SALAMANDER

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window.

And it was wise what "happenstanced"! That they should come together, this mob, all a nation. And burst in on him with a flame of light and glory - scampered backward on chicken feet. And drag him hard and stony into the turbid dust and crossfire. And then segue neatly to justly and thus have justly hanged, this... altogether blasphemer and... DECEIVER!.

If you have read Clemens' Connecticut Yankee (1889)... one of his more interesting books... you'll see, you'll see for a certainty what I meant, when I said he had modelled himself on the Appearance of that inter-loping, eponymous character, in Chapter XIV, the second paragraph, and third line - to be specific. Decked in battle armor... embedded like a slinky lizard... Green and earthy and warty - his spittle came out like small plumes of hellfire. One could imagine his Caw... like a mawkish, scrying bird. A large flightless scrying bird cawing about like a horrific idiot... Picture that!

"Do you see him, there. Old Man Abe Benacerrafff," he slithered, "with my vulture eye I see him, a wounded prey, a carrion... walking... my maark," he said adoringly.

Abraham Benacerraf was at the mahogany doorpost of his "abode", or "placement", or as many words as are insufficient to say such a poor house but a happy home.

"My maark, one leg in the grave, my maark." he slithered.

The geriatric had his sandals nailed to the doorpost, so they were indeed his veritable "quarters" so to speak.

He hied like the Accuser, this salamander, to try the Jobean, and like Diabolos raced deceitfully to try the first man. And like a - like a DECEIVER - to make things short! And in no small fractal part did he make so many other fibs, and fables, and all these lies, and stories to build himself up –

For “Oh, he was royally descended", he said, in no small part, from that grand, “Solomonic Dynasty in the Horn” - this liar. From the "mountains of darkness"... where they "admit of rolling gold". And "rollicking fine sharkskin boots and clothes" - all in their coffers, he says, (hidden and secreted for a rainy day). Never mind that he never spoke a word of Eritrean or even stepped foot there.

MARRAKESH

And the Moroccan skies were pink and purple that season and sunset-hued, like the day that breaks the wildfire.

Or like when it runs tut-tut at dusk, continuously running its pinks and purples to another land. In the hither-sides and hinterlands of the Moroccan Atlas mountain found he his footing, this lizard-man, or rather yet the footing of his beast of burden. For his mount was one of those ordinary, burgeoning pack-mules. Its head was bridled steadily with hovel rope. And its jaws with woody strings, were sealed up and muzzled. But one would not be too taken aback, or at least not be too remiss to think it was exasperating smoke-dried fumes, as it respired. And of such blackness and so opaque were its eyes, or at times, bleary and dimless, like the hazels of Jutes, it seemed preternatural from another world.

And he flitted his own eyes, gloopy like a nest bird... With eyne burgeoning, scheming disaster on the world entirely.

He has an Imazighen-style portrait of himself in this stance, which is what I'm reciting against, then it breaks out in weird, mediocre, self-aggrandizing poetry.

"He beats his non-existent wings of alabaster weight like a horsefly's petals.

Dippest thou hand into a rockpool of water, with the blindworms and the fishy eels, and you'll know how terrible and irksome I am.

And the sky, bearing Omen, sags of such crustaceous weight, that it sags like a leafy green forage of toxic nightshade and hard, dappled blueberry."

In Seir, he himself was like a bandaged wild ass –- Bertram's burro (Equus Asinus), probably takes the cake for an accurate comparison. Lolling about his bedpan, shedding pinchy skin like a sunburnt desert-goer. Lolling his tongue band, himself and his corpus in a straitjacket of bandage linens, not a moment to stop or breathe - "Ah, ah," like he was in a dentist's chair - we almost felt sorry for him. But we cracked smiles, and attended to him. He kept going on, about how he was going to besiege - (whatever did they do to him?) - 'Lisbon', and Portugal proper, and crush their cities. And he went on about how we'd see his troopers surging down hilly streets. Like pyroclastic flows.

On the Friday before his death, he bid me close, and told me of a place in his dreams, (and whispered), "Where I was on ramparts white, smoothed over in rammed earth and adobe, where were all manner of men and machine –caught up in my breeches – siege-tower and cannon, men bedraggled greasing the wheels, and wetting the arcane hides to shield their wooden contraptions" - all gone up in a Sheol of blazes, gathered for his sake and all their praises and unconditional loves, for him, and for him, and for him. For him, and for him, and for him - they screamed - from the midst of the fires.

The people hewed and cried - when he was ought to flee - "Were we not with you?!" And he looked on from the white ramparts. (How they would all die for his sake!), he whispered hoarsely.

And - aforetime - He gave to them. Food to the hungry, life and death, the son cheering in father's arms in admiration, the prattling maids chatted him, full of promise, (and credulity). And he quit them harshly there, choking on his own salty breath, and granted only a burst of a glance, but for an obvious argument.

And in that night, like the firebrand Spartans in Wilusa, a second mob climbed out of a well and they were instead descended upon and cut down. Priam the Hittite never saw such broken bones and aching death.

All his allies and companionates he destroyed with him, and I am not apart from those.

THE LAKE

The man of Strawberries, (for that is what the place was called), sat on the apple cider lake on his long canoe, between reeds and thickets. In an hour, as he was wont every workday evening, he

would pull it up the dirt ramp, and lock its teak body in his shelter cabin. Then, for five minutes or so, he would peruse his vines of olives, and his beam posts of support. Not to eat, not to take a bite, no! But to take a marvel at his handiwork!

The horizon had dulled its sights, like it was holding its breath. The air of dread rolled over him.

These sprouts were grafted meticulously, hollow as a pitless date. (Unfilled). These are not to be eaten! They'll slip to the soil and the earth, an unwithered branch.

But "they are a fleeting pleasure for the eyne". "No eater shall whack them, no, nor go over them twice for the downtrodden". And they'll have no descendants these 'grapes', but wither forever, no progeny, like water and sleet off a rock.

In a quarter of vision, one may espy -- mountains -- layered in color -- and scope.

In this moment in time, I leaned on a Carob tree. And I said to myself there's some mystery in the Maghreb. And I took rest at a Cedrus Atlantica.

I mused with a bird:

"Gilgamesh traversed the land of darkness and thought he met 'Shamash' the sun-god here..."

"And Hanno - Hanno the Navigator - in those coastal waters, look, reined his ark like a horse, and tripped between - look - those magnificent volcanic waters."

And I took rest at a Cedrus Atlantica, "just like a Cedrus libani, which supplied Hiram’s armies huh? I guess one of your ancestors must have been there."

It chirped back at me - surreptitious.

Here I regrouped with that windsock of a lizard, and I told him amidst the pines, that he should quit his evil, but he was glib. His sights wandered at the foggy breath of morning swirling around a glacial peak, like a man gazing into a hearth fire.

Here are the earthen castle-forts with icy-sharp crowns, soiled with that crystal stuff of silicates, gypsum, kaolin and shale.

Here, by the by, underneath are the dry lakes and iron-pan barks (rowboats).

"Give us trass, give us pozzolanas to add to the height of these earth-castles! Oolitic forms, calcium silicates, addendum!" I cried from the top of a mount.

Here and there, on the hill beams, are a triplet of dromedaries.

The olive man. In a younger, thinner year, he grew olives and cucumbers, to put with some sour goat’s yoghurt and douse it in thinner oil and chilli powder. That is good eating.

--

REHAB.

By August, the shifted month of the emperor, we had found room and board in what looked "white and blank as a mental ward", I commented. But it was more set up as what they call these days a rehabilitation centre, or sanatorium.

I ate cornflakes, he ate his cereal.

Now at this time, Salamander had cared for us excessively. "Eggs and breakfast in bed?... Flowers in vases, there you go. And fresh-ly squeezed orange juice – all that a body could want."

“Do you want these blinds open.”

Like an old dear compassionate.

“No.”

“Just a bit open.”

It was all Excessive fine.

In our shared room, he had a small flannel bag, like a pencil case. You could smell the dry residue of toothpaste.

Just before Winter, he took money from the insulation fund, to give more custard and jelly to the boarders.

At night, he could snore up a draconic storm, mites of ash.

"Marrakesh Safehouse. 9:12 AM. Dried glue and paint flicked over, the toilet paper holder was askew. The cupboards were unframed, the skirtings indiscernible. It was like honeymooners looking around their new house, the stale smell of fresh paint included. But to the sound of disappointment."

Often a time, he would remain in the Vaudeville corridors of browns and purples and mahoganies, and superabound with hisses and whispers, as if he was talking to himself, but I knew he always had some not-so-secret company.

And on one late night, I confronted him, and shovingly demanded he tell me what the matter was. He whimpered in laughter, and delayed not a word. "I've a partner in crime in lilac or purple wrappings, to the consulates now she’s headed. She'll steal the newborn babe Rassberg, still in its swaddling clothes, still in the reek of paternity." I knew he was pulling my leg, I knew - just to keep me on my toes. For I would watch him through the creaking doors, snickering with some random unassuming friend about something unserious, and he’d be the same watching me, just to make me irascible.

He was just an altogether loser like so many crabs in the bucket. All the ashen frustration that builds up within himself, he exists only to slap the hand of anyone more daring than he. When tenants are doing bed sheets, he must intervene and insists to help, if the windows are open he must insist to close them, if closed, they must be open! And the blinds, the same. Always a contradictor.

He was deputized by one of the caretakers, having ingratiated himself to all the old ladies and supervisors around town. He'd wind down from a villa of blue ascension to one of a schema of Maroon, bringing flowers and daffodils.

----

And if he expectorated a flame, this Salamander, he struck deep in the serrata of mountains nearby. A sheep perhaps, or ibex was his prey. And he turned it into a fine flake or crisp. And thus was dining with him always considered great fare. Nothing like meat from a fire spit.

But a charcoal goanna would take roost, and he'd wince at his german-cousin, in embarrassment.

See a skittish newt ruck in the ground-holes and he'd fall shameful. A forked tongue might strike pathetically... upon a horsefly on a rock... or tunneled red ant, and he’d turn our heads the other way, and his own face, we’d sense, was faint and debased.

And he'd speak hoarsely at this, like charring tea in the throat after compensating with his pyre tricks.

But he himself is a chilly-blooded creature, the kind that basks cold in the sunbeam, gills and flanges withal - and gross sac.

He is an animale in truth, a hayawan. See him in the prison they kept him, dragging his bilboes, like a menagerie of Elephants keeping hall, with all their droppings and kicking up dust, his Mughal-like hall shaped like an inversion of a dusty, stony, mahogany couch.

---

He was altogether sinister like some horned serpent in the crossroads. In the ward, I think I saw his worst.

His face attuned looked puffy like a loofah soaked in grey water.

His cheeks were flushed grey, and the air was always tensile around him. His breath was always fulminating in his core, and always seemed smarting with self-scorn, like a mule left burnt in the sun.

On Monday 31st, he took one of the stewards to fix the wiring - I already told Mikail this. I found a coil of wire wrapped around a lightning rod, leading underneath the draft gap of pastel door, presumably into the hands of this associate. Now, the storm began to shudder, and you know "everyone knows that electricity takes the nearest path, the quickest path," I said.

That was the section of the building that was still under the process of construction, which is why he was bidden to do electrical work in the first place.

I tried to get to the entryway by ladder, because that is the only way to reach it - or somehow scrape up those blue-white cinderblocks and the masonry. I felt the breath of lightning shivering down my neck, and I kept heaving my breath as if every second lasted a little longer than usual.

I still don't know why he wanted to kill the lad, but it was enough to gather my breeches and stop him.

I shifted and shouted "Kahraba!" - for that is what they call amber that gives its name to this electricity. "Kahraba!" I rattled the door knobs every which way, every cement staircase and dusty brickwork I beat my hands raw against. The powerlines entire, lead to a substation then another power station that smells of death.

There are few things as evil in this world and distinct as the scalding of electricity, or the scalding of hot water, distinct as the scalding coolness of white paper.

--

They offered me a house near the consulate, up the road. The mere condition was that I would let some certain diplomatic guests in the guest room and office, but apart from that no other disturbance. But I felt I must ask Salamander his opinion on this decision.

It felt here as it must have been when Andrew Marvell wrote Upon Appleton House. I walked up the grassy knoll, and the house stood against the golden dusky light as if from a Hesiodic age.

The heights on the rear horizon here were level with the mountains, which look like Icebergs. Like milk poured on s'mores, the berg of a mountain peaked, in blue-white kaleidoscope, like milk poured on s’mores.

Ah! Here are Atlas Mountains, here is the promontory Toubkal.

-

Here are Aures Mountains. Here is Sorghum, and wheaty pastry. A sordid porcupine of Titian color defines the green and urban border.

Go you, take a winding tour through, and see all the stratified carpets like blue mounds of the earth. You’ll see us at the street cutting through the fig field on the hillsides, helping a fellow move house. I turn the hex key creakily in the bedposts, and I hold such a flimsy thing upside-down and vertically till I can put it back in place, otherwise I can’t screw it with gravity bending the wrist of my arm and my tools.

And be amazed at how such a flimsy timber in a moment could crash, and ruin me altogether, and what a flimsy thing it should be until it is timbered and locked in place - a fragile thing - until it is fit for the sleeping dead, lifted by a few planks, but which are somehow heftier than the waking.

"After this, we have a few hours of daylight," he snarled. "We had better pay a visit to that consulate building."

A hawk in taxidermy and nearby bust of a U.S. Admiral presented itself. Perhaps he was one of those that fought the Carlist, or the Napoleonic Iberian, or the Madridians of this day. The room was bare except for these, barring a wardrobe mirror in the far corner, the room so long like an exercise in perspective lines, the canvas painter will avouch¸ or looking down a timbery and termite-bitten hallway. The mirror looked like a bright eye in the corner, resined with amber at its edges.

---

"Come let us go, I hear a wind of a caution, a mark we don’t want to miss. A ragamuffin is scouring the Gulch road, armed with coffee browns and mahoganies, with cupcakes and coffee cakes, and mud," he tempted.

And we met eyes with the trekker, and all the coffee beans it seemed of

Abyssinia, which I pretend to grow from mounds of baobab, and a crude clinkered coffee grinder, were in store.

The Salamander bid me rob and destroy, rob and destroy, and no-one for the umpteenth mile will see.

COTTON GINS

They put us to some reprimand work on some cotton gins.

"Don't cotton always got an incendiary quality to it," a fellow said above the whir, "as if one finger-snap should set it alight?"

The large cogs spin like potter's wheels, and clank like pickaxes on a minefield.

"Don't it just."

Salamander was bandying around, muttering. And whispering into the hearts of men.

Here are mountains. Here are molehills of cinnamon and ginger.

A cooper's barrels rudely disrupt our elbows.

----

CHEFCHAOUEN

("Look at the Horns"), named in part after one of their goats.

Here are buildings dyed in white and ceil blue, reflecting the sky as waters and lakes do.

---

"How'd it happen?"

Can a leopard change its spots?

"He threw himself into a lake."

He thrashed into the lake, like one plodding through snow.

"When they came to arrest him?"

The rain fell like pin drops across the lake.

"When they came to arrest him."

---

He used to stand and exist in this earth. A presence.

Can a mountain be nit-picked out of its place?

I stood at a Truss bridge, built like one of those toothpick creations Willard Kennedy used to glue together at his Princeton U. Alma Mater…

Who could guess these things? Imagine if I could tell him all those short years ago he would die so sudden? He'd never see the progress of old age, not the aging wear. Not a dimming of the eyes. A light of the eyes, an apple of the eye - none of these - neither a bearer of children be. All that weight and presence and momentum, or momentousness or impetus of a person! Neither to exist with us in this world!

The dent in the bed-cushion is still there, but the soul is not.

Bearing up with grief, is not so easy.

Here is the funeral dessert.

Hairy Knafeh

Hairy shredded filo dough

for to cake a Mozzarella and ricotta cheese and dunk in rose-water.

Or soak in rose-water.

Heavy is the head that works through its zeal and sorrow.

--

Betimes in his hospital bed, he chafed his skin to bend them less green.

-

It was implied to us some Berbers, or some Moroccans or some Amazigh had taken to imitate or don some of the West Point costumes and their papery robes, particularly the youth. When we used to teach, Salamander and I, in the dusty academies attached, we’d see old men and young men before their prime of life, for these are alike in their absent-mindedness, trying on their white capirotes, and bleached linens. To see the impression, you must see Francesco Goya’s Procession of Flagellants, for the overall effect of raw madmen and senility.

And it was a little before this time we would hear the haunting war-whoops in the mountain ranges and yells like klaxons, but we paid them no mind, as yet.

In the p.m., the headmaster charged into my classroom, and bid a child sitting dismally on a three-legged stool to stand up and hand him over his hat, and snatched from him a Dunce cap that he cradled in his fingertips, that he meant to put on, right from his hands.

At a nearby procession, one welcomed us to a leaving party, where the bureau men had just been mulling over treaties and negotiations with the Madridians in the latter part of the war. In the interim, for we did not fully understand yet, we saw and heard the silhouettes of hooded and masked marauders.

In the two decades beforehand, there was an incident, I cannot place it, where such men were sketched in the newspapers in stark expression behind hidden masks, having cornered the senate candidate in his home state Old Dominion, and another time cornered a woman, second-storey in a domicile, and in gentleman fashion, bid her an order to stop supporting their political rivals – and they are not in the habit of asking again.

They used carnage in the underworld for what they could not manage at the bully pulpit, to use Theodor Roosevelt’s phrase.

So many 'poltergeists' and hooded revenants have now peopled the hillsides. They were mounted like knights with blankets and too-wide eye-holes for their steeds.

In the latter days, they said, some have no longer been content to remain in the countryside, like foxes that broach forbidden urbanism, and make curious eyes at civilians. And there was always the odor of a gamey fox skin, about the salamander, as though wildlife and mankind were not of one creation.

I found out what they did in Algiers. Shame on them frightening the people.

"Give me water!" One would shout in papery robes.

Not in a practised English, not in a learned language, no. But he gurgled like a Parisienne card-player, or crow in the graveyard -- "Give me water!" His hands were raw as a Libyan horse-rider, a local, a familiar.

He drank from a trembling cup. He drank again. And he drank, indefinitely.

Some lied and said it was nothing but a mean illusion - "a pig's bladder, a-a sponge t-tied to his thigh". But it was nothing, nothing more than supernatural.

-----

A letter I have received as of late indicates the following intelligence [U.S. materiel no. 02934 30/7, North Africa Province Ochre City]:

They had hired a Sherpa to replace me, a fourth to their large bed, and discussed footsie the foiled plans of this snake lizard I won’t even name anymore, their ‘mastermind' or exchequer.

I'd just seen Adam Benjelloun that Wednesday. I wish I still lived like a Cairene in an apartment like my nostalgic days, when all was secure and all was safe.

When the familiar pedestrians beat their feet in the cobbled road. And the sun beamed and refracted that same way through the dense dust of the glass, remember that? That little rainbow sheen it used to make? And all those schemings we used to make - just need to make sure the statue of limitations are getting to their end. But it's getting worse now because of all the riders. There was a lady bellowing to some fiend, downstairs, "You take and you take and you take, you won't stop taking, I'll take your * life, you runt." I don't know they brought some people from overseas to work on the Canal - and he's upstairs crying, "Help me, help me." In drunk fear. Adam's like "I don't know who's imprisoned him."

The band told me they'd just woken him up just before dawn, the tannin - I don't even wanna talk about him any more - ugh "the tannin". The morning when one's still got dirt in one’s eyes, is that the first thing you want to see, this snake? - when one just misses the cusp of full sleep, but can't repay it, until the next night, no.

They want to keep saying about me, oh, he's still in the turn-over in his second marriage, all his children are hanging like limbs, begotten and neglected - that's what I heard - "thrown like caution to the wind."

And trust me, if these effendis were discussing their plans for the morrow, I swear I would've been there first to cut them off. But anyway lucky for me right at the time of execution they said they decided to sleep in the drafted cold, underneath their mutton wool, lucky for me. Lucky for me? Lucky for them.

Or they’ll say I was an unconscionable co-dependent whatever, "I hated the reptile. And yet I loved him".

The last thing he told them, he resigned to his cabin, and he just starts sighing, "I'll sleep and dream of better things."

That was his mistake.

Remember when you told me before I went to war with you, I'd have to get my money in order, well everything's in order, go figure, and I meant every word that I said I'd do to you, snake.

And let them tell better, or at least I’ll tell better in memoirs, what was with all that bickering between Mikail and Gabriel in the ward, you think I'm going to keep everything a secret?

You're going to burn not just in this world but the next. You think the people that were with you are with you, or they're with me?

For a week of rest in Marrakesh, we would eat Maghrabiyeh, named for the place, large chickpeas and small ones, with a wooden spoon. Yellow and off-yellow and black pepper, like the flowers and fences and maizes. And the flowers of iniquity of the leviathan were ever-present as a reminder; for the cinders oft-times blew from the chimney and sprinkled against the driven snow.