reading

The Jules Verne Steam Balloon

Nine Stories

Guy Davenport

Contents

The Meadow

Pyrrhon of Elis

We Often Think of Lenin at the Clothespin Factory

Bronze Leaves and Red

The Bicycle Rider

Les Exploits de Nat Pinkerton de Jour en Jour

The Jules Verne Steam Balloon

Jonah

The Ringdove Sign

About the Author

The Meadow

BLUE THISTLE

Here, said Gerrit, making an iks with the toe of his hiking boot where the meadow thinned out into the alluvial gravel of the shingle spit, jo? We’ll be across the wind, with the landtong and inlet to see from the front of the tent, meadow and wood from the back. What quiet! was Petra’s observation. She saw bee balm, and the grandmother of all thistles. Nello, easing his shoulders from under the straps of his tall pack, sighed, sagged, rolled his arms, and stomped.

LA GARIBALDIENNE

Brainy steelrim specs, Garibaldi cap, Padvinster shirt with patches for woodcraft, swimming, hiking, botany, sewing, geography. Blue seven in a yellow oval on her shirt pocket. In boy’s white short pants, big shoes and thick socks, Petra was straight up and down boy except for the flossy snick along the keel and the sliding look she gives you when she doesn’t believe a word you’re saying. Raised on Kropotkin and Montessori, she was great buddies with her folks, anarchists of some kidney. Quiet, said her brother Nello, hundreds of cubic meters of solid silence. Spiffing, our blue tent, nickelbright frame and yellow rigging. You can, Petra said, hear mevrouw and mijnheer Vole messing about, it’s that quiet. Smell the meadow: clover, mint, grass, river.

Beyond the spinney there, back of the rocks, was where we camped, Gerrit pointed. Promised myself, I did, that if I came again I’d camp on this spit, with the meadow. Erasmus, said Petra, is nice but spooky. That jiggle in his turned-in eye, the flop of hair all over his forehead, shapely meat all over, but he’s strange. Because, Nello asked, he lives with Strodekker, Nils, and Tobias? Of course not, Petra said, with one of her looks. I mean the way he talks bright and then runs out of something to say, fighting sleep. He blushes pretty. Nobody should be that good-looking. He’s OK, Gerrit said, when you get to know him. Hans had told me that, and it’s hard to fool Hans. It was his idea to winkle Erasmus loose from his tribe, his buddy Jan off to Italy, talk about a funny family. It was Rasmus’s scheme that we not wash. Strodekker holds to a germfree nursery, peroxiding the depths of ears, crusading against dirt under fingernails and crud between toes. The whole house floats with shampoo bubbles and splashes with the gushing water of showers. Also, he’d had it with sex, said he was being kissed to death. Tell all, Petra said, but later. Rocks in a ring for the fire, the spit, pots and pans.

Everything’s off somewhere else, Petra said, giving her hair a toss. We’re here. The meadow’s here, the river, the woods over there. Gerrit’s wrinkling his nubble nose. Cornelius has the tent as shipshape and trim as a bandbox. Whistling The Red Flag Shall Overcome, she studied the page of the Boy Scout Manual that shows how to lay out a campfire. Dinky aluminum pots, she muttered, nests of cups. Water from the spring in the spinney. A sprig of clover in her teeth, eyes calmly honest, Petra edged her panties down. Pink butt, Cornelius said, soon to be tawny goldeny bronze. Gerrit, swallowing hard, politely stared. Prude, Petra said. Let’s see what the river’s like. And Gerrit in the fetching altogether. The river shines this time of afternoon.

GOLDBUTTONS

Petra drawing plants in her sketchbook, saying the names of parts to herself, bract, umbel, petiole, said to Gerrit who came to watch, they’re alive. They’re out here on their own, as independent as Frisians. They were here before we were, I mean before people were, at all, them and the insects, so it’s their world we’re visiting, intruding on. Time is so grandly slow. No, said Gerrit, it’s just that there’s so much of it. What I like, Petra said, is a thing minding its own business, like this little goldbutton here. Greeny white roots, a hard stalk, its flowers eight to the line here at the bottom, five on the next level up, three, two, one. It’s just tall enough to live in with the grass and still eat lots of light, and get enough water through its toes. Axial, but not strictly: you can’t lay a ruler along any of its lines. The orangey yellow of the flower matches the dandelion green of its leaves: they go together.

Mitochondria, Petra said, cytoblasts. Everything may be a symbiosis of the two. Every once in a while, Cornelius said, my weewee goes weightless, floating. Because we’re britchesless, I suppose. The earth, Petra said, was deep in bacteria once upon a time, making the oxygen for our atmosphere. Erasmus last summer, Gerrit said, called Hans an elemental sprite, or djinn, a hybrid of whacky Toby and serious Nils. The weeds out here, Petra said, are not weeds. This is their place, their meadow. Erasmus said his predicament was that his hormones turned on early, with the help of a camp counsellor, a buttermilk-fed weightlifter who believed in flying saucers and extrasensory perception, and told his charges that it was good for their souls to whack off until their brains were sodden. Showed them how, and lectured on the hygiene of it all. Some people, Cornelius said, have all the luck. Nello, Petra said, wants you to believe that we’re afflicted with stuffy parents when we’re not. Why then, Nello said, am I so shy? Look, Petra said, how plants make colonies, like islands, and don’t mix in with each other.

Happy dimples and merry eyes, Nello said, is what Gerrit has all over his face, and Petra can’t kiss for laughing. Don’t niggle, Petra said, we’re doing our best. Straight face, puckered lips. Close your eyes, Nello said. I’m pretty certain you’re supposed to close your eyes. A squint will do, like that. Side by side, prone, Gerrit’s feet riding up and down in a swinging kick, Petra’s toes dug into clover, they kissed again, rocking their lips, Nello counting to sixty, one and abra, two cadabra. Nello hummed. Sixty abracadabra. A whole minute. Peppermint, Petra said, rolling onto her back and stretching. Gerrit walked his elbows closer, grazed Petra’s lips with his, and mashed into another kiss. Both heels rose. He ventured a hand over a breast. Nello kicked into a headstand and watched upside down. If you like it, you like it. If you don’t, what are you doing it for? Sixty and five, sixty and six. Two minutes and one, two minutes and two. Blood’s rushing to my head and I’m going to croak in a fit. Three minutes. Gerrit lifted, but Petra pulled his head back, and kept her hand in his hair.

LANDTONG

The feldspar and quartz pebbles derive from precambrian gneisses or granites and the small fragments of tourmaline and garnets from crystalline schists. The general inference, therefore, from the pebbles is that the beds in which they occur were uncomformably related to certain precambrian gneisses and certain slates, limestones, and quartzites of Cambrian or Lower Silurian age.

SYCAMORE

The Jules Verne stood tethered in the spinney beyond the meadow, its yellow drag tied to a boulder, valves leaking steam. Its girdling panels of zodiac, polychrome asterisks, and Laplander embroidery were as benign an intrusion among the trees of the grove as a circus wagon on the street of a Baltic town, a flourish of band music into the domestic sounds of a village. Quark in a Danish student cap, American jeans, Lord Byron shirt with ample sleeves, was picking blueberries in a school of butterflies. Tumble and Buckeye had climbed into a sycamore, walking its limbs as easily as cats. Tumble sat, hooked his knees on a horizontal branch, and hung upside down. Well, he said, there’s the begetted eightness of unique nuclearity. Sure, said Tumble, noneness or nineness, or there’s no dance to the frequency of the wave. Quark, overhearing in the blueberries, shouted that numbers are numbers. Zero one way, zero the other, scattering butterflies by drawing a goose egg in the air. The zero in ten is a nine pretending it’s under one to be beside it and generate a progression of nine again. Tumble, parking his Norwegian forager’s cap over a spray of sycamore leaves, said two four six, three six nine is what you get in a multiplication by threes along the one-to-niner line, but by four gives four eight three seven two six one five nine before you get to four again. He pried off his sneakers, tied the laces together, and hung them from a stout twig. Into each sneaker he stuffed a sock, white, striped blue and red at the top. By five, said Buckeye, gets you five one six two seven three eight four nine, which leaves a space between numbers for landing in when you leapfrog back from four to one. Quark, down among the blueberries, had sailed his cap to the boulder with nonchalant accuracy, and pulled off his shirt, which he made into a ball, tossing it over his head to land behind him in a patch of goldenrod and rabbit tobacco. By six, he shouted, six three nine, six three nine, over and over, out to infinity. Tumble upside down, squirmed out of his sweater, like a bat peeling itself, as Buckeye remarked, and let it drop far below. Bet you can’t shuck your jeans, Quark dared him, while hanging upside down by your knees. Bet I can, said Tumble, watch. Unbuckling and zipping down, he sang, or zipping up, considering, I lift my left leg off the limb, so. And slide my left leg out, ha. And latch on again, squeezing good, with left knee while easing right leg out, and what was the bet, Quark old boy? He did it! Buckeye said. But your face is red as a tomato. Feel lightheaded, too, Tumble said, lifting his arms to the limb and scrambling onto it, astride. Woof! By seven, he said, seven five three one eight six four two nine. You lose two every step except from one to eight and two to nine, where you add seven. That’s the best yet, Buckeye said, and with a bet won to boot. Think of something good and nasty. By eight, Quark said, eight seven six. Changing the subject! said Tumble. As for the bet, I was thinking. Eight seven six, Quark shouted him down, five four three. I was thinking that. Two! One! Nine! That, said Buckeye, has its tail in its mouth. The eight’s on one end, the nine on the other, and the in-between’s reversed. I was thinking, Tumble dogged on, that as long as my jeans are fifteen feet down, where, as soon as they’re off, my underpants will follow, there, have followed, whee! right on top. By nine, Quark sang, nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine.

LEAVES

Wild tansy, Petra said, Roman wormwood. Ambrosia Artemisiaefolia. Not, I think, Theophrastos’ apsinthion, which is Artemisia, genus and species swapping places as in a dance. This is a New World weed with pinnatifid leaves, very Greek, very acanthus. The flowers go on and on up the stem, shishkabob of yellow ruffles, tight little green balls when they begin. She leaned over the wild tansy, spraddle-legged, hands on knees, Gerrit’s longbilled red cap on the back of her head. Carrotweed, said Gerrit, finding it in the book. Stammerwort tasselweed ragweed tall ambrosia. Ambrosia is what the Greek gods ate, and at our house it’s orange slices bananas grapes pineapple and coconut wish I had some now. Nectar’s what they drank and now bees drink it. I like being naked, I think. Artemisleaf, said Petra. Of course. Because it has a leaf like Artemisia, toothy lobes in a nineteenth-century neoclassical spray. You look good naked, long brown legs and big square toes. Botanists are nice people, gentle, with queer names. Sereno Watson. Blue-eyed grass, said Cornelius. Artemis was the Greek goddess of hunting and women and young animals. Women when they’re young animals, said Petra.

DOUBLE FLOWER OF BRISTOW, OR NONESUCH

This glorious flower being as rare as it is beautiful, is for roots being stringy, for leaves and stalks being hairy and high, and for the flowers growing in tufts, altogether like the single nonesuch: but that this bears a larger umbel of flowers at the stalk’s top, every flower having three or four rows of petals, of a deeper orange, adding more grace, but blossoms without making seed, like other double flowers, but overcomes this defect by propagating from the root.

SNUG

What I like, Petra said in the sleeping bag, is a dark sleety winter afternoon when I can go from school clothes to flannel pyjamas and wool dressing gown and get snug in the big chair with a blanket and something good to read, and can see outside. You’ve got so many worlds at once: memory both recent and far, the house with supper coming along and talk and Papa coming in, and your book. You know where you are. A cat’s view of life, Cornelius said. Thanks, said Petra. Where we are here, Gerrit said, is the backside of nowhere, under all the stars, at the edge of a meadow, near a river, all three in two sleeping bags zipped into one, Petra in the middle. Straight down is New Zealand. Did you see the mouse on a stem of broomsedge, holding on with four fists? Petra did, but Nello missed him.

A STRING OF SPANISH ONIONS

Candlelight in our tent, and every sound an event to itself, spoon’s clink on a cup, and our voices. Hansje was happiest that we weren’t going to wash, and kept saying we’d stink. Erasmus was cool about it. Take off socks, briefs, a shirt, he said, and into the laundry basket it goes. It’s good to wear dust and mud, pollen and leaftrash. Hansje pointed out that we didn’t know what dirty was. And, besides, naked and dirty was different from wearing dirty clothes. Places, Erasmus said. The meadow can’t be dirty. I said that it could. Dump city trash on it, atomic waste, industrial crud. Understood, Erasmus said. But we, sweaty and dusty and with oniony armpits, are clean in the same way the meadow is clean. We’re natural. What if we hadn’t brought toilet paper? Well, Erasmus said, we have a river, and even dust. We could powder, like birds. Every culture has its own sense of clean and dirty. Every part of a city. Every family. But the day your socks are yours, comfortable and friendly, is the day parents snatch them away from you. Then Erasmus made a speech on dirt: which he said was anything out of place, like seas and in the carpet, dust on shelves, egg on a necktie. But it was Erasmus who rolled in dust when he was sweaty. Petra didn’t need to say a word. Her eyes said it all.

RISE AND SET, AUTUMNAL STARS

So, Petra said, Hiroshige. What’s happening at a place. A tree, and it’s there through the seasons. It has its life, from seedling to ax or lightning bolt. But it’s there. And then, all of a minute, when Hiroshige chooses to have us look, a peasant carrying two bundles of firewood on a yoke across his shoulders passes the tree. At the same moment, a monk, a lady on a horse, they are also passing. Our meadow here was under snow last winter, and hares made tracks across it, and the mice burrowed deeper and all the grass and flowers were dead. And now we’re here with our blue tent and each other. And last summer, Gerrit said, Erasmus doing a hundred push-ups at a time, counting in Latin, betting Hansje he couldn’t do a hundred and five. And unmentionable things, Petra said. No, said Gerrit, that was part of the game. Pure thoughts all the way, like us.

The sleeping bags zipped together, as with Hans, Erasmus, and Gerrit before, Gerrit’s plan, one less sleeping bag to tote, and, as Petra explained to her folks back in Amsterdam, proof of their freedom. Me in the middle, Petra said. Liberal parents are the stuffiest. If ours were a Calvinist enclave where sex is never mentioned except to deny its existence, not an eyebrow would raise at three innocent teenagers camping in a meadow, two of them brother and sister, the other a friend from the playpen forward. Liberals are the new Calvinists. Those Danes, Nello said, in Jugoslavia. I’m still trying to figure out what they were doing. Four girls and one boy in the tent back of the textileless beach. Squealed all night, that lot.

PARNASSIA PALUSTRIS LINNAEUS

Flowers, fragrant as honey, are interesting in that five of the original stamens transform into staminodes split into narrow gland-tipped segments, which attract insects. The five fertile stamens alternate with the petals and mature before the stigmas, but in a remarkable way. The anthers face outwards and ripen in succession, each in turn lying on top of the ovary with the pollen side facing upwards. After several days, when the anthers are all empty of pollen, the apical stigmas become receptive and occupy the former position of the anthers. Knuth’s Handbook of Flower Pollination says that the stalked glands of the staminodes attract insects by their glistening color, as if they had abundant nectar. Intelligent insects are not deceived, but flies and beetles are, and effect cross-pollination. Many smaller flies are also attracted. They lick the nectar but are ineffective in transferring pollen.

CAMPFIRE

Minimal possessions, Gerrit said, maximum order. Last summer, Petra said, we had maximum possessions at camp, carloads of stuff, and most likely minimal order, no matter how loud the games mistresses shouted at us, as muddled as we were. One reason, among others, when Gerrit went off here with Hansje Keirinckx and Erasmus Strodekker, I saw that camping could be something quite different from a giggle of girls talking boys, television, clothes, and homework. So here we are. Nello will live down going camping with his sister. Never, said Cornelius. A knowing smile will serve, Petra said, if not an invitation to mind one’s business. Well, Gerrit said, we’re different. We have hygiene, sort of. It was Hansje’s bright idea that we go native and swear off soap and water, as a corollary to Erasmus’s giving up sex. He said one morning that waking up out here’s fun because the mind’s an idiot and thinks it’s where it usually is when you wake, when it, by happy surprise, isn’t. He stole that from Proust, Petra said. There’s a famous passage about finding yourself again when you wake in a strange room. It couldn’t be in Proust, Gerrit said, when Erasmus would look out all four sides of the tent and say he’s seeing a rabbit, a whirl of gnats, a brace of meadowlarks landing and taking off, up down. I slept in the middle, like Petra now, being the neutral element, though Erasmus would reach across and knit fingers with Hansje, and shove and push, by way of some kind of understanding they have. Erasmus was rollicking in our outing because he wasn’t, as he said, being hugged and kissed to death. No Toby and Nils rooting and pranking in the bed of a morning. No fights. Just the freedom of the out-of-doors, and friends who were just friends.

IMPATIENS BIFLORA

The pod has evanescent partitions, with anatropous seeds along a thick axis. Five valves, elastically coiled, spring open when dry, shooting out the seeds.

Well, Petra said, there was this poster in a shop across from the Centre Pompidou in Paris. A man it showed, with a great body, about twenty, in the buff, holding a baby out in his arms, looking wise and happy, as if it approved of its daddy having an extensive babymaker hanging out and down over tight fat balls, for all the world to see. But behind these fetching two, crossways the poster, were two boys, also britchesless, lying in a hug. Ha, said Gerrit. Anything printed on the poster? Nello asked. No words, Petra said, just the photo.

Hair muddled, eyelids thick with sleep, Gerrit raised himself on his elbows in the sleeping bag, and said, There’s a mist off the river. Whoopee, said Nello, eyes still closed. Petra lay batting her eyes and smiling. Hello, said Gerrit. Don’t look, he said, after leaning to give her a kiss, I’ve got to nip out to pee, and have sprung one. Let’s see, said Petra, reaching. No, said Gerrit, blockading with knees. Close your eyes. Petra closed her eyes, looking as soon as Gerrit was out. Wow, she said, straight out and up, and with its hood back. It does that, Nello said, as you know good and well, when the bladder’s about to pop. Learn something every day, Petra said, lifting the tent flap and looking out. Gerrit’s peeing up. A silver arc, pretty in the mist. Me too, said Nello, scrambling out. Hey, Petra, Nello hollered, it won’t go down. Breakfast, said Petra. A fire, water, mush, raisins. I’m impressed. Gerrit, half embarrassed and half pleased with himself, scrounged around in his knapsack until he found briefs, which prodded out in front when he put them on. Bashful, said Petra. Water jug, coffee packets, and come here. I liked kissing all day yesterday. Poor Nello’s left out. Don’t anybody kiss me, Nello said. As they stood kissing, Petra pushed down Gerrit’s briefs, and, squatting, took them off, batting Gerrit’s hands away from trying to pull them up again. No clothes we agreed, she said. I’m mortified, said Gerrit.

LUPINUS CALCARATUS

Erect, high, silky pubescent throughout, leafy. Leaflets 7 to 10, linear lanceolate, acute, mucronate: stipules ovate, acuminate, persistent: flowers in rather close and short raceme, bracts subulate, deciduous, calyx deeply spurred at base, minutely bracteolate, the upper lip short, double-toothed, white, the lower larger, entire, acute: banner and wings somewhat pubescent externally, the keel ciliate: pods hairy, with four seeds. Flowers white, the spur exceeding the pedicels.

House wren of the Grenadines, said Tumble, mockingbird bananaquit Carib grackle. Buccament, said Quark, Sion Hill Cumberland Questelles Layou New Ground Mesopotamia Troumaca. Angelfish, said Buckeye, spotfin butterfly. Finite but unbounded, O over under by and through!

Fainthearted, no, said Petra, but do be fair. Kissing’s fun. I’m not looking, Nello said. I’m just here, browning my butt and listening to the meadow, the buzz of it. So what are you doing? Fondling, said Gerrit. Feeling better all the time, said Petra. Everything, anyway, has become unreal. Time has stopped. I think the meadow and river have drifted away from where they were when we came. It’s us, Nello said, who are different, and getting differenter all the time. How different will we get? Running around bare-assed is not all that peculiar, and that’s not what’s doing something to us. We’ve only each other to say things to: that’s a big difference. Last summer Erasmus said all manner of things I’m certain he would never have said back home. We think differently, Petra said, breathing deep after a long kiss. Snuggling on the sunroom couch or at Betje’s when she has the house all to herself is always a dare when hands stray to critical places, like now. I’m not looking, Nello said. Why not? Gerrit said. Unfair, Petra said, is unfair, sitting up and monkeying over to Nello, pressing a kiss on the back of his neck. Tickles, he said, after a suspicious silence. But feels good. Does it now! Petra said, neither tease nor mischief in her voice. Gerrit’s next. Gerrit’s next what? asked Gerrit. Kiss Nello, Petra said. Why ever not?

SURVEYOR

Gerrit, in his scout shirt because of the morning chill, with Corbusier Homme Modulor shoulder patch, said once they were off the bus at Knollendorp, honest Hans asked Rasmus every tactless question that sprang easily to his liberal mind. In less than ten meters of hiking to the sandspit, he pried into Rasmus’s standing as Strodekker’s newly adopted son, happy older brother to Nils and Tobias, their involvement with the Vrijheid cadres, why he wanted to get away from them for a few days to change the pH factor of his soul, length of his weewee, who his real parents were, if he did it with girls too, how much he got for an allowance, what they did in Denmark and the Federal Republic, why one of his eyes was off-center and jiggled, the length of Strodekker’s weewee, and on and on, until Rasmus was shaken inside out but not in the least pissed off. He’s as honest as a dog. This is his shirt, from the wild scout troop Strodekker runs. It was when Hansje asked Rasmus if he didn’t think that Strodekker’s just a mite gaga that I changed the conversation and got a shoulder squeeze of gratitude. What I did was ask Hansje the same questions about his buddy Jan, who was in Italy with his folks, and heard more about him than I really needed to know. So, Petra said, why do you have Erasmus’s shirt? He gave it to me, Gerrit said.

TREES

Four trees upon a solitary acre

Without design

Or order, or apparent action,

Maintain.

The sun upon a morning meets them,

The wind.

No nearer neighbor have they

But God.

The acre gives them place,

They him attention of passerby,

Of shadow, or of squirrel, haply,

Or boy.

What deed is theirs unto the general nature,

What plan

They severally retard or further,

Unknown.

THREE PERSIMMONS IN A BLUE DISH

Klee Noordzee coast, the sandspit, a Boudin with Cornelius on it, sea blow cocking his hair into a crest of light. Early Mondriaan pine forest with blue shadows, the wood at the top of the meadow. Courbet, the spring. What’s more, Gerrit said, is our telescoping aluminum flagpole here on the main brace, flying the Danish flag. For the bunnies, Petra said. They were wondering where we’re from. Now they can say, Ah! Lutherans! Dutch flag tomorrow, Gerrit said. Then Swedish, followed by the Norwegian. Today we’re Danes.

The spinney explored, the meadow traversed twice, the sandspit inspected, the rivermouth waded in, they came back to the tent. Bread, cheese, and hot soup, said Petra. We’re getting to be the color of gingerbread. And Gerrit’s spirited virile member sticks straight out, sort of, rather than toward heaven. Does it feel good? A grin and a blush together are wildly becoming. Cakes and apples, sang Nello, in all the chapels, fine balconies and rich mellow pears. Last summer, Gerrit said, and I’d have been a zoological exhibit, with commentary by Hansje and Rasmus.

PATROL

Quark on reconnoiter in the wood met Wolf, her gazing eye silver and soot, silent of paw as she strode. Sabina! Quark said in the old Latin, mama of Quirinus, chaster than Vesta, cunninger than Minarva. Hrff! said Sabina, et lactentes ficos et gutulliocae. Carissa! said Quark. I saw you playing with the frogs and crickets, pretending to dance and pounce, laughing all the while. Archeotera, said Sabina, unde haec sunt omnia nata. But, said Quark, these are good people, over yonder by the water, the three cubs in a cloth house. They live in a town of canals and lightning run through threads, where they learn, not much, but something, numbers and tongues mainly. I’ve smelt them, Sabina said, two toms and a bitch, potash and olive, sheep and cottonweed. Metal. Not to do you a mischief, Quark said. The metal is the frame of their house, cups, buckles, and such. It is never prudent to be seen, O Consiliarius. The faith has been gone so long.

LA CHENILLE ET LA MOUCHE

From the Jules Verne, a hot-air balloon hanging unanchored six meters above the meadow, defying both gravity and its own radiant levity, its declinator lever set on orbit, hung a rope ladder up which Buckeye, Tumble, and Quark swarmed with the progress of swimming arctic wolves, knees and elbows in the same vertical plane, all three in midshipman’s uniforms of the French navy. The propeller turned its four wooden blades idly, like a windmill dreaming. Two brass cylinders leaked steam. The crystal-set telegraph key was chittering patrol signals, asking for reports. Buckeye, standing a bouquet of meadow flowers in the teapot, sat down to the key and sent: Le travail mène à la richesse. Ha! said Tumble, that will really interest the dispatcher. Pauvres poètes, travaillons! Travaillons! said Quark. La chenille en peinant sans cesse devient le riche papillon. Tumble, out of his sailor suit and into plus fours, red flannel shirt, sweater, scarf, aviator cap, goggles, and gauntlets, gave four dials a reading, poking each with a businesslike finger. Ion stream, he said. Neutrinos under however many atmospheres you get from rho over time, divided by the azimuth in hypernewtons. Twenty-three point six eight niner, said Buckeye. Fourier waves in sync. Somebody, Quark said, has been pressing weeds in the log. Now, said Tumble, send them the Fly. Never mind that they’re asking for coordinates. That’s microswedenborg’s point zero zero one by four zero on the nose. The Fly, said Buckeye. Nos mouches savent des chansons que leur apprirent en Norvège. Quark, naked between naval togs and flight overall, said of his penis that it was sunburned, along with his behind, and probably his toes and the back of his neck. Les mouches ganiques qui sont les divinités de la neige. That ought to hold them until we can achieve drift. We’re starting to spin. Rain on white dew, Buckeye recited, all the leaves are yellow. Wait awhile for that, said Quark, and where’s the bee balm and cucumber salve for my member and butt, both as red as cherry wine. Look at the late afternoon sun on the inlet down there, Buckeye said, wrinkled quicksilver specked with green and blue. Get those weeds out of the teapot. Let’s see it with biscuits and cheese, apples and chocolate. The log, said Quark, who had wrapped himself in a blanket, uncorked the ink bottle, and dipped the quill. Berrying, he wrote. Bees, caterpillars, flies, sycamore polyhedra, three families of field mice, from whom that peculiar joke we still haven’t figured out. Gerrit and Petra kissed fifty-four times, or once every ten minutes for nine hours, with Gerrit’s piddler going sprack at every kiss.

QUINCE, AUTUMN RAIN, AND MEDLAR