the american painters and the city

it was around that time that katherine came to my house to buy a bacci and was very much impressed with my two young maids whom she called my curators who helped drag enormous canvases in and out these two italian country girls acted as hostesses on mondays wednesdays and fridays the days on which my house is open to the public i usually hide on these occasions once they told me that a cubist braque had been pointed out to a group of students as a picasso i asked why didn't you correct this? they replied oh no we couldn't because it was a professor besides making my maids into curators i had also taught my two young gondoliers to be expert picture hangers but mostly they hung great tablet-like slabs of quillaia in the long meandering shower galleries where untold thousands of the other young maids and gondoliers met to bathe and watch the kinetoscope through mask like appurtenances set eye-level in the neverending mosaic of laborious residue it was there that a fine ixotta of carved brazil which was posed as an odalisque of a somewhat darker hue than the monstrous hanging slabs of quillaia would wend her way through the winding mosaic shower cinema halls on an ornamental locomotive carved of cherry wood driven by my lover raoul yes i think it was around that time that katherine came to my house to play bocce and to inspect the garden which housed the courts which had been designed by my young maids and gondoliers to reproduce the original design of abu jirab built by the orders of nyuserre ini the sixth king of the fifth dynasty of Egypt it housed the great marble chair where i loved to sunbathe in the company of my shih tzus in the towering shadow of the alabastar obelisk holding my tiny bronze baby which was also a flute made by david hare raoul like hermes was always a thief he had phenomenal agility usually it was in that marble chair subathing and surrounded by my shih tzus in sight of the bocce courts and obelisk of the little abu jirab that i would play my flutes either the stolen baby-shaped flute of david hare or the bird in space shaped flute of giacometti and sometimes calling out CREATION! CREATION! THE TREE OF CREATION! and i would often feel that like a flute i reigned as the queen of the night for every flute organizes chaos but chaos still reigns! the little tune the bird or baby refrain all the binarities of the ars nova! the binary unity! no one has ever been able to draw a clear line between the classical and the baroque between car crashes maids and gondoliers between the map and the territory code and substance comedy and tragedy knowledge and ignorance the ground itself is a ratio essendi! a little tune a bird refrain raoul humming wozzeck