The Rake

Another caravan arrives when dawn cuts through redwood like salt
water brandishes another fallen vessel. How easy it is for them
in a sunrise. I was there, once/ once, without the passage of the sun.
I can hear them: that same lonely hymn all caravans sing
when the journey on wheel has ended but there is still more
travelling to be done. There is a piss bucket that needs dumping
and it rests upon the leg of a sheriff, or marshal (?),—he breaks
wind worse than the horses that cart him, as if his presence is believed
by he himself to be a betterment, all the steer and people to file
in accord, surround him in his cloud of petrified, putrid filth—
and I want nothing more in this world,
this gold-forsaken, monetarily-empty world than for the sheriff,
or marshal, to lose his footing in the collective shit-dreams
every caravan shares,—clean port, warm whiskey, family and
trousers intact and singing, a violin player aboard who knows
Vivaldi and Paganini and fiddle strings crush every cloud in the sky
in a wild effort to distinguish its permeable load when their wagon train
is faulty kindling frozen,—at least his boot would be covered in piss.
Man is, after all, as deep as the hole he digs for to empty himself into.
And to shit in the wind, free from walls, is to publicize privacy in dust
settled upon one’s ass. Pray leafing arrives on schedule. Hear the ocean:
it’s why caravans land here. Salt under man’s eyelash burns sweet
like heartwicks. Gold dust in his fingernails. That copper sun is still the sun and sun
only. The clasp of the sea is a clap all caravans drive for to find and forget—
officers of the law are another. How the setting sunlight chokes
land bare and mankind be often in its darkness, his wagon a fantastic wall
dreams are stuck within,—violins, visions, empty stones under birdsong—
relished: that canopy cut open and wandering. A sober start. The start is the muse.
 
||Vincent Wolcott|| 1 May 1872

[Vincent Wolcott’s diary continues… Note: I’m not putting too much of my work up here because it is going to be submitted to journals. So Mr. Wolcott may be all that I publish Tumblr-stylie. It may not, however. We’ll have to wait and see how I feel tomorrow]