IV
Lights ablaze in the House of Europe, and the Party rolls from room to room: Poland, Romania, Germany, the black triangle of Czechoslovakia. You can walk Europe comfortably with a plastic shopping bag, Western Europe, that is, forests and country neatly manicured. A Sunday stroll sort of feeling. In Eastern Europe you can do the same thing though must lift your steps higher, over the rubble, that is.
Under the red copper basin of the sun, under the broken crockery of stars, Senegal, Nigeria, West Africa.
Meanwhile, George MacDonald flees the Evil Wood through the unreflecting mirror of 19th-century time, a prophet of the cinema. O cine-romance! Tony Curtis (sword glint of light off teeth) and Natalie Wood, beautiful in white tulle (lungs not yet waterlogged) in heady love. Follow their laughter with an open-topped Lagonda down the white-walled mountain roads of Mt. Aetna to the Port of Catania in a blood-boiling swerve to the red-chequered table, and the fishing boats in the blue dusk. Woody Allen steps from the screen to the dead crystal lakes of Sweden. A floppy disc of moon lies reflected there in an Excalibur beam of light. Clouds, too. Those ancient purities across my triptych window-view-of-the-sky package air as light as styrofoam. The lighthouse beam chills the sandhills and oceans gather up whale breath to cloud. Our civilisation bartered on the whales back. Love undrinkable as water. The silent film of fantasy which is night plays out through the ivory keys of stars.