from "Spy Story"
7.
He cultivates the vendor,
whose complicity is ‘without stay’,
establishing, in this way, a credo
for the eyes of the unannointed:
whatever the news, whenever -
he is the man for it, you’ll find him
wrestling with his broadsheet
on the corner of Immaterial Street,
like a galleon in full sail.
It’s this that distinguishes him from the mineral kingdom:
not the news, but the hole in the news.
He’s looking through a hole in the news
at the prissy bungalow, set back
in flowering laburnum and acacia.
He has seen the quarry twitch
at the window, or he thought it did. He reads:
“The area is on Spain’s northernmost”
as a little boy in an anorak skates through,
carrying a shopping-bag and a yoyo
“for its leather goods and its Dali museum.”
That was the news at such o’clock:
he recognised it by the hole it made.
But nothing moves in the bungalow: that news
is delayed.
8.
Is it about this time
the hero begins to take shape?
He resembles a man like you,
like you and me, brother; a woman
like you and me, sister. The affectionate
gameboy, the fraternal phagocyte:
he inhabits the rock and the satellite
communications system. His name is mud.
His name is Ariel and he has a gun
and a rope for shinning down. He inhabits
the spurious crater, consecrates the song
of the mad, the lame and the dumb,
the hero that we were speaking of
when we started. He keeps a civil tongue
in his head, and performs the cha cha
with a grace unusual in a man of his kidney;
a man of his wallet and his appetite.
That wallet, though, and that appetite
are in themselves so many
one could go on divining then forever.
Except by then it would be too late:
the danger would have passed or swallowed us
completely. Begin with the smell of leather.
The poussin in honey sauce, with almonds.
Page(s) 137-138
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