Bagatelles and Bell’s Exit : Russell Persson

 

Mittersill

So as not to muck the sleep of his grandchildren he went to the front porch to use his cigar outside and stood there as such in night, the new quiet still unsure to settle, low dust in eddies few streetlamps are on again who put tents of light down on the. He listened to the night sounds, the bugs and whine the fucking called to in serial peeps and ticks. The ticks a period among the longer peeps drawn out as a sentence in fond repeat. Could we get by with just a sound and none other? His smoke of him goes up and off and thins into what could be silence. We thin us like this and to our kin we gather what we can and set it there for them to be with it to be with us as an ashen gray figure drawn on linen I could have it either way I could note and in so doing my notes go ahead of me as a new present. Each night is a new bafflement I strain to harbor any sense of it so the unorder of a far truck is the undernote to the tin pot hit up against an evening sink. This is him in night his smoke guylined to the weather he’s under.

From his house a voice who comes up into a loudness and heavy bootsteps come from the kitchen and come to him through the parlor and as the bootsteps near him a child on an upper floor begins a jag and nearer now the bootsteps come to the front door where he puts his cigar away from him and exhales to send out from him another evening cloud who thins and but for the chaotic winds even low as they are tonight fend his cloud into a spreaded banner frayed into a gone threadedness and in its dissolve an added note for what maps it ends up fallen into, mixed into the endless and next, his glowed tobacco held now in front of him as if his hand was in a greeting to the night and behind him the coming bootsteps and then it is an open door his own door swung in so that a latch undone is a pluck to enact the drawn tones of a dry hinge, an opening as a whip begins the high ringing who follows it and coming through the opened door with his boots and with his anxious eyes and with his olive drab and patches who recommend him and corral him and put his name upon himself and in his hand which is also held out in front of him as if in a greeting is the pistol, the man he comes outside in such a rush he comes into the ember of the cigar who swung around to see him and lit edges of it fall down and taking the man outside for a sudden threat he tightens his pistol hand and conducts the final few notes of the man who was outside now rubbed out in night the tether now cut for good who ran down from above.

 

Mittersill

An olive egg. Embryo he’s.

He’d gone into the entrapment as a cook a lark his sergeant enlisted him in. But any break in the formal he’d become unguided and so it was on the porch in night an ember toward him was an unknown and he saved himself against it.

Debriefed the cook was told he ended what was then the life of one composer the peers of whom were few and them well upheld.

The cook was gathered in then. His body smallened by the sadness he’d took. He wept in long stretches in Mittersill and wrapped hi sarms around himself in a try to push his littled egg back to the past when he hadn’t yet put his kill in. Back into the foetusy bag he wraps him up to go beyond a mourning he’s unaware of until it deepens again and then again again.

 

Mittersill

He’s finded out who he’s offed. He’s akin to what’s done. The cook in drab has shut the life of one man in night the man a man who put down a score in compose, a man whose music he brought to into for that his notes could in their own fucked way convince an ear of how true the notes were.

Drab cook and so tied up in his own ferals he comes to try to shut himself of what he’s done. Wrapped into himself is what only one body could come to his own possible, isn’t it?

An olive drab cook his name is Raymond Bell his sentence is his own handed down a self no more jacketed to so weather what’s been doled he’s decided what he’s done is as beyond the criminal as a man could do at all and so reft he’ll keep on without hinge and without feck he’s cotted in the bunks ad hocced inside the saved end of a monastery he’s cotted there and to the limestone walls he’s any man but himself up to the walls he’s in compare a deather-man who deals in end days who rides the shoulders of well men into the fields of war and aliates his death cards to whomever, wind is what could end up spreading them and Bell he’s I and I do come to ride up on the shoulders of well men and I do come to cross out the coming days you believed you had and sack them into the neatness I’ve beheld and to the slate I’ve cut to clean it come and look at how I’ve in ease I’ve been the he who graced away your true upcoming I’ve been the one to cause an inhale when our opposite was in ask and borrowed from an ancient I could recite your ode but instead our lifted arms to you recite another knotted tome so gather and shamble in to this and then we’ve been turned out to listen and as such we’ll follow the tracks of our elders and envision what they might have beheld as a coal stove lit by these eyes alone could encause what ends are nearest and shamble in to this to lay quiet and subdue your all and allow just the sounds of wind and mussed foliage to back what I tell you of the days unlived you were verged on and those who would have followed you into the noted bog you made for them and your eldest how she stood out and brought down to her own palm the light of one star and spread that without an aim to be repaid or owed what all but in kind she gave to those who most could need it and they took the burned light and scarred wnet all into the upward and of thie days who rain could stay you inside and there with the heaven sands you’d hear the splitting of the air before the deepness who followed and as a seer is taken over by the body who speaks through him so you would commit this sound to sheets the paper staffed and soon endotted with your ear’s séance upon it I am the remover of those days and I am the one who blots out for good what will not be.

And sitted he’ll be carted soon to some room away from them. He’ll lean himself in rocking and to mutter hwo he’s an ebon agent of all men and how his initial opus is for the ages.

 

Sea

Shipped home for his fondness there was only room in the ship’s brig for him and so he locked up was under way his belted coat who kept his arms abuckle. There was no food this cook would allow in him and in his best dwindle when it seemed there could be no end to the crossing of the sea and there was no weather or sky to split up the days into the bits but only when the brig officer turned out his desk lamp in night was it able to lay guesses as to when it was this dwindle of his arm and of what sense was still left of him when a shift went across him inside and he could tell the legs of this ship were in cold dangle and each leg became ice and broke off below and left him to not know what aim was had at all but to drift and to try to picture for himself what no land in sight would look as.

 

Carolina

Mount Olive

He’s gotten back to his rooms. This is where his wife is is and his young son. His gaze does not lift up above the shoulders of them. His coming home is gathered small, some others he’d known before he left to go to war. When they leave and he is now home with his child son and with his wife he finds himself among the same chairs and side tables and the same smell and the rug who holds on to a foot print like beach sand. The quiet and the arms of his young wife and the eyes of his son he builded into the safe bay he’d imagined could be the road out of where he’d kept on.

Outside a cicada went through his gradual incline to an almost electric hum and others joined him in this mad bug lunacy. It was a lunacy he’d known all along and home again it gret him in the first night and kept him awake against the rest he needed and against the long his young wife held for him. But his awayness was steady and did not ebb although he was now home but his deathing over there was a coat he could not put off. The cicada hums went on into the dusk in a way he’d known when he was young a way to tell how hot and wet it was outside and how slow a body should become inside the day to not become bothered by the day and it is a white noise a southern ear would tune into and along with the sound of them it is the summers who come back to mind and the good hours before night when a pond was swum or when a road into the town was thumbed in and then in summer it was the evening hours when a string who held a light dress on a shoulder was sided away and the untanned eyed you as a line who was off limits but until now and still a man shuttled back to his home in Carolina the loose events he’s done untold as yet for it is to him a homecoming unfinished in its entrance and unfinished in its tell of why he’s back from where he occupied but until then he makes of the cicadas and falls into this bed alone among his wife and they swim there as several ponds enflood about them.

The morning is a time when it is fit to renew and to cast a self into the coming open and to shed the what before but instead the open for all its emptiness is terrible for what it needs and he can not amount to another’s needs no matter the setting or the when. His awayness. Carried like a loaded sledge is pulled across the rotted floors of wood land. His awayness as a gift offered back to the giver.

The zinnias have come up. Your mother has been over to help with them. Her green fingers I swear.

His answer is an abstract. A sketch who plies ended trade into an exchange of a dwarf utter and truncate notes.

——————

Before it’s known to him he’s assembled a routine and his body walks in step to the guide stones laid out there for him to follow. In days he tinkers in a shop held to for just a pursuit and his young son comes with him some days to watch a man tinker on small engines and motors. His son watches close and the quiet class he’s in is what does hold fast into the days beyond these.

Raymond Bell sits himself in dusk. His ritual continuing. He puts his whiskey in him. And sits outside among an air he’s on about. Coming around him an air in night who sheds a day and a field smell of how it’s fed and kept alive is abundant and near him the zinnias live in open call to the hues God bestowed on them we all come hued by an eyed God who sets us out there among the leopards and ants and it’s for us to decide who we could suck to get by for an early on. The whiskey in him bends his eye slanting enough to go unguided across his hand and back.

 

Massig

He went in thick and without wait. A habit picked up over there wherein wine sat in with dinner and whiskey was brought out to follow. His regret is endless and in his cups it becomes a tangle of more to it added. The fiction of it gathers in him and he hauls it with him and forth when an ear would have it.

His days are doldrums strung together along a valley floor. In night his drink puts a clearing out for him to roam in and then in deeper still he’s fallen along with his drink into the room where all his voices are kept and it’s there he’s found in night to mix with them and fend and to rebut again what they’ve posed in endless chorus about the ruin he’s done and those acts he can’t undo to fend on all points from them all assembled to post about him all cases against. It is pinned on him he’s host to the voices pinned and left there for the others. An added drink and he’s on point again to ward them and not until the drink’s enough to end his up it’s then he’ll camp where God has chosen for him to rest and it could be outside or it could be on a tile floor in a sideways sitting pose his wife’ll find him in tomorrow.

——————

Waked he spends an off day in research. The Second Viennese School. Tonal scales. Brief bagatelles who disarm an ear.

He copies out the notes who mean to him few sounds but he’s sure to fill in the black ovals and leave the open ones open.

---

With is son in dusk they sit on the back steps of home and crickets. With two fingers he shows his son the movements of the legs of a cricket and the sound who brings itself from this and even so it seems unlikely.

 

Leicht bewegt

Tip teetering up his stoop it comes they come with it wrapped and it has a man on every corner and in time they dip down and the whole body of it sways tilting backward and they correct this and steady what they bring into the house and go slowly through the middle of the front door who’s held open with a boot this shuffle of them slow and meaty like a men’s team trying quiet for a spell and almost winning at it but for the grunts they do because a body does what it has always done and so the bag of tricks is endless in its own making so the men come up with gutters and steam engine exhales each a corner man who lobbies his angle to the men to see if it’ll carry so they shuffle loudly to the hall where on the walls a picture of a new recruit hangs who then was ready to do battle with a drawn foe and set to bring his violence into the day he sees himself then as new to war and what a tyke he was to the actual script who was in store for him all written in the dark gothic hand of the old world arranger his ignorance a blessing then and coming through the hall now the men decline rest but shuffle on up to the gates of where they intend and it’s shrunken down the width in which they get to pass with this and the shrunken door is eyed for wideness so the men on every corner shift themselves to cause a better thinness among them and they sidle through into the guest room with the school piano who needs to be held in place and sat up next to and tuned by a kind of listener who would know the way to tune such crudities as this one got for no money and the men lended by a church who looks down upon vets with a kindness and they install as far as they know how to do this school piano in a room who wants some room already the leveling of which is beyond them all and so it sits with a wooden shim below the southeast leg and stares him down as much as a thing has done before.

 

Ziemlich fliessend

The woman who lends books she also vends how to play these keys and signed up he ends days with her in his school piano room.

She keeps me from solely having at the wine alone. That touch is just enough to convince me I’ve been delegating.

They study scales and how a hand rises to the keys and posture. The dusk it reddens them and he studies and is quick to get down the new lesson and head into the next.

She leaves and he continues but it’s now he brings out his transcriptions and puts himself to note by the next buckwheat note cause in his room the versions he’s copied over. In night he tops himself off with the whiskey he’s kept home and as if reading the sounds of a language unknown to him he taps what he sees and it could not be so. There must be more time spent in learning it seems. There must be some shift he’s not seeing on how to bring these written notes into a room as they were intended.

He presents his transcriptions to his tutor and she causes them. They are in the air inside the school piano room and with them disbelief. She causes them again to be sure.

None of us has, she says.

Less than a minute some notes who tend to something other than a tune it’s up to wonder what at all he’s up to if the transcriptions are aligned and true.

You must have had them wrong.

 

Sehr langsam

He’s sure that he’s sure of his notes. Alone he causes them into the room and they have an awkward dance a halting rise and then sudden plucks to tell us what? It is a knocking to come in or is it a bird in dusk or just a finger in the passing of an idle when? He causes them again in their written briefnesses. He touches them into the school piano room and in there the notes place themselves around him in a shifting fug they all roam and fidget and can not wear his trust and so they feint and ebb and at once against the roof and on the floor and once upon him to best govern his hands and weigh his versions.

He’s fled into the hallway it is dark and in the kitchen his wife has left on for him a lamp he needs and his son is sleeping and his wife is. So as not to disturb them he puts no ice in his glass but instead a straight whiskey and small water and to keep his trips few he doubles and more his cup and swigs there in the kitchen a deep pull so as not to disturb them. He goes back into his room and sits again with his copied notes.

They are there still but now hiding but now waiting for him to enact them back to where they can dance and fuck him around. He plays on and touches them back to.

He pulls deep on his whiskey and an exhaust comes over him but there is no one to spell him. He plays on into the morning these odds he’s sure of and he’s sure he has them down.

But even the ending notes don’t have the body of an ending. It is the middle of a chat who gets cut off. An open door who blows a small wind through. Like an unfinish. And in this his body chills to know what has been unfinished and what his role about that is.

He pulls deep on his whiskey and there is only the keys who remain and look back to him and they do this in the dawn. There is no way to know his path out of that room and to the low chair he sleeps in. The lamp he no longer needs. The good dreams who could have a say in his forgiveness he’s too lit to read well and they go lost to him.

 

Auberst langsam

I shot him in a moment when his ember turned and met me swung up to me in its ember color in the night an ember who it seemed was up against me in a violent who would have done me in we could have been surrounded and the son in law Mattel had posted at the doors a thug each who would handle us if it all went sour and for Mattel it did go that way and on my guard and through his house with my warlong nerves who all went frayed from what a man endures in it and with my sidearm rady and with my order to return with more men to escort Mattel to the brig we had set up in what was a town bank I came to the door and drew it in to go outside and thugs were of a possible then and I stirred of it so when the dark coat swung around and brought an ember round and to me it was unknown to me it was as far beyond me as it could have been that he stood there in night to seek quiet and to enter into that room who held for him those deep tricks and where he kept those notes who went ahead of him and led him to that plucking and to the spaces in between the notes who grew into sounds themselves for all the space they builded and to the notes who felt as if they tumbled down the steps and fell out on the path to rise again stumbled off without notice or word to where it was they set off to and just before they went away into the darkness you could tell they faltered in a slant in odd routes so they led him in the room he went who held silence only altered by his own device his own adding to the dance he must have held inside him to the room who sketched him his country in which the entire of it was of his sole direction it was here he must have brought himself to in night when the sounds of the city went away to remain him with the rest of it in a study of how the rest of it fit together and the divine could assemble it but instead he swept it all up for his self to build and men go to the dirt without a country to them and without a dance at all and swung around to me was just an ember who came around his dark coat and embered there and still as if I could one day unsee this I still and tear this out please tear it out from me the wire glasses and his eyes.

 

Fliessend

Mountain Olive. Wayne County. Maplewood. Valley, Crest, and Kornegay.

Pete’s Spa. Before he shuts it down. A pocket jar to walk with.

Life a borrowed better list.

Center and Main. To look but it’s then forever crickets and the sound they rub to me. Rexall’s.

September fifteen. Do celebrate me and what I’ve done. The jar is up and we Prost! Let’s off.

East Main, East John. The flatness of us. Why can’t these train tracks just sit and mean the tracks they are? I won’t fall into that. They go on off from here.

Maplewood in night is not much. Again just what they are, marble set on end and a name cut into the sides. Dates and a dash. The hollow of that dash there, all what goes between the left date and the next.

So let’s dwell on what. Some jar it was who gave it up so early. Riddance. As an altar to you, too dark to see who you it is.

Bees in bonnets. Bustle. A quick walk back into town. Skirting the son and wife. May darkness become what it must and do it soon. What pub’ll set me up tonight. I’ll pledge to the town I won’t bring it up.

Good Mike. Whiskey and an ale back. I keep it to myself.

And what’ll become of what I wander to. She doesn’t know about the ones I’ve hidden in the arbor. Sit back to me there to mend about the way I get back to my piano and cause into this night what I’m sure of.