Jogging With Roussel 16 Part 2

Jogging With Roussel 16 Part 2

            Nedda was growing impatient, she paced the little drawing room nervously, occasionally peering out the window to glance down to the street to see if Fogar had yet arrived. She hummed a strange disjointed song, and sang some of it too:

étant une fenêtre

la chanson taquine

par à-coups de la

fin de l'arbre

seule la fenêtre laborieuse

connaît mon nom

je suis l'oeil de verre

en étant

une fenêtre à

qui sait ce trouble

mon art se trouve

quand j'ai comme un œil

est inversée comme un signe*

It was in fact the faux bucolicity of the city park across the street outside the window which had inspired Nedda thus to sing, in a strange translation, one of the poems from her alternate world, a poem from the poet known as Marramelle, from his final volume called Tears of Sickness. The poem’s title was I am Being a Window (Which I Can’t Pass Through). Suddenly she stopped, and turned to Dr. Saint-Isles who had recently returned dressed in more formal attire to receive his good friend Fogar, and spoke, “Does this have something to do with Fogar?” And she turned and pointed to a long van from whose posterior reached a roll-out drawer-like assembly upon which was stacked what looked to be meter long ingots of pressed bird seed contained in a hard gelatin which were being placed along the deserted main artery of the park in the likeness of a hyphenated line. “Of course,” cried Bex, “it’s Saturday! He always skirts the parks around these parts in his ‘bird-sphere-hot-knife-bicycle’ as he styles it. He’ll be coming along shortly now. Those are some of the members of his quirky little cult. They’re quite adorable, and admirable yogis as well. And surely enough, a metal sphere appeared in the distance, far away at the end of the park. Its body was bisected vertically by a trough in which one could see, like a paddle wheel, an array of hot vertical knives which cut and cooked their way through the bird seed ingots, the heat creating a smoke which alerted the adjacent aerial citizens to their weekly treat, and who soon descended creating a squirming, squabbling, feathered “hyphrenia-zation” of ingot-treads. On either side of the trough one could now begin to make out, nearly flush with the surface of the sphere, two thin but enormous rubber tires, whose rotations could be counterpoised so as to enact a small amount of directional correction. And then there came into view a small hatch on one side, and two horn-like telescopes aimed discretely down so as to reconnoiter the immediate space before the strange vehicle. And soon enough Fogar had arrived, and the group stood enthralled as the would be Magian Emperor disembarked from his pilgrimage’s spherical chariot of avian charity, but no one could have expected what they saw!

*here is Canterel's translation of Maramelle's poem 

I am Being a Window (Which I Can’t Pass Through):

being a window
song teases
in bursts at the
end of the shaft

only the laborious window
knows my name
I am the glass eye
being a window

who knows what trouble
my art is when I 
like an eye is
inverted as a sign