THE WEB

Tonight Darwin would cut up a body, the body in the flood channel which had become a bowl of fruit. He would cover the fruit in a fine mist.

Darwin weighed 280 pounds. He was just over six feet tall. He was too big to sit on telephone wires. He was too big for most utility boxes. He sat on the sidewalk with his many things, and at night he pushed his carts—five or six of them—behind the Burlington Coat Factory, and this is where he went to sleep.

You know I did not see Darwin for one year, because he had followed the flood channel to Flamingo, almost all the way to Desert Inn.

I looked for Darwin when he was gone. He must have been somewhere beside a synagogue, somewhere near an empty acre of land, a big acre, and on one side of this is part of the flood channel called the Flamingo Arroyo. In most places the arroyo runs beneath the street, as where Darwin is crouching now.

Darwin is too big to fly, but he walks quickly.

When he is finished eating he emerges from the tunnel into the open part of the flood channel. It is the first time Darwin has seized that kind of body, but it had become a bowl of fruit, and he had been hungry. The man had been hungry too. 

Darwin picked up some rose trimmings which had been tossed over the fence into the flood channel, and he carried these to the place where the body had been. He spread the rose trimmings over the floor at the mouth of the cave; some of the flowers he separated from their stems and he placed these where the hands had lain on each side.

On each of the man’s fingers had been a letter. This was the name of his friend, and it would become them both.

In the name there are no unknowns.

In the corner of the name, a spider is hanging in a web that is full of dust and piecemeal. The web is moved gently by a breeze from a fan on the ceiling.

Terminal One, Terminal Three.

The spider has unfolded her ribbon so that she can hear music. She listens to the sound and grows into it, a kind of undulation, a kind of wave. It is her lovemaking. When the fan blows strong she holds on.

Darwin is holding onto this thing.  

The air is like a cloud.

The spider loosens her grip to drink from a new place on the fly’s body. Who would have thought she could touch the sky this way? She is holding the fly with two arms. 

*

After Darwin was gone one year, I saw him finally in the business complex parking lot across from Sunrise Villas 9. He was walking in from Eastern Ave, pushing one cart. It was January and the air was cold and the sun was bright and the sky enormous.

Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas Happy New Year! We said, waving at one another in the reach of Magnolia’s shadow, in front of the blue dumpster, the Monte Carlo, the Stratosphere.

[[The sun became a centipede on Darwin’s face and he cocked his head so that it fell into his mouth.]]

In another year he might come back. He said this as he walked away, as his cart made a sound like centuries on the asphalt, ringing as a mountain beneath a house. [[He was walking towards the home of Bob Bigelow, the house which is built like a rocket ship.]]

It was January so a year dissolved like cream, and Darwin was back in April. He sat in his antique chair on the sidewalk, in front of the Tropicana flood channel and the Burlington Coat Factory, across from the Sunrise Villas and Bigelow’s south wall. He sat with his wings bulging over the arm rests or folded loosely around him. He watched the sky and stayed still and stayed quiet, but when clarity so heaped him he had to cry out, so that the birds on the wire and the pigeons and crows in the tree and the grackles and the magpies and the yellow songbirds would all begin to fall into orbit.

The Mulberry tree was bursting its blossom, and the black fruit was beginning to appear in its seed. JP Moonsberry has taken up residence in the New York hotel. He drives a black Italian Selvano, the fastest car on earth.

Once a day, Darwin makes his way to the garden which was called Harom. In the garden there are statues placed along a stone path and at the center of the path is a small white house built in 1945, and at the top of the stone chimney a golem sits cross legged as if looking out over a long valley, full of pine trees and cedar, where the clouds lull a person to sleep. [[If there had really been any pine trees around, the figure would have appeared wider.]]

*

Last night a pigeon set himself in the corner outside our patio—a little white puddle emerged and I thought in the morning it would be dead, but the bird is there again on the lawn. It has a small imprint on one side of its head, an indentation, something which might appear on the soft skull of a new human.

Do you see, there are the seeds of sand coming, falling down.

Darwin has come to the garden called Harom. He is in there with his wings flat against his warm body, and he is walking towards the center and the white house. He sits down on a bench carved from brass and bronze beside a statue of a dove. A hand is raised in the air and the dove, its chest out, is about to depart from the open palm.

The shadow of the dove’s wings are cast in the sky, as a thunder cloud moves in front of the sun, slipping now behind the Monte Carlo. The sky opens and closes, an armory of stars waiting for their moment of exchange.

It is said that this exchange is impossible, and yet it occurs suddenly. The orchestra is one violin and one cello, and Darwin is moving the sound around with his breast.

Far up beyond the stars are the Bigelow Space Mansions, a hive of rooms each connected to the center by a network in which distance cannot be discerned or maintained.

There are eight rooms around the center and thirty-two rooms around these, and then one hundred and twenty eight rooms around these, and so on. The hive goes out in all directions so that the rows retract towards the north and south poles, and in the center of this is a field of statues, not unlike the statues inside Harom, and in the very center there are three stones.  

The people who live in the Bigelow Space Mansions come once a day to the field.

In room four are Stella’s mother and father. They have been there for twenty three years; they speak to Stella by way of palm trees, and of course by way of stars. 

Stella is frosting the layers of a cake. Darwin can hear her inside her home; her kitchen is crumbling as the house in the center of the garden. The cake is yellow. The frosting is white.

Darwin is too big to fly. He listens to Stella.

The spider is pulling back around.