower story where a late aunt pours over the picture postcard of the Parthenon horse that is perhaps Xanthos, one of Achilles's team, made miraculously to speak (Iliad XIX.409) that his master is mortal, from what strikes an elegiac chord, the etymology of golden haired, Theodora registers that the subject in question, is a palomino— 
What is in a name, was it Juan de Palomino’s tribute to Isabella de Bourbon, for her Barb Arab crosses or what remained of her stable painted by Velásquez sent overseas to her viceroy in Mexico (1660)—More than this, more than it takes a bluestocking to defend, after the death of mother in 1947, Marianne Moore gathers the gumption to go on The Jack Parr Show (7 February 1968), where Sydney Poitier reads a section of “In Distrust of Merits” (1944), and she says to herself, the omitted last lines, Beauty is everlasting / and dust is for a time—Revised by feeling rather than by fact, the romantic tracings bring us to Zetna Hara—In what inventories of mind launched by what is in a name of a forebear of a Spanish school set loose in the West—Comes down in the pedigree the Arab dam of Bamboo Harvester (1949-1970), Mr. Ed, who is the peanut butter-lipped character only Wilbur can understand (1961-66) taking the same methods of visual object recognition, when to place the neck scarf, when to bend, of the sensory entrained Pandemonium model described by Oliver Selfridge (1959) 
 
What has become the basis of pattern recognition—Wisconsinite Marguerite Henry pens Misty of Chincoteague (1947); and she pauses, effusive, the beschert, meaning bestowed, of the young and grown, recalling the most marvelous find after a beach storm, an entire herd of wishhorses, and they contrive to own the father’s much-aspired Phantom, and then, her foal—Here, a momentary sob in the throat for the upset of the dusted Valencian Lladró porcelain (1953) or the spilled vanity of spindle-shanked thoroughbreds and now-chipped tails that are the enterprise of the Renakers, which they had undertaken from a garage in Culver City (1945), and commercialized by Maxine’s father Hagen, of the miniature menagerie on paper cards, the most-sought-after Maureen Love ponies—Marianne Moore would approve, with her footnotes, “Silence” of The Dial July to December issue of 1924—[Speaking as they] who are robbed of speech / by speech which has delighted them (lines 8-9)—Harry Selfridge’s  
formative time at Marshall Field’s before he started his flagship store, committed to a Silence Room with other camerae, where Theodora is reminded that such a word encloses the cutaway of the phragmacone of a nautiloid, and in her shopping undertakes to visiting the wings and wares of the French, German, and Colony rooms—In spite of or maybe the cause of the novelty of what is seen, the heart regresses to the questions of how the stunted ponies of the barrier island got there—Traced by a tooth from the Puerto Real in Haiti, and perhaps from the scuttled La Galga (24 August 1750), whose equine passengers marooned to eke out a diet of sand cordgrass on Assateague Island, from where English then Spanish corsairs hauled their distant sires and dams of Rotten Row runaway to the Serpentine with their leads trailing—Off the road of unmanaged cuticles and unhorsed dandies; if imitation is the highest form of flattery, as a place to be seen, the route of the Stadtholder William Hendrik on his carriage lamplit first by whale oil on his progress from Middelburg to Whitehall to Kensington Palace (1650) to wed Mary, the oldest daughter of Anne Hyde, where she wed him with tears in her eyes, regarding his likeness more beautiful than his vanitas wreathed portrait, and she would squall later, for their fugitive child after so many miscarriages—This is what Katina Pavlou feared for most, more than the smell of emptiness, consommation sous-vide 
Of the martello with a would-be veterinary, who forgets her name at tea with their mutual acquaintance of Le Jardin Exotique, Theodora Goodman—In her country, the obstetrics were matching those of seventeenth century London, one woman in every forty died of childbed; or otherwise, damaged with rough handling, but corrected with an expert hand—Before his apotheosis of the then-radical café-au-lait ground of the chestnut bay speculated to be palomino 
Of the Second Marquess of Rockingham and Prime Minister twice, Whistlejacket (1724) George Stubbs sought out the best instructor he had, always in Nature, as he witnessed in the stables of the counterclockwise uterine torsion of the mare rolled on the right lateral recumbent position—Stephen Dedalus, walking double time, onto the set in which the gravest problems of obstetrics and forensic medicine were examined (U. XIV.394), Buck Mulligan’s scholia in contrast to perhaps his invert’s solitude and plan for a good match, on the purloined image from his maiden aunt’s house, himself set up before the cracked lookingglass of a servant (U 1.146), which is the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Caliban, who could stand a pass of the groom’s epoussette  
Antalgic with a secret pain, his companion, the registrar, thinks he is about to fall into his bed, and wearing his boots as a pretext, together, they stride onto the Holles Street Maternity Hospital, Dublin (1922), where an episode consists of forty paragraphs, the forty days of gestation—In the recovered swamp of Belgrave Square, Lord Arthur Savile looks on a horse-drawn lorry, the great piles of vegetables looked like masses of jade against the morning sky (1887) with the mind on geology, again—Jade is a combination of two minerals illuminated by Alexis Damour (1863) as nephrite and jadeite, an axe cannot bust, stirring in that erogenous barrel of the anatomy of the horse nettled  
Humbert would say, sets off the sustained rustle of potential snakes (1955), the anti-glade of Daphnis and Chloe, of thoughts taken to Lanzarote, for instance, a volcanic pile into which Malvasia grapes are hidden, in the moisture-trapped black pits of El Grifo (1775) initiated by the casual pet, a plutonic scene—  
 
Sunken into an initialed granite headstone next to her parents; aunt of three, E.D.D. (15 May 1886) is placed by a brother, who was diverted from Chicago to make partner; The Evergreens, assembled to their satisfaction, with nearby Mary Loomis Todd, the wife of the astronomer, a situation as it was known and staid thirteen years—What correspondence Sue did not gather, doubled back on the envelope, and with whose hands that fondled them when they were Fire / will gleam and understand (A227), the trench, despite presentiments to the scene  
Nearly impossible to fathom, the requested evergreens lined against the damp—Or to set the spark, the boughs containing turpentine that auto-ignites as low 220 degrees Fahrenheit (104 Celsius)— To remark on the trapped volatiles of the pine; as a purgative aboard Magellan’s circumnavigation of Cape Horn (December 1520), as a blinding adulterant during the Gin Craze, and where it performed as an economical alternative to lamp whale oil—Emily stopped to inhale the gum turpentine solved into the grain with beeswax that burnished the lion-limbed cabriolet chaise, with its hint of the same exhausted in the wake of the relentless machine from the railroad ties—Turn to “Chemin de fer” (12 April 1946), braced by ads for Maggi's bouillon and Nuyen’s liqueur, Elizabeth Bishop is the "I" on the voyage on rasping tracks, where the gun-happy hermit defies “Love should be put into action!” that is fifth stanza and corrective of the iron horse’s advesperate ride down a path not made for it—Broaching the subject, the Flehmen response of having come into contact with a conspecific—And neigh like Boanerges—(585.14), what was said of John and James competing to be on the Master’s right and left sides (Mark 3:17)—George Stubbs painted no less than seventeen iterations of a horse attacked by a lion (1769)—Whether in placid acceptance or adrenergic fatigue, the quarry is later reproduced by Wedgwood, which is based on a Greek copy seen in the Capitoline (1594), where the anatomist (1794) saw the Daedalian sculptor placed the Achilles tendon correctly above the hock, and thus fuses his studies of the caged lion on Hounslow Heath estate of the Dublin-born Lord Shelburne—Affording a great house, Stubbs resides there until his death at No 24 Somerset Street in Marylebone, which is later subsumed by Selfridge’s— 
 
Posting the letter composed and kept until expedient, Theodora’s cryptic farewell to Fanny Parrott about leaving for Abyssinia, a citadel above towering depressions, in proximity to the island fortress where general of the Egyptian army married his first wife of Meroë-Saba—Where Rimbaud turned to (1880), overlooking the same starboard deck of cosmopolitan nettle 
Jelly in the Mediterranean as in the Mid-Atlantic, le vide sur séjour 
Of life since Brussels where a 7-mm six-shooter goes off (10 July 1873), and the shooter softening hard time for two years, recites the catechism (1875)—Whereupon he recidivates, at last, at the cradle of the automobile, with the Wappen von Stuttgart (979 C.E.) that is later the black horse of Porsche (1952) Verlaine reads the once-lost ream of Les Illuminations (1886), and, chastened, sets the epoussette—  
The penumbra that cannot be wiped away, after Clarice Lispector touring Bern with her mother (March 1947), and name of the novel she was working on, The Besieged City (1947) upon a marriage to a diplomat, looking askance at the Chinese novel of the same by Ch'ien Chung-shu after that French proverb, Le mariage est une forteresse assiégée—The Natural History Museum houses a cabinet with the oldest living animal (the Antarctic glass sponge) and the shard from Black Beauty (2011), the Martian meteorite since then targeted to the crater Karratha, after the Western Australian mining town—  
Verlaine brushes the jewelry case, and sets the bill of sale of himself in prose from the last reproach from XXXII. Solde […] ce qu’on ne vendra jamais / all that which is never for sale (1875)—In the wake of the excelsior of her torn tickets home, the wanderer comes upon an American homestead all horse corral and cans, with the residents inviting her in, and she recalls the repast of the Johnsons's under an assumed name fearing to be seen as either deviant or mad, enlightens among the coiled themes Theodora left in Australia and Europe with its portrait pearlescent Andalusian or Lusitano breeds of palomino— 
 
Utterly changed; as the yellow shift in the Arlésien’s palate from the 1880s, all crow and wheat fields unrevealing the carrion they prey upon, coinciding with the industry dominance of yellow pencils the most regal color of the Chinese, then the source for prized graphite, and yellow the color of exposed tendons and bone later requiring amputation in the aftermath of the hunt in Harar (February 1891) of the spooked palomino 
Of the injury ignored; rather the rider instructing the horse put his feet to work immediately signals from rider of the doma vaquera with imperceptible cues—Circumference—the thou like the commandment against another’s wife—Bride of Awe (quatrain 1636 of a letter) contra Verlaine's infernal bridegroom—All appearing as half-moon leaf scars of the ash trees before Dolores the habitat of the dull affair of the flame brocade moth, just as brown females of the Blue Lycaenids are strewn larva weeping honeydew among the ants, pausing before the stone bruise of the pack mule, and the desmoiselles Bloch report of losing more items of their toilette, the sterling stylo, the Koh-I-Noor cellulose acetate brosse—Pupating in the linen sails of the Maghreb sloop transporting Rimbaud to the Larnaca stone pit act as overseer—Dispatched from the Alexandria Poste, December 1878, in a letter to his mother in Roche about seeking out another agricultural enterprise, his ship transport in sight of the Stone of Andromeda off the coast of Jaffa, scene 
Of the heroics of Perseus of the Danoi and of the daughter of the king of Aethiopia, and Cetus, the whale constellating the Messier 77 object whose spiral arms wound the void that Méchain communicated at the beginning of the Age of Napoleon (1780-1820)—Further inland, the distances round on a sea route, not Gaza, the bamah pillars shoulder-spaced to topple at Tel Qasile that Mazar excavated (1948) the text with the archaeologist's epoussette 
Perhaps the last site of Samson the judge, the Danite, and his tribe's snake upon the road (49:17), given the primacy of the chariot to the Egyptians which gives cause to make horses rear—Whose last night thoughts on his shorn head and with his gaze awestruck with cataracts—The Greatest of the twenty-one Isaiah scrolls of cave four of Qumran (150 to 100 BCE), as One who would grow up before us as a tender plant (53:2)—From the 166 words in Isaiah 53, where are only seventeen characters from the Masoretic codices, and much centered on imanu el with us unachieved Theodora says contemplating the rime in the carpet of the once nautilus—The Depression, combined with Jancsi and Roszica, the Dolly twins, are the ruin of Harry Selfridge 
Nevertheless; attributed to him the adage, the customer is always right—Inventories out of which the soul flames, Albrecht Dürer’s watercolor rendering of a Pine (1497) contiguous in the same timeline to the woodcut of Samson rending a lion with a nettle 
At its place of prominence in the lower left-hand corner shedding its burning trichomes of terrestrial life— Thomas Browne took to Certain Miscellany Tracts (1648) to comment on the 41:19 acacia and other evergreen imperishable trees—In the ancient lakebed of tenayocátetl iron-reduced crimson of volcanic rock, where Tenochtitlán is called the Place of the Prickly Pear Cactus; Marina would know this, in Seville, the Andalusian capital after the death of Cortés (2 December 1547) looking up into the most intricate arches she had ever seen, captures the current of the night blooming jasmine of the Alcázar—Le regarde vide 

Shadow of a great rock (XXXII.2) in a weary roadscape unbroken but for the Sinclair dinosaur, where Theodora, stands alone, with HH and Dolores at the same mesa overlook—The Nevada test Site areas below the water table, the size of Switzerland 90 miles from Las Vegas  
Ungrounded from the aerolites and the abyss, Paul Celan, despite speaking perfect French, wrote in the enjambed German, Blätterwald of the forest leavings, the 1969 stone in the air, to land where die Herzwand, the heart’s wall refoliates poids à vide, sans occupants, and the palomino runs free—  
The counter cleared but for the epoussette's cloud of rose poudrée—Of Selfridge’s expanded line of cosmetics 
Catastrophic encroachment files the nettle fields before reaching the stable door, what are we if not witnesses to the dry-down of a star that cedes both the winged horse and Chrysaor, scene of the 40th suite, off the parapet, the plongée of a shell, and off ploughs the pelagic whale—