the chaise lounge

                                         AT THE POOL

In the middle of July it was heaven to find a chaise lounge.

At the swim club he was king. It provided a moniker, a way to assert his identity over all other pretenders.

He hurried along the planet, a ball of ponderous matter. Some wigs wrote cryptically ‘a bequest of a rich fraternity who owned secret dominion over it’. He remembered the Merovingians who had ruled France, then the whole world, during the dark ages. What had become of that rich fraternity?

So much wealth piled one blanket upon another until it reaches the sky. The king of the world sits on that top blanket to better rule all his subjects. Above the fray he sits not subject to death. Oh pile of bones, are you not betrayed? The angel of death finds his quarry no matter the power, wealth, beauty or glory of the one chosen.

At last the dragon found the gate to the swim club. He swaggered in as was his custom and passed by serenely unaware of a billing for ‘A Serious Disquisition on Meaning’, the introductory lecture in a multi-part sequence of fascinating poolside talks produced by the motherhood group at the pool and scheduled for that very night.

“Barmaid,” he cried, “A drink for one weary from the sun.”

She handed him a cold glass of liquid, the better to quell the fire in his belly.

The dragon nursed the drink until he found a chair suitable for one as august as he. Now poolside he relaxed and gaily sipped his glass of menthated water carefully to preserve the ice. Every time a piece of ice disappeared, he wondered, did not something else appear?

Curiously he eyed those gathered around the pool. The regular crowd of women lounged about the water sunning themselves. Then he noticed Hortense and Heloise in their beach chairs talking heatedly together.

He pricked his ears to better hear them, but the seawater in the pool lapping against the perimeter drowned out their words. He stood and poured his drink into the pool as a libation, as if the pool was a fold in the skirt of the mother god who manifested all for the good of all, if not for the good of the fish he was certain lived in its waters.

Then he went his way through the bosomy surface of the pool deck.

So caught up were they in the momentum of their argument neither woman noticed his approach, though the dragon overheard, “But I am pinker than you, Hortense!”

Hortense grew pinker while adamantly shaking her head, “No, Heloise, I am pinker.”

The dragon framed them, as if he was a painter and they his subjects, and judged them equally pink. “Ladies,” he interrupted with a pleasant smile.

“Ah,” said Heloise surprised at the cocksure lilt of the voice addressing them, “The dragon.”

Hortense asked, “Are you the monster the poolside crowd imagines sleeps at the bottom?”

The dragon denied this unflattering comparison found in folktales equating dragons to fiendish swarms of cruel fire breathing semi-aquatic reptiles. “There is no treasure at the bottom of this pool,” sadly shaking his head.

The Pink sisters pouted also in response to the gloom that had so visibly overtaken the dragon.

“‘It is my belief,” the dragon said brightening, “That in this pool a hero plies the waves in search of everlasting life.” He saw doubt in their eyes.

“Don’t you see, Heloise?” asked the dragon while pointing to the center of the pool.

She turned her fine pink head toward the water and saw a man with great strokes of a large spoon turning the water. He stirred deep into the earth, nay, to its center.

Heloise and Hortense watched as this man stirred briskly and without stop causing a whirlpool to arise out of the depths of the pool. “It’s spinning!” they shouted in alarm.

The dragon sidled to the edge, “Haven’t I met you before?”

The hero shook his head, “No. I am the cook and this is my soup.”

At the mention of food the members of the swim club queued up for a cup of the soup.

The dragon served while the hero stirred. He asked the hero why he was so sad.

The hero replied, “It is interesting you asked, for I imagined I masked my true heart. I tire of this beastly job of stirring incessantly until the Piscean age begins or ends, I can’t remember which.”

The Pink sisters stood at the edge of the pool admiring the swirling textures of the waters while sipping sea soup. In a moment of frivolity when the dire question as to who was the pinkest was forgotten the sisters murmured together confiding what each saw in the sea mist continually churned up by the whirlpool.

“I see,” said Heloise, “A brave man pacing the prow of his lion masted ship.”

“I see it too, Heloise. The sea around it boils red with blood from the sacrifice he has made to appease, he hopes, the angry god who has caused this tempest.”

“Is that not Iphigenia whose torso I see bobbing in the waves?” asked Heloise.

Hortense peered into the mist. “She was beautiful beyond compare.”

The members of the swim club stood at the edge of the pool also to look dreamily into the mist, but then tired of it and drifted gently back to their chaise lounges.

Only the Pink sisters and the dragon remained near the man stirring.

“I would have hoped this was a fish soup,” sighed the dragon, “though I have yet to see one fish.”

The sisters gazed into the waters looking for a fish.

“You will search in vain,” said the hero dryly, “For I am a fish at times and at other times a man like the warrior.”

The dragon thundered, “You are! Good heavens!” He reached into the pool, took hold of the man and heaved him into its depth head over heels. The pool continued stirring even without the spoon turning.

Heloise gasped, “I see him. He is not drowned though I can’t understand how a man could swim in such treacherous waters.”

“He is using the spoon as an oar,” said Hortense who could easily pierce the veils of the mist because of her pink heart.

The warrior strove furiously for control of his heaving craft. The waves struck against his hull threatening to engulf him in green oblivion. The desire welled up in his breast to abandon ship and thereby surrender all hope of visiting ever again the queen’s chambers.

He pounded his chest in a paroxysm of grief and then gripped the oar with steely hands. Under these conditions there was neither north or south, not east or west. At last he arrived at the center of the whirlpool where it was calm.

He took out a line and threw it into the water fishing. After a while he made a catch. There was stout tugging at the other end. He heaved his catch onto deck.

A mermaid, who spoke, “The queen is awaiting you, warrior. Won’t you follow?”

And so saying she dove into the calm waves lapping at the sides of his ship.

The line did fast disappear in the wake of the mermaid. The warrior took hold and followed in this way covering himself completely with the waters of life.

The pool was calm showing no signs of the warrior. The tempest had died down. However intense it had been, it flared for only seconds. A life is over sometimes before it begins.

                                         THE SPEECH

“The very air is snakes and all the speech heretofore spoken is a lie,” commented the warrior in the opening line of his remarks. “Wisps and odors, smatterings of unmentionable language, the foul odor emitted by sycophants and beggars out of the instrument of their mouths, did not Beethoven write heavenly music or Pound the echo of the Greek genius, yet these smells emanate from abodes darker and more dense than hell. Where does one look for the higher mind of man? In a jar of soap?”

“You!” the dragon yelled. “What is the point?” He furiously flung his flagon of ale against the lectern. “Such incessant madness!”

There was a tittering from the rear where Hortense and Heloise sat close together like two cats.

The warrior broke off from his rant. “I was just about to mention the arthritic bones of my mother, wifery, far off antecedents, and the general malaise inside my skull.”

“Is he afraid of mortality?” Hortense wondered aloud.

The dragon burned by fire the script. “Too much anguish! I diagnose sea sickness inherited as a toxin from when his ancestors fared the sea.”

The warrior smiled as he remembered darling mermaids and their lingerie.

Heloise charged, “I accuse the speaker with little knowledge of his mother.”

“Do you think sex replaced a plastic nipple?” the warrior mused.

The dragon removed from his doctor’s valise a mustache, eyeglasses and a worried eye from which to regard more acutely the warrior.

“This mother of yours,” the dragon queried, “Was she,” he floundered, “One might say,

subjugated by the wife object?”

The warrior handed sweetmeats to the giantess of motherhood he saw plainly in his imagination.

“Don’t worry,” soothed Heloise, “She is real.”

The warrior continued to muse, “What is the purpose of clothing? My wife had breasts and my mother didn’t.”

Hortense and Heloise merrily squirted him with milk from their pink tits.

The warrior licked his lips while the dragon meticulously recorded this device for later investigation. The dragon proposed, “How did you acquire this fascination for brassieres?”

“When a boy I wondered why my father bought hats,” the warrior answered.

“A hat symbolizes authority,” the dragon offered. “To whom do you bow your head?”

“My father was bald and I feared the same fate that he suffered and the father before him.”

The dragon arched his eyebrows bringing to mind a cartoon villain.

“Perhaps I will never understand woman,” the warrior despaired, mired in doubt. He felt a twinge of fright at the dragon’s clownish impersonations.

The room fell silent in expectation.

In a squeaky voice so as to mimic the female the dragon spoke, “The witch lured the girl before the first awakening of her sex into her hut. ‘Here, drink this,’ she kindly offered the girl. The little girl did not resist though a smaller voice inside forbade this gift. A roaring fire blazed in the ancient hearth. With a twinkle in her eye the witch told the girl, ‘This is where we throw the nasty boys.’ The girl dimly understood and felt an inchoate gladness. The witch approved. She patted the girl on her hair, ‘Lesbians us all,’ she intoned.”

The warrior asked, “Is the boy not almost a girl?”

“You haven’t the strength of imagination to successfully carry a marriage to fruition,” the dragon remarked.

“I haven’t thought of my ex-wife much in these writings and during the wifery management I didn’t attend to her with all my heart, soul and might. Proof of the pudding, a damnable sneaking penis slithered up the pointy steps to our bed and impregnated her with its seed.”

The Pink sisters checked the area surrounding their skirts.

“The mishmash of mother wife images I never quite got the hook,”the warrior continued in unbroken thought. “I mean the separation between the two houses.”

The dragon noted the confusing insights as they poured forth directly from the unconscious.

Heloise interrupted, “I suppose you can now acknowledge your nose did not respect your mother?”

The warrior blinked twice from the effort to see how long his nose went. “I was allergic as a child to the most innocent foodstuffs. I would characterize my mother’s larder as inadequate.”

The dragon proposed the food/caring equivalency.

The warrior generally agreed though with equivocations. He explained, “It begins with milk, becomes seed through magical transformation, and then begets babies and more milk. Yet the mother eludes exact classification as she becomes the wife and crone simultaneously.”

The Pink sisters sent the warrior a lavender scented note. “You are so silly,” it read. “We are not your mother and neither is your mother!”

At the reception following the disquisition the dragon embroiled himself in a terrible heated argument with another learned dragon pundit over the subject of snakes as walking phalli, that is, before the Fall, and as extension the reptile a.k.a the dragon.

Meanwhile in celebration the warrior and Pink sisters enjoyed themselves over wine and fish and chips.