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THE CAPTAIN ON WATCH
The Matterhorn with cows. Doughboys resting under Philippino mango trees. Natives shouldering bales aboard a sternwheeler in Manaos. The giant panda in its habitat. The beekeeper, veiled like the Mater Dolorosa, caught in a cloud of bees. Voyeur of frozen moments and impossible deep focus, Captain Midnight will spend hours staring into his antique stereopticon. Japanese marines, in their tight white caps, their rifles at rest between thumb and stiff fingers, stand two deep along the narrow Hiroshima street to honor the officers who died in Lu-shun-k'òu in the war with Russia. It is late afternoon, and their shadows stretch like bamboo matting spread under the wheels of the cortège of rickshaws in which ride the yellow robes and pointed hats of priests. The men who draw the rickshaws stride over the shadows, their bare legs knotted like the muscular water in the roaring Gorge of Gorner, near Zermatt. Tomorrow, perhaps tourists will hang on to the shuddering handrail of the boardwalk that follows the cliffs, glittering and slippery with spray from the Chasm of the Matter Visp, its water as white as the sky that writhes above them, or as white as the marble cloisters of Akbar's tomb in Agra, where turbaned men lean to peer amazed through the perforations of a stone screen much as Captain Midnight himself might stand on the fire-escape of his home in the Borough of Queens to gaze through sooty glass and lacy drapes at the young woman who lounges near the chiffonier with a half-emptied glass and a half-smoked cigarette. Under the lamplight she holds a limp novelette, one stockinged ankle crossing her knee, thereby revealing the broderie anglaise of her drawers. At this hour, in Hiroshima, a thousand marines are honoring their dead, and in the bed behind the reader I am lying, my hands folded on my chest. Never has the Captain been so smitten with whiteness. A nightshirt. A river of frozen hats in the solemn street. Above a ribbed stocking a small triangle of thigh. A column of sunlit dust above a city. He clutches the iron rail and clamps his eyes.
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