is stridently hanging on for
dear life from the Big Clock hand
reading 12:30 twenty floors up in NYC
dangling a gibbet jig on the ledge
beneath his girl with the bob cut
screaming soundlessly as he catapults
past the big businessman whose fist
is foreclosed like a bank on their
undying love which against all odds is
saved as he grabs at the flagpole
angled stark as an erection from the
side of the building on the way through
the office window only to upset the
cooler and startle the typing pool
then back down the zigzag emergency
exit skittling the fire-bucket to snatch
the fire-hose & bungy jump down
the side of the skyscraper while the
keystone cops are toppling in omnibuses
furiously toward the wrong address
at odds with the clanging fire brigade
a cavalry charge amongst a confusion
of ladders & outsize helmets
pointing the way into the fray
continuously as down drops Harold free
falling as only a spider can to be
pulled up short one foot from the side
walk under the canopied foyer entrance
as darling thing hurtles into
the stripy canvas awning where Harold
catches her in his stiff upheld arms to
the astonished joy of the hotel porter
Conrad & Wells & Co.
Great to have met Joseph Conrad
or for that matter, HG Wells, who said,
Lets go upstairs and do nice things
with our bodies, and who did just
that to take a tilt at the waitress.
I saw them once, Conrad & Wells, in
a photograph, standing together.
A courtyard setting beside a few bamboo
chairs. The hour was mild in a black
& white afternoon. Trees, too,
green galleons shipping oars in Autumn.
Conrad had, perhaps, cast off the last line
of a novel: the indigo lump upon the
horizon is an Island: behind it the sun
spilling its treasure trove: the rent
sailcloth of a sea-squall. Anyway,
he could still smell the coast wobble from
the deck of the Tartane, her weight
to the wind. Wells, maybe, was thinking on
socialism & science, and in some
melancholic way of the waitress, she all
ascent. By what conversations did
they measure each other, these two voyagers
who possessed that sense of the bigness
of the world? For Wells, an electrical
spark that arced across the white page, and
for Conrad, each word creaking on
the blocks, the woman pale before the moon,
her eyes black as tornadoes at sea.