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Conrad
& Wells & Co
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Great
to have met Joseph Conrad
or
for that matter, H.G. Wells, who said,
'Let's
go upstairs and do nice things
with
our bodies,' and who did just
that
to tilt the waitress.
I
saw them once, Conrad & Wells, in
a
photograph, standing together.
A
courtyard setting beside a few bamboo
chairs.
The hour was mild in a black
&
white afternoon. Trees, too,
green
galleons shipping oars in Autumn.
Conrad
had, perhaps, cast off the last line
of
a novel: the indigo lump upon the
horizon
is an Island: behind it the sun
spilling
its treasure trove: the rent
sail-cloth
of a sea-squall. Anyway,
he
could still smell the coast wobble from
the
deck of the tartane, her weight
to
the wind. Wells, maybe, was thinking on
socialism
& science, and in some
melancholic
way of the waitress, she all
a-scent.
By what conversations did
they
measure each other, these two voyagers
who
possessed that sense of the bigness
of
the world? For Wells, an electrical
spark
that arched across the white page, and
for
Conrad, each word creaking on
the
blocks, the woman pale before the moon,
her
eyes black as tornadoes at sea. |
©
1998
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