Pearl

PEARL / Anne Winters My homerigged transistor can't seem to fine-tune tonight. Even over Antenne-Eiffel, the whole cloud ceiling of Europe sifts through my cramped mansarde, thousands of hairline tongues like the feet of storks stirring. From the west, forecasts and tides in Celtic French, then cockney; janis joplin's lost or Zflsf, a blur, then suddenly thatshy, eroticwheeze. . . Through the mist the channel towers tilt landward, the seaboard shrinks and the voice of the dead woman soars across the sky. Whining, hungry, it wails for comfort beyond the notes, beyond language itself, as if that whole shapeless continent yawned perfume of washed-up whale, and then France is drawn across again, like a net full of corners and stars . . . my Paris Opera Faust broadcast. Only at intervals some unseen buoy keeps buoying those ululations that can't help mixing up Ufe and the weather, until the bulge of the earth is not too much between that voice and me. I'd rather the weather itself as it thickens, wiping aU wavelengths, the cry of a gull sinking near, the weather itself with its blur. 274 · The Missouri Review ...