Читать книгу The Sick Bag Song - Nick Cave - Страница 10

I am a nervous system that runs on rhyme and ghosts.

The ghosts howl through the words making them chime.

I’d no idea I may have tasted your sweet breath

For the last time,

And when I think of you at home I notice

A brief expansion of worried longing in my chest,

As we cross the state line into Missouri,

And park our bus by the side of the road and disembark,

And in the unhurried dark, enter the low grass of the prairie

On our bellies like snakes.

We enact the slaughter of the bison by William ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody,

Then the Indian Wars including the Battle of Coon Creek.

And that night at the Intercontinental in Kansas City,

I try to call you on the transatlantic communications cable,

But the phone just rings and rhymes.

So I leave an obscure, disembodied message

On our answering machine. It goes –

You are the statuesque bison standing in the prairie of my leave. You are Squanto’s grief upon returning home. You are the tear spilt on the rawhide sleeve. Pick up the phone Pick up the phone I am the skinned hump that paints the prairie red. I am the guy with the flies. I am the one that dies. I am the man that goes on tour and hides. I am the one that wed and fled. Pick up the phone Pick up the phone I am the dead.

Then I take a pill and go to bed.

•

Under the bed sheet, I place the sick bag to my ear and shake it. I hear the rattle of the nine Muses’ emblems – the writing tablet, the scroll, the flute, the arrows of love, the tragic mask, the harp, the lyre, the comic mask, the globe and compass. I can hear the warm blood seeping onto the highway, from my severed neck, as I phone home and you do not answer.

I can hear the young boy’s terrible heart calibrating itself to the train that is rushing towards him.

I hear bloodless people, whispering, commiserating and plotting. I recognise these voices as collaborators from a distant past.

My nine naked Muses sleep softly, piled on my chest, for their work is done for today.

I regulate my breathing as the unfolding angels wing me away.

In sleep, I am borne across a gentle, purple North American dreamscape – a panorama of solution and resolution, where the next action that is best for us is effortlessly revealed.