Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader, 1988-1998: Volume 2 - Fictions, Travels & Translations

In its day, Andrei Codrescu's controversial and notorious anti-literary literary magazine Exquisite Corpse was a primary source rebellion, passion and black humor. Calculated to assault, shock, intrigue and reflect our anxious millennium fill the pages of this Corpse reader. A heady invitation to enjoy one's intellectual freedom while it lasts, the volume inscribes central (and edgy) poetic controversies, eulogizes and condemns, realizes and surrealizes, translates and travels across space and time to place us in all those wild worlds visited by the bizarre legion of Corpse correspondents.

CRANBERRY JUICE IN A GLASS

DANUTA BORCHARDT

Based on a few events from Charles Olson's life in Gloucester, Massachusetts

Was it "They that go down to the sea in ships./That do business ingreat waters," or was it blueberries in the center of the Cape, in DogtownCommon where long ago dogs and old people were the onlysurvivors of a war, or was it rocks and sand dunes as varied as thepeople who lay on them in the sun that made Mr. Maximus comeand cling to this fishtown on the coast of the Atlantic, it is not for meto tell. It could be these and other reasons. There were reasons toofor wanting to sip cranberry juice with Mr. Maximus in a cafe by thewaterfront, or anywhere for that matter. And watch ice cubes in hisglass, stirred by an occasional glint of sun rays coming through thewindow, change into a potion reddish-pink and crystalline. Mr. Maximuswas the chief poet of the town, and beyond. He liked the townand strolled around listening to gossipers, talking to fishermen andlocal intellectuals. No thought passing through the streets escaped hisscrutiny, and conversation with him would have been most entertaining.But as it happened it was not through conversation but through his comingsand goings, as he tried to carry this town on his humongous shoulders,that I was gradually drawn into the vortex of Mr. Maximus' deeplypersonal event.

    Winter is the time of year, more than any other, when I think ofthe slow passing of Mr. Maximus. For it was on one of those cold daysthat many stood at his gravesite: poets, friends, gravediggers, while scantsnowflakes were falling and they lowered his coffin into the ground.With eyes big and flat, bigger than most peepholes and feeling heavy likean old toad on its way to the mortician, this is the time to look throughthe window and watch a fishing boat cut through the frigid waters of theharbor. While the sun is setting the water is a deepening blue, the sky istaking on emerald and the crystals of snow under my window becomepink, one of the shades of cranberry juice in a glass filled with ice cubes.(Heck, why not just say "the colors of Fitz Hugh Lane"?he painted thisharbor, not I.) As the day darkens it is time to watch the boat move alongthe distant horizon where it becomes no more than a brightly shininglight on its way to the fishing grounds, and like Our Lady of GoodVoyage bid it back, safely. Living on the Fort that juts into theharbor, Mr. Maximus would have watched it too. He must have watchedmany boats come and go and disappear into the fog. He must haveknown that their fate was guided by the sound of fog horns, bells andbuoys and yet....

    Not far from the Fort was a buoy by whose song this side of townrose and went to sleep. But Mr. Maximus tired of listening to it moaningand moaning into his bedroom ear. Sailors lost their bearings a few yardsoff shore, half the town slept well past the hour of noon, fish startedjumping to see why it was so quiet one day when he prevailed on the cityfathers and mothers to have the buoy shushed. I too missed the sound,but Mr. Maximus' ear was big, bigger than mine, and probably heardtoo much, much more than its simple rhythmic chanting. "Hey," Ithought, "he must have had his reasons," but I started to watch morecarefully what Mr. Maximus was up to. Especially when his battles withcity hall moved closer to my home. Preservation of old houses was nomatter to some, but Mr. Maximus led his life caring, as I soon realized.He fussed and worried about an old abandoned house that stood almost,but not quite, on a curve in my street. It had style. Gray, weathered clapboards(the more they weathered the more stylish they became), gingerbreadon the pillars that propped up the overhang. Rats were poppingtheir heads through the cracks but mostly wiggling their behinds andlong tails after. City fathers wanted to straighten the street. "It's not quiteon the curve," Mr. Maximus argued for the house and for the rats. Buthe lost. The house was razed and the rats moved on. The street was neverstraightened because there were other houses there, on the curve exactly.And so he went on gabbling and gibbering by the waterfront or, as Ioccasionally noticed, in the most dingy of diners while eating the bestbuy in town?scraps of roast beef and mashed potatoes, with gravy,sometimes a spoonful of green peas thrown in. The diner was not likeone of those roadside establishments where truckers eat, where theyserve hefty meals, homemade meat loaf, banana cream and coconut custardpies. No saucy comments from the waitress here either, only asmudge of brown stuff from the previous day stuck to Mr. Maximus'plate. Not that this was the fault of the high school kid washing thedishes. He insisted he was hired to shove them in the dishwasher, not toscrub them first. "What's the point?" the kid went on. The cook arguedwith him for everyone to hear what the point was, but Mr. Maximus toldthe cook not to squelch the teenager's independent thinking. There wasonce a movie house in town built originally as a live theater (a smallstage, orchestra, balconies, velvet curtains), this known only to historiansand to a few very old people, the same people who, as children, saw theelephants of the Ringling Bros. Circus stomp down the narrow MainStreet winding to the contour of the waterfront. Mr. Maximus had ahabit of sitting in the back of the cinema, watching whateverfilms came into town. In the back, so that he would not obstruct anybody'sview. He was so huge that were I to bump into him in the streetmy forehead would barely reach the middle of his torso and I would seenothing on either side of Mr. Maximus, no street, no sidewalk, only historso spread wide. As I walked into the cinema that night I saw Mr.Maximus sitting in one of the back rows, his threadbare coat over hisshoulders. I sat in one of the front seats. They were playing Blowup. Inever cared for the shapes that leaves and branches take on when no oneis looking, or shadows that they cast on the unwary, at night especially. Iwatched the final denouement of the film, when a man's face and belowthat the point of a gun come into focus on a photo of shrubs in a park,and I sensed my terror mounting. The gun was pointing at me, I wassure. Were I to turn around would Mr. Maximus pass me a slow, reassuringwink? I did not turn around, but that same night I unwittingly putmy foot in his heart. Feeling almost certain that Mr. Maximus did nothave a car, I went up to him after the movie and offered him a ride home.Maybe a glass of cranberry juice in my home first? Gracious acceptancemagnifies those around as they walk beside him, pure and elated. "Thouleadeth me" they sing in their soul. But 'tis all for naught if the giant cannotfit into a VW Bug. We walked up to the car. The small curved form ofmy Bug looked at me with questioning headlights. Mr. Maximus stoodtall, like a Martello tower over the Irish coast on watch for submarines,waiting for me to unlock the door. Too late now to decline the ride asgraciously as he had accepted it. I pushed and shoved and squished himtill he was in. Sweat on my brow, flushed with embarrassment, it felt hotin the car. But unsuspecting, without grief in my heart, I took him to myhome where for several hours his words filled my living room. He did nottell me though, but others did later, that his beloved wife had died in anaccident, in a VW Bug. Never again did I have a chance to sip with Mr.Maximus the juice from cranberries?skimmed off from flooded saltbogs?as they are bobbing up and down, little red balls on the water, andpressed into "Ocean Spray" or "Sweet Life," as sweet and sour as life.But as I look in the night at the copse of bushes where the old house oncestood and out of the intertwining branches,...