Читать книгу Model of a City in Civil War - Adam Day - Страница 11

COMBINE

Captain Nazret helped the Communists overthrow Haile

Selassie and when

he discovered his wife’s infidelities sewed her into bed

as she slept

and moved his family to the Isle of Man, where he retired

and began losing

his mind, so that one All Hallows’ he pasted a mustache

onto the pastor’s

sorrel mare and rode it through the cobbled streets of Cregneash

saying to the costumed kids,

“Come pet comrade Stalin.” Children loved the old

syphilitic because

he’d show them his stomach’s gnarled track of surgery scars, because

of the violet-backed

sunbird he kept until the neighbor’s cat, with wet green eyes,

reached a paw

through the cage bars, and snagged the bird on one hooked claw

so that a crosshatch

of feathers and blood tattooed the tile floor. That night kids drugged

the Siamese

with cough medicine and stapled it by the scruff to its owner’s

picket fence.

•

On a Siberian expedition, Nikolai Bryukhanov brought the wrong

food for the sledge-dogs,

so they had to be killed. But not by the squeamish Commissar.

On the third day

of Bryukhanov’s trial, Stalin sent a note with accompanying

illustration that read:

“To the members of the Politburo, For all the sins, past and present, hang B.

by the balls. If they

hold out, consider him acquitted by trial. If they don’t, drown him

in the river.”

•

Here sits Queen Anne at Hockley Hole, London

for the dog and bull show.

A rope is tied ’round the root of the bull’s horns and fastened

to an iron stake,

its slobbery gray nose blown full of pepper to enrage it before

it’s baited. Meanwhile,

men hold dogs by the ears. Let loose, the goal for the dog is to hold for all

hell to the bull’s

snout—the most sensitive spot other than the genitals—“If a bull had balls

hanging from its face

they’d be attached to his snout.” Now, either the dog remains

fixed, or is thrown

tearing out the flesh it has laid teeth on. The bull, a skeptic in dialogue

with hope, works

to slide a horn under the cur’s belly, and throw it, so that a dog’s side

is often ripped open

entrails protruding like wet sausage—“Yes, it provides much joy

for the community,

and the animals certainly gain a sense of dignity in achievement.”

•

Goya’s “Portrait of the Family of Charles IV”: intermarriage preserved

the family’s wealth

and the compact features of mongoloids. Deformed by a hunting accident,

Charles—subsidiary

to his wife, his mouth full of gravel—spent his power slowly collecting

watches and wrestling