Legend / Bouvier Carnage

“Legend” is a column by Wayne Koestenbaum in which he suggests one or more possible captions for an image provided by the editors of Cabinet.

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1. The corpse on the lawn interrupts our garden party. We porch girls confess disgruntlement: peevishness, a Doppler effect…

Wittgensteinian thought-experiment: What spectacle transfixes the porch-girl gaze? What catastrophe makes us knit our brows in a consternation that bespeaks an era before the atom bomb?

After the birth of nuclear warfare, we expressed consternation more directly, without Bouvier mediation. The name Bouvier, a private symbol, means not yet married to the future president. Don’t accuse me of malfeasance or libel.

2. Dreamed I saw a new Sacha Baron Cohen movie about a Christian zealot; afterward I gave a lecture about Sacha’s mother, who was, I argued, a “magician.”

After orgasm we fallaciously believe that our groins have furthered the universe’s destruction: agèd swingers, Tiny Tim…

S’agir de, my favorite idiom, sounds like “agitation,” though its meaning is benign.

Dreamed I did drawings—on chalkboard?—of fallopian tubes, obsessively, to express (I used these very words) my “phantasmal body,” and to assist some internal psychosurgery I was undergoing, a shamanistic metamorphosis.

3. The corpse on the lawn might be a delirious dog, a rabies victim, or a friend (a Hart Crane look-alike) who jumped from our Narragansett porch and shattered his skull.

He killed himself because of self-pity and a wish for pneumonia.

Pneumonia never arrived; yearning for inflamed alveoli, he chose self-slaughter instead as the Isolde envelope in which to dwell.

4. That day we read no more.

That day I auditioned for The Bad Seed.

That day I bombed the studio where they were remaking The Sound of Music.

In a dream, someone told me, “It’s obvious that you’re spiritually evolved—I can tell from your frown.”

Is peevishness my avenue to trance?

We come from a family of children with hearts torn out and consumed at banquet.

Of the four available genders I choose the middle two.

Vince gave me the idea for a poem called “Kirk Douglas’s Ass.” I asked Vince to provide the first line. He offered: “It was wet.” I like his line, but I must write my own poem, however flawed.

O Rapunzel, O Sally Field, O Mélisande, the motor behind this sentence is neo-surrealist frottage, my bathing cap a Francesca da Rimini hand-me-down.