.jpg)
Sport 7: Winter 1991
♣ Murray Edmond — The Thirty-six Dramatic Situations
♣ Murray Edmond
The Thirty-six Dramatic Situations
I asked him by looking at him.
I asked him by taking off my shoes.
By dancing that dance.
Supplicating my neck.
2
She took me out of myself.
I stood in the shadow of a tree,
a path of steps.
A taxi drew up.
It backed fatally far,
its wheels hung over the concrete edge,
chassis on concrete.
No way out.
3
Delivered like a baby
he fled the city in an aeroplane
but she followed him.
Agreeing to meet at the end of the wharf.
Lots of yachts locked
in docks.
4
If the son found out.
If the daughter found out.
Electrifying and arresting.
They sit like snakes
in the furious room.
Her drugged body breathes through the wall.
5
She wakes up.
Leaves the house.
Footsteps.
Speeds up.
A corner.
Shoplight.
Take a taxi.
Cannot be followed.
To his door.
6
Sell sell sell.
Everything.
Every last brick.
Rock bottom embraces.
At the airport, a line of well-known faces.
Disaster.
Circumstances made her go back to him.
Let him wait as long as he envisages.
He let the pale ghost of trepidation muddy
his doorstep.
He ate shit
because they asked him to.
In a small room full of books
with no desire to read.
8
Gagging on words,
money revolts you,
stings skin where it touches,
sunlight burns, darkness
eats your mind,
your children look straight ahead,
you flounder.
9
So begin with a project.
Arrange date, mood, escapade.
Delete fear.
Behave like a different person.
Prance around with your life
in your hands.
10
And then one night he steals you.
There on the back seat
feeling the maniacal swerves of his driving
heave your body here and there
the cochleas swung in a scream of imbalance,
he takes you to that place
he once talked about:
everything is neatly arranged:
the tins, the skins, the bars,
the beans.
11
The phone calls came first.
Then signs: things turned,
objects displaced,
a face at the window, no
one outside.
12
Obtaining to what, whom?
Obtaining whom, what for what, whom?
Obtaining power over others.
A money-back course.
13
Brother against brother
mother against son
wife against husband
hoar frost
a withered branch
a hint of insanity
a marriage of unspeakable degradation.
Your last hope.
14
Both wanted her,
met in the cafe to discuss
possible ways of sharing,
alternations,
simultaneities,
exclusions,
perversions,
dimensions of trade.
A house of bonded free men.
15
Simplicity is the most attractive feature.
You hold it.
Draw back.
As he opens the door.
Push past.
She's there.
You smile as planned.
He follows you in.
You turn.
He stops in the doorway.
And then you plunge it in.
In and up.
Under the ribs and turn it, curl it,
till the heart ruptures
on your spit.
Not for her.
Murderous adultery.
16
He'd never felt saner.
Never had his stocks floated with such buoyancy.
Never before the energy.
The sheer dream of living
lived out
openly
fearlessly.
And always the verge of choking.
17
A sunny afternoon.
In his office, working.
That faint knock, the
fatal imprudence.
After all he'd been through
to put himself through more.
Rogered by his own spectacle.
18
He stole for her.
Bent his neck for her to bite.
Wept coins on her garlic hair.
Gifted shares in a flood of love.
Lent his book of taxi chits,
queued in banks for time
to drop its rain of skin.
They flew everywhere,
did everything.
And still no one seemed to know
what was going on between them.
The tension in the auditorium
was palpable as a pin.
19
A simple accident.
Late at night.
Together in the car.
Laughing.
A brother steps to the kerb
and doesn't look.
It's the evasive action you take
which kills.
20
So give up everything,
start again.
Make sure no one's on your side.
Proceed to demolish any hope of gain.
Pack your batteries with a pure
burning fuel.
Execrate promise.
21
And for her children's sake
she came back to the gothic arrangement.
Coinage
in a bad joke.
22
A house full of beds.
Beds full of bodies.
Bodies full of blood.
The full-on classical
cash-flow crisis.
23
He hung on to her chances.
He wouldn't stop nagging her doubts.
He made her pay with feelings.
She had to dig a pit for him.
Hall of doors,
dish of whores—
stew it
Roger and out.
The littler man wants
the bigger man's wife
and the bigger man wants
a quieter life.
Harmonics.
Whore-manics.
The wife wants a bite
of the country cooking.
25
So when it happens,
late in the afternoon
upstairs with the TV on,
only an hour before he returns
from the meeting
they wonder why they had
waited so long.
26
Rouge her.
Crimes of love.
He sold his father's story
to the newspapers.
Twenty, thirty,
years ago.
Still telling that story,
shoulder on the jukebox,
blankness in his eyes.
28
The transport system
money
the wind
a hill
sleepiness
inhibition
delay
satisfaction
who gets up to make breakfast
for who—
obstacles to love.
29
An enemy loved.
A friend reviled.
A revelation dismayed.
A smile disrobed.
30
Years casting around for a subject
big enough for his ego.
Bought, did up, and sold
five houses in one year.
Still his father's words
nibbled his desires.
Her ankles and the arches
of her feet
made him lurch with pleasure.
His whole reason.
31
Free to choose
you chose wrongly.
Resorting to blasphemy
you heard your own lack of conviction.
Forgiveness
begged too late.
Contrition no salve.
Cacoethes vivendi.
Whore to your own ambition
you took no pleasure in it.
Worship a numbness.
32
She wanted him to
so she could hate him
for it.
Downstage left, eyes
just over the heads
of the audience
the full wind
of passion
misplaced.
33
The taxi's wheels spinning in the air.
34
A signal of pain
carried over a great distance
to reassure a loved one
the nights will grow warmer.
35
Prodigious feasting
in mock-marble halls.
Tales of reconciled swine.
36
And the one who never came back.
Delayed. Deleted. Dilated.
Dutchman.
The seven seas.
And forever.
The last third of the semiosis
suspended indefinitely.