Play and theory of the drunken boat Clouds, clouds only flash past the waters. Such noumena. At Kennebunkport, I am learning to be peacefully aware of the clank of the wild roses that are not my business. I can’t sentence enough though my memories barking at my heels. I woke up in a cabin not very far from the Dock square where, last night, I believe a kind of green of something gossamery near the windowsill was expecting the warm breath of the stars through the rips of a sultry sky. And yes, with a new name without forgetting my bitter name, I was thinking of the merriment promised behind the yellow door left ajar. The lamps and my memories were gleaming enough to lug my heart. Calcined enough to subside into theduende. So doomed yet trim and jaunty, my heart finally floated. Last night, at every bend of Kennebunk river, the drunken boat of Lorca was wandering my way. * Thinking of Lorca with a deep bow I asked myself : Should not I bequeath everything to the emptiness of the rental cabin including the blue hyacinth grapes falling into the depths of my Christian bondage before I play for the boat? The ceiling was descending. Ecstasy dipping into emptiness, into salt, into half of an eye throbbing. I had known the yoke, the tenor of a fog slinking through the potion of hope, everything that sounds and resounds the gulp-choke melancholy of high tide. And now it was the boat knocking and knocking on that yellow door beckoning me. What was I thinking then? My face must have looked marred by an inscrutable masquerade. No? No, not my face, it was Lorca’s wax soft forehead shimmering in theduende I have been carrying all through my life. “Welcome to the stage”, I heard his insistent verse ringing out. Without drawing a breath, I knew the oleanders were asking forgiveness for their old bitterness potted in blood. Tonight, I will walk the path with them until I get to the boat. “Trade me, if you like, for your laments”, Lorca said dizzily inside my skull. The mouth of the Kennebunk river was full of darkness churning. There was though no hidden replica in the eroded sky-borne moon. That very moon to my blueprint bone. * The midnight’s sirens were carrying America’s hope dressed as a striped woman with kohled eyelashes and a body of clay all swollen up. On the bridge painted with a superfluous blue, I was left face to face with a gaudy rhetoric of power asking me, ” Are you ready? “ ” Are you ready? “ As if I was just entitled to an interlude, and it was about time in Sodom. I didn’t know if I had time to remember the nymph I had left behind in an essentialist boat shop gone down the drain. The feigned shock in her waxy eyes when I had anointed my hand in the cold sweat cauterizing her breasts, removing mistakenly her shawl sheathed in gold. The blessedness running out of time when her thighs started to keel in the depths of a pounding psyche before turning to stone. Lorca’s heavy boots all around us in that boat shop where plenty of sun-kissed tomatoes were lying scattered here and there. Their old skin on the wane. Now, I looked over the lewd bridge, trying to spot the drunken boat hulking under the scaffold of lassitude. “Do you agree to take on?” Lorca seemed to blurt out under his sombrero, and I was really ready to inherit his curly words that always propel me back to a sorcery endlessly hollow and humane. How could I forget the countenance? Yet, I knew the boat was waiting for me in the dusted scarlet canvas badly hung inside that rental cabin. My fate had been already jettisoned. * I was again about to open or maybe I opened again a jar only to glance down, for the last time, at the face of my mistress soaked in formaldehyde. Luminous such luminous face that keeps your time without you having to dial the sharp memories rolling along the rust of rain. I was raging and not scared to laugh at my own wreck finally becoming an abscess still holding out its hands. In her eyes, I saw also our children clawing and kneading playdough inside the kitchen of George Bush’s summer home in Kennebunkport. That sun-filled slaughter house was full of Kafka and Modigliani guarding the silence of a restless gong. I tried to think of a pool of blood beat-by-beat, but the oleanders kept coming back to remind me of the awaiting topsail schooner, and I moved on in search of the yellow door, yellow and yellow, so proud to be yellow. This is what I have always done with my whole life. All I wanted out of my life is to stay put or maybe to move to the other side of the world. Where was the difference? I have never lifted my head from the lullabies to hear the cowbells, the gypsy bells, the queer bells, the refugee bells. “Are you ready”, the gong aroar now swirling through the synaptic cleft and binds in my rodent brain. Amen, said I rising from the muddy banks of melancholy. I knew all the forty thieves will be in power. Their nobility speaking in tongues. And Lorca’s body will never be found. At Kennebunkport, I am still watching the clouds, the rise of the tides, and hoping to peddle my life for Lorca’s boat. And the word is that the pitiful history will arise from the dark clouds trampling on the underpainting. *** Of death out of the gallery out of the gallery, the slit wrist, he writes the dribble of … dawn, he writes omitting a few words … made the seagulls gag intimate with each and every fold of Spring clouds, he adds the birds screeching, he frowns the birds pecking his memories’ clippings away from the husk of bleached glass panes and thousand blinds, and he longs for a song named Soledad glued to the empty bones drifting underwater, he flits on the pool of blood Losing the sky that grew never closer to his valves than the whiplash in practical terms, he tries to imagine more of such artifacts made of words sliding up and down, and where at the end of the lacerated artery the white African violets would be blooming gracefully, he stains his bitter shirt of his own accord BIO:Debasis Mukhopadhyay holds a PhD in literary studies from Université Laval, Québec, and lives & writes in Montreal, Canada. Recent poems have appeared in The Curly Mind, Yellow Chair Review, Thirteen Myna Birds, Of/With, I am not a silent poet, The New Verse News, With Painted Words, Silver Birch Press, Foliate Oak, The Bitchin’ Kitsch,Snapping twig, Eunoia Review, Revolution John,Quatrain.Fish, Fragments of Chiaroscuro, Sacrlet Leaf Review, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere.