PARTISAN REVIEW
tering webs like doilies and lace valentines. There
is
an organ with a
rat world in its insides, and rats' feet sift over the strings with the
faintest prism tinkle like the death-knell of the delicate. On a sugar–
cane pole in a comer are strung old dresses and coats, and crumpled
in
a comer
is
a Ku Klux Klan hood like a caved-in ghost. The clothes
hanging in the purple loft-light are shredded by claws and streaked by
rain and drenched in light and burned through by ceaseless rays
of sunlight and moonlight and starlight. They are ripped by teeth
and gnawing (almost as
if
in some kind of vengeance) and the tiny
punctures of the mouths of ants and moths, as if the wearing of life
had left some sweet syrup on them. A gray diaphanous veil hangs like
web and spun so fine by age that it seems a veil of light. Because these
garments have been so long diffused with light and lights-through
many washings and drenchings-their colors have faded and the
lights have dyed them delicate pale Light colors.
In an eave
is
a whole mosque of dirtdobber domes and globed
hives of bees and the blown gray papier-mache bags of wasps. Cur–
tains of gossamer hang trembling purple and luminous. In
this
wreck–
age the insects and creatures have made their artifice and their order:
frail mouth-built or cilia-built structures, envelopes and membranes
and spun-out or spat-out fragile architecture, phantom and fantastic
and terrifying.
The faded pine walls wear Wear like a fabric, a garment of
speared and cometted and darted and spiralled grain, and grain
designs like those on the sole of a foot; and lacunae of lucent amber
resin; and serrated or glabrous surfaces: a landscape of figures of
grotesque naked men and women among pools and hummocks and
flumes; and there are fantastic scrawlings and lewd phalliforms of
grain. On one wall there
is
a terrible water-mark figure like the huge
claw of an enormous bird grappling over a long dried pool of blood.
There
is
an old cowboy hat felted with fuzz and fine gathered
agglutinated dust.
A pale watery green sea of Mason jars, and a pile of rubbish
onions that had sprouted sickly lianas curling over each other and
then withered to crumble are in a dark comer and near them
is
a
croakersack of peanuts, slashed open by some hunger and spilled out
like doubloons ,and now only shrivelled husks. And there
is
a crock,
cold to feel and marbelled like an aged agate.
