Lancelot

skyey day. There is the blinded dazzled headachy sensation of coming out of a movie in the afternoon. The blackbirds are rising and settling, the wind has picked up but is fitful, blowing sycamore leaves back and forth across my tiny pigeon porch.
    I sit on my porch and watch the blackbirds rising and settling and the clouds hurrying toward the hurricane like latecomers to the kickoff.
    The blackbirds fall silent. The clouds straighten out and form a line. The sky becomes flat and yellow. The view from the porch is very simple. There are six parallel horizontal lines, the bottom rail of the iron fence, the top rail, the near edge of the River Road, the far edge, the top of the levee, the straight bottom line of the clouds. There are many short vertical lines, the iron spikes of the fence. There is a single oblique line, a gravel road leading from the River Road over the levee. Atop the levee are the triangles of the bonfires. The slanting boom of a ship intersects with the triangle of the bonfires, making trapezoids and smaller triangles.
    The hurricane machine cranks up. The live oaks blow inside out. It is necessary to use the hurricane machine even though a real hurricane is coming, not just because the real hurricane is not yet here, but because even if it were it wouldn’t be as suitable for film purposes as an artificial hurricane.
    SECOND FEATURE: MISS RAINES ROOM
    There are three red figures on the pink bed. Pieces of bodies, ribs, thighs, torsos, fly off one body and join another body. Hair blows in a magnetic wind. Mouths and eyes open on light. Light pubic triangles turn like mobiles, now narrowing, now widening, changing from equilateral triangles to isosceles triangles to lines of light. The posters of the bed make a frame.
    Lucy is lying lengthwise in the middle of the bed. She is recognizable by the flame-curl of hair under her ears, by her big breasts, and by the still slightly immature not wholly incurved line between calf and knee. Lucy is like a patient. Certain operations are being performed on her. The other two figures handle her as efficiently as nurses. Raine is slim and swift, moving so fast her body leaves ectoplasm behind. Dana stands naked and musing beside the bed, one hand browsing over his shoulder like an athlete in a locker room.
    The three lie together. Their bodies fuse but their arms move like a six-arm Shiva.
    Now they are doing something else. Dana kneels in a horizontal plane, takes Lucy’s head in both hands, and guides it toward him. Raine moves much more quickly. Her sleek head flies off and burrows into Lucy’s stomach.
    The figures make a rough swastikaed triangle:

    Elgin is right. The sound track is poor. No words are audible except near the end an unrecognizable voice which is neither clearly male or female seems to come from nowhere and everywhere—and only fragments at that: Oh Christ dear sweet Jesus oh oh —
    Another prayer?
    Crows begin to fly north against the wind. It is unusual to see crows in such numbers, flocking like blackbirds. Then they straggle out for a mile. Ellis Buell says crows are the smartest of all birds. This is probably true. At least I know for a fact they know the range of a shotgun (Fluker claims they can distinguish a twenty gauge from a twelve, then move just out of range). The only time I ever killed a crow was by pure luck and a .22 rifle. He was flying at least five hundred feet high. Without expectation I led him by three feet and shot him through the head. Surprised, he fell at my feet with a thump. A ruby drop of blood hung from his black bill.
    Still I had to watch the 5:30 news!
    Unhooking the videotape, I turned on the TV. The hurricane watch had been changed to a hurricane warning. Marie, two hundred miles due south, was headed due north. She filled the whole Gulf. It became necessary to make preparations.
    Everyone became serious and happy.
    Storekeepers seriously-happily boarded up their windows. Volunteers seriously-happily sandbagged the levee. Shoppers seriously-happily shopped for battery radios, batteries, flashlights, Coleman lamps, kerosene lamps, kerosene, candles, canned goods, powdered milk, dried apricots, Hershey bars, raisins.
    Happiest and most serious of all were owners of fallout shelters dug out during the A-bomb scare many years ago and never used. Happy families huddled underground around TV sets showing Marie spinning ever closer.
    Happy drinkers sat in friendly bars under the levee