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Columbine and Harlequin

with English to French Translation by Christiane Ehrenreich

THE REMIX:

COLUMBINE AND HARLEQUIN

Un enterrement. Twenty-five years ago… in the beaten air of a Georgia mortuary one hundred fans circulate the rancid vapors of formal-hydrate. The dance of faces creeps across the closed façade of a casket, creeps across the black polymer of a casket. The corps de ballet shuffle past—step, step, clap; step, step, clap—a procession.

There lay David DeKournket, shriveled and fuzzy like an old fruit, a rotten tomato. Inside that box, his visage resembled a November jack-o-lantern, his mouth an open container of blue-green moss, his lungs a forest of fungus. Morels and elephant ear spindle and crenellate throughout the moist cavern of ribs, which are still and up-thrusting no more. Above him, the dancers’ flowers play. Fleurs du mal. On gangly stems their heads hang with the lewd droop of tulips. After the dancers comes the producer—transparent Harlequin in ghastly reflection, faint, in the paint on the plane of the mirror halfway between the living and the dead, neatly transparent to the end.

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Les funérailles passées, la lettre dans la main d’un enfant, un souvenir. His hand clutches the choreograph. His eyes orbit the room. His eyes will settle nowhere. They break free from their sockets, roll within his skull, fall out and race like marbles on the marble chessboard floor, trickling under the casket. Wet with tears they gather dust and dirt; his humiliated eyes hide in the castle’s corner. Blind the producer navigates by sound, calls upon stereographies of the ear.

Somehow his meaty paw finds a bevel on the slick wood. To cries and exclamations he wrenches open the casket. Tries to crawl inside. Sobbing he is led away. Sobbing he has laid the choreograph down alongside DeKournket. A light ream of rice paper, transsubstantial as a communion wafer. Secretly he placed it on deadman’s chest where it remains to this day, now and forever in its place. A sheaf of ink marks, darting dancers, lithest of the lithe, now blotted dry, now stuck in time.

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Maintenant longues journées le long de routes plus longues encore. Memory is the purgatory of the living. By this means, they reproduce the long years between Monday and Saturday. Like dancers looming before the mirror in an empty room. This practical chamber is the Houdini box which holds and releases the magic of self-loathing, the livid-lidded left-overs leering of yesterday.

Underneath him his feet, shuffling across the unswept parquet, make a sandy sound. Slithering and leaping they trounce the boards. In the hours of precession, in the hours in-between the hours, in the time of the mind when he stands before the great mirror in the house of Ailey. A shifty little man in a black leotard. A silhouette, a clay man, a granite statue, a pliable form, a meditation, an atom rebounding in a room. A pirouette, a gesture? A problem to resolve. The head revolves on its axle, the fouetté of days, eyes snap to a taped spot on the mirror and see themselves. To surprise oneself with one’s own face, this life, spent turning this endless gesture, the only gesture. Revealing oneself to oneself. Making knowledge.

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Maintenant longues nuits autour du feu. Revolutions once enacted collapse upon the page. Eternal night fills the arena. Turning revolutions before a crowd, diving in the wet splash of their approval, a bath of sweat and vigor. White face paint dripping from chins and lips, the world tumbles in the capoeira of flashbulbs, the snap of jaw bones, until it at last the earth is cross-sectioned to its molten core by a guillotine: the velvet curtain falls. Worms drop from the noses of the dead. Flesh, having melted away, reveals two sharp points of bone, two holes where the nose once lived. In the front row, soft coats of astrakhan molder with moths’ eggs. Mice’s and moles’ and voles’ holes are the new rows leading into the black lacquered back of this final auditorium. The wooden box of the mind carries on after death. A scattering of molars litters the stage, a long night underground with the femurs of lemurs in the costumes of Betty Page.

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Campé dans une clairière sous le feu des étoiles. Harlequin chases Columbine through a long night’s stalking in dark undergrowth of clubs, is given the brush off in stables and later sent packing like a mule under a starless city sky. Unapproachable in the cold company of dancers. All of them howling, laughing, and bitching like the joists of an old tenement. One by one the bevy squeeze themselves in and out of Puck’s costume, dart around in drag, cover old façades with new, disappearing under coats of paint and moonlight. At dawn they return themselves from demigods to dancers, less awkward and begging once more for flight.

Columbine stands aloof. His skin and fresh eyes, glossy and alive, catch the light and turn it fairy green. Splendorous long limbs, taut legs and arms wrapped around an agile mind. His grand jete will give meaning to this orgy of life, this continuous tumble and tangle and twist and grope and fuck—this mad carnival, this meaningless parade, this staggering out-of-tune march—this life: in which real order, so bitterly fought for, is so briefly gained; in which real control, so fervently worshipped, is so little understood.

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Campé dans une clairière sous le feu du soleil. Eternal days spent waiting for a glimpse. Eternal days spent securing capital, making certain. How those days smell of the hoops they burned and the fur they scorched. Food-minded and carrion-crazed, flies emerge from his nostrils to rub paws and conduct their insouciant séance of desire. The pungent fungus inside him ripples with new rot. Another Harlequin dresses himself in violet and night shades. Camphorous as a corpse flower, he draws his Columbine closer, lusting after those horsey hips and sure sweet lips. Soon too, the night spreads its odor of decay, intoxicating the dawn, drawing close the day.

In a warehouse meeting room on the east side of Manhattan—his box above ground—the producer recalls the stick prop and the jerk of the string, the moment of his entrapment, when DeKournket turned pirouettes into sautés, changements, thoughtless movements neither forward nor back, his turn en dehors to glimpse his Harlequin lurking in the wings, figure to his ground, a horse on his merry-go-round. Glassy and reflexive, neither here nor there, neither dead nor alive, their eyes touched like clouds on the surface of a lake.

A reflection once begun becomes unstoppable. Light follows upon light, dashing every which way the wind blows. It blows and blows, not shouting but lamenting through the ghost town of an old man’s soul. Not able to break out of this claustrophobia, this physical strangulation, thoughts taught by muscles are the container, the wooden restrainer.

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Dans les villes poussiéreuses, les mouches se rappelent les éléphants et leurs excréments. Flies bask in detour, recalling elephants and their sacred dung. In dusty towns, Buzz, goes the gossip of whores—a hushed, broken language, shivered through shattered teeth. Saucy dish. Ya-hey, did you hear? About that poison little toad? Dancers, tiger tough broads upon the boards, hoe a road, paint it black with derision. Such is the gossip of whores. The box expands walls to floor. Protected—Fierce—Aggressive, the prima donas surround their diva, but Columbine gives a churlish whirl to the whole whorish world. Vanity swallows; pride spits, says she. Such is the narcotic of narcissism, gaping at its core.

Asleep on her feet before the blackened mirror, red lipped in garish tights, the night is lost for a poet’s lie. Not one ounce of truth in beauty past the age of twenty-five. Black the boards where we dance, and black the boards where we lay when they die.

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Les longues journées de Pierrot. The bedroom room walls are bled of color, like a bruise before it turns yellow. DeKournket has a mildly twisted ankle. Lift, turn, spot. He rehearses a sequence to the beat of a dripping faucet. The petit allegro rises first to the left then to the right, interlocking with the bone-hewn intricacies of scrimshaw. Across the disco, flashes of teeth and raptors’ eyes. Courtship, like dance, desires disconnection from thought, pursues through the ability of the muscles to memorize. This is the feeling of tours in air, the longed for present, the mnemonic condition. A clown’s grin. Both idiot and savant. Accident and intention. Misunderstanding and comprehension. From this, the body-mind wanders to David Christie: Saddle up. Saddle up your horse and ride like Hell.

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Pierrot dans la forêt des ours. From the club, the cubs conga toward the dock where the trailer trucks park, each one an open-ended, oblong compartment. How they skulked along the banks of the Hudson River. How they hurried on tip-toes to the yowling call—the wild ones, who would hug them tight within their arms. The flickering light of fire barrels cast kabuki into the open mouths of the truck trailers. The mother bears stood naked but for their boots on the threshold of the forest, sneering on their haunches at those too scared to climb up. Teeth and fur sheen’d as if silver under the open casing of the night.

How they clubbed us with paws, and how we cried out to God. How those bears opened our throats, gave voice to our stomachs, and the noises we made to God. Ah, my Columbine, our should I say, Pierrot, my sad, sad Pierrot. God, when the police found you covered in tarps and boards, caked in dried blood and danced up by flies. Thereafter hours spent in the dumb show of grief. Mulling and chin stroking, while nights secretly returning to the waterfront, moving trailer to trailer looking for the one. Eternal days and their numbers dwindling into night. Eternal nights of the doeskin dotted search parties edging the docks, the subways, the corridors of evening—everywhere a’buzz with the gossip of whores.

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Pierrot dans le champ des os. With a mechanical blink night becomes day. Hides of jackals are shaken out and hung on hooks. In the desert outside Tucson, the dancer glimpses Sun Fire, not realizing yet that he is sick. His ecstatic vision of light to counter the darkness. The reptiles and cacti and rock ledges and ancient petroglyphs gave him the idea. In the white light of Taawa, DeKournket claws at the air, tugs out his hair. In the swift light of Tucson, in the desert of purgation, a bolt of grace shoots him through, ends the valley of his eternal days. He falls in love. He finds within him the choreograph and names his dance, “The Dance of Sun Fire”.

Lying in each others arms, my wet wax calcified on his skin, sealing him within the membrane of my own translucence. Therein began his god-awful metamorphosis.

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Un masque de mort de six jours. Fire Island burnished the lie. No more huddling around the barrel light. Masked in the radiance of the sun, the young dancers run—from us as from ghosts. Surely we were mad, more legend than living they thought: a horny toad with poison oozing from his pores and a leopard who saw sunspots. No more canopy of concrete forests, only the glistening figment of the open sky. No more moaning about life, but gasping instead with orgasms of surprise. Through the city of ragged fags, I wandered like Gulliver among rank and dying vegetation. But to my blind eyes, the Hudson was wide and gay, like the Nile in better days. Audiences invaded. Suddenly we found our lives appreciated.

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Pierrot sur le siège avant d’un break. However, when the purified self faced its own hectored remains, the news of an illness put an end to our lavish game. No more tooting in the face of decay, no more fighting and dying to keep a few wrinkles away. I had hoped for a daring escape, for a life pro-rated, but I gave up and ran away, like a Catholic priest from an unexpurgated Shakespeare play.

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Pierrot chancelant au bas côté de la route. On his head a tuft of hair. In the mirror a bloody face full of canker. A rude scab clotted across the bridge of his nose. Tubes race out from behind Pierrot’s ears, take oxygen for the lungs, which are dotted with the fuzzy white spores of Pneumocystis and oral thrush. The skin over his jaw stretches tight. The horror of his ribs, sticking out, pulled out, abused for other pleasures and put back. He is God’s lover now, receiving HPA-23.

One of the tiny tubes comes unhooked and flaps out like an elephant ear. Savage legions ravage his shaven skull, pave a black macadam. They scorch the demonic path of a thousand flaming lice across his skin. Sterile walls mock his suffering. His lips explode like charcoal when he smiles, the blood already powder-keg dry on the inside. His seducer, his producer, his Harlequin cannot bear to remain by the bedside. Pierrot has become an artifact in the coffin-sized museum of memory, and I, your tout and guide. In a light drizzle of years, he is gone, eternally gone having left his lips, left his green eyes, left everything in trust.

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Maintenant dans la ville. This proud city will not do anything now. A city that reads itself to sleep. A city of sheets in a museum menagerie. Bricks, dust, and shards of glass. Little swept piles of ash. A stage manager’s signature. A city of sunlight and sass. A tower’d and humming cemetery. A city of stained windows and fire escapes. A city inarticulate on morphine, whose theatre buildings wear black in mourning, whose whorehouses are its proudest churches, whose actual churches are but burned out husks in the embers of a forgotten faith. A city whose once-packed rafters and scaffolds now swing with fanatics, audiences hang from cupolas and spires on Wall Street. A man-made city spilling its entrails at the slightest tempest. A city of flatbed trucks brimming with skins and skulls. Flatbed trucks overstuffed with the spoiled carcasses of last year’s production, shot through the back of the heads or flayed rinds. Now in the figments of ballet shoes; now in the farce of boots. Down Riverside Drive are the homes of rats and the nests of birds. Now, David DeKournket passes along, in the back of one of these trucks. Dragged around the city walls. No, he does not resist. The bleached white jaw bone. The teeth long and dry. Once he danced and ducked and ran these damned avenues. Now the streets are haunted by the apparition of his passing.

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Une ville horrible, maintenant. In twenty-five years this horrible city forgets more than it knows. In twenty-five years, this horrible city grows so symmetrical. A suburbia on hill-sides. A Cartesian Elysian plain. Its gated mausoleum scripts are chiseled in granite—not so as to preserve the dead, but rather to preserve the idea of death. The memory of our loved ones has been stock traded for the possibility that we ourselves will one day be remembered in stone like the silent gods of an ancient race. These proud but impotent stones perforate the ground around his grand compartment, his underground apartment; they surround the perfect little room under his carpet of grass. Out his window he can see the city, where an old man defies his death taking 36 pills a day. City towers gape and leer through the filthy yellow smear of sky. The cemetery is bright, clear. I lay the peonies. His favorite, white. Torches. A bundle of light.

When some people say, I love you, what they really mean is, I am happy. When some people say I am happy, they really mean, I love you.

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Perdu dans les empattements calligraphiques des avenues. When I try to leave I become lost in the calligraphic serif of roads. Lost in a city of wide avenues and broad families. A city taped in ticker and confetti. Lost now I wander into the fallen apart doorways, into speckled houses, cobwebbed gables; I ply the dusty davenports, where his shadow pirouettes against the water stained wallpapers bulging with the husks of beetles and crackling with mice.

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Perdu dans les salles de Herot. La dernière pirouette, Pierrot perdu!

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Remixer’s process: I guess I started with the intention of re-interpreting what [Kloss] did through one of my own characters. I read up on Pierrot and tried to think about what character I had in my repertoire that would be a similar sort of eternally sad character. I settled on the dancer DeKournket, whom I have written other pieces about. Then I counted the paragraphs and summarized the content of each, trying to identify major elements and motifs because I wanted to make sure I had the right number of elements to be exactly analogous in structure to “The Clown Show”. Based on those summaries, I also wrote the poem in English, which later became the italicized French. I thought of it as the strongest connection to “The Clown Show”, because it takes [Kloss’s] language and transforms it both into a lyric Romantic poem (lyric Romanticism I thought was the essence of “The Clown Show”) and translates into another language thus complying with the ‘remix’ idea. After that I wrote out the exact number of paragraphs in sketch form, working from my summaries of what [Kloss] did but substituting my elements as analogs of [his] elements. This was a hazy part of the process. I was going for lyric paragraphs about DeKournket (analog of Pierrot).

Then I met with the translator and got her going. Then it was trim, edit, re-write, trim, edit, re-write until each paragraph felt tight and felt like it had some lyric time stopping umph. Mainly at that point I wanted my own voice and style to come through [Kloss’] structure and story arc. Whenever I felt I was getting too far off course I stopped and fed [Kloss’] language back into the piece to keep it focused. Then time ran out and I had to turn something in and viola.

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Craig Medvecky teaches Creative Writing, Literature, and Composition at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he is currently a dissertator in English. Recent and forthcoming work can be found in The Toucan Literary Magazine, Kerouac’s Dog, Contemporary Literature, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, The Burnside Review, and Shady Side Review.

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