Disaster Was My God by Bruce Duffy Read Free Book Online

country is at an elevation, but the land is cultivatable. The climate is cool but not unhealthy.
    Contrast this with:
    It has been found again!
    What has?—Eternity
.
    It is the sea gone off
    With the sun
.
    Sentinel soul
,
    Let us whisper the confession
    Of the night so void
    And of the day on fire
.
    Or this incantation:
    O seasons, O castles
    What soul is without flaws?
    I have made the magic study
    Of happiness which no man evades
    A salute to it each time
    The Gallic cock sings
    Ah! I will have no more desires:
    It has taken charge of my life
.
    Which again raises this disquieting question of language and style. Namely, how a poet prodigy of almost unfathomable abilities could willfully
forget
how to write. How could such a man disable a style and unlearn ageless rhythms—stubbornly
resist
, as one might food and water, words and their phantom secrets, indeed the modern secrets of language that he had been the first to discover, in his teens?
    How, in short, could a poet of genius systematically erase his own life
—unwrite
it? How? Why? To what conceivable end?

3The Rimbaud Luck
    The lanterns are two golden balls in the darkness. “Come
on,
” says the one.
    In black rubber boots, down the hill they trudge at 4:00 a.m., two dumpling-skirted, lumpy-sweatered women hauling steaming buckets to the barn where the beamy, big-eyed ladies are now loudly stamping and mooing, Feed me milk me feed me.
    “Well,” says the mother in the darkness, as if a malicious voice has just whispered it. “I now know that Arthur’s knee is worse than he has let on. Much worse.”
    “Mother,” says Isabelle, his one surviving sister, a thirty-year-old girl-woman still half asleep, “how can you presume to
know
this?”
    “Because, daughter, I had a dream.”
    Setting down the bucket, Mme. Rimbaud turns up the lantern wick, licking and smoking. “Hold up the lantern—up.” Turns the latch, then pushes light into the piss-perspiring beast heat. Cats, skinny barn cats, leaping, mewing, and twirling round her ankles
—things needing things. Dehors!
“Out!” Then, bumping Isabelle as if she were a cow: “In with you,
in.
” Claps the door, then continues: “Of the four of you, Arthur always kicked the hardest … as an infant. Are you listening to me? Hekicked me last night.” Isabelle is now staring at her in bafflement. “In my sleep,” insists the mother, “he
kicked
me.”
    “You mean, as a
baby
Arthur kicked you?”
    “I mean, I felt a kick. Last night. How do I know if he was a baby? But then I knew—I knew it’s bad.”
    “But, Mother, you always think the worst. You jinx it.”
    “Jinx what? It
is
jinxed. Good lord, your brother doesn’t need me to jinx his life.”
    At this, Isabelle plops the rag into the hot, soapy water. Rubs her nose on her woolen sleeve, wipes down the udder teats, drops her stool, then starts wringing.
Sploosh, sploosh, sploosh
.
    “Ignore me.” The mother stands there, burning. “Go on with your pretending. You’ll see I’m right.”
    Sploosh sploosh
.
    “And, you
hate
that I am always right. And I hate always having to
be
right.”
    Grabbing the next cow by the tail—by the balls, as it were—Madame hand-jacks her, bucking and stumbling, into the stall: seize the tail and, rest assured, Bossy will follow. Wrings out the rag, then starts wiping. “You’ll see. Or rather, two months from now you will—as usual. Monsieur Michaud!”—this is the hired man, another itinerant tippler and oddball—“Get in here! You and your two friends. And not too close to the lantern, lest you blow us up, all the alcohol on your breath.”
    And not merely is the old pest probably right, thinks Isabelle, but she is
wrong-right
. Mme. Rimbaud always sides with the worst, and at the pessimist’s betting window, almost invariably, she is handsomely repaid, Arthur’s leg being a case in point. For the past two months, they’ve been skirmishing over the leg and what it portends, especially