Wednesday, February the 23rd, 2005

back to: title, date or indexes

hear this 

Two Monks

Alfred Wesley Wishart's phrase “two monks took the blood of a duck”, which appears above in today's quotation, was appropriated by the poet Dennis Beerpint as the title of a lengthy, as-yet-unpublished work. It may be that he is still writing it, but our regular Beerpint-watcher, Dan Sprawl, is currently in hospital with a case of jangling cav and pag, so news is limited.

What we do know is that the prose-poem compares the image of monks draining blood from a duck with the concept of being “washed in the blood of the lamb”. Here is an extract:

Then Brother Fabrizius strangled another teal. “Hand me that retort, Brother Arpad, so that I may decant into it this teal's gore.” Brother Arpad reached for the retort and in so doing smashed an alembic. There was a sound of bells. The monks were called to compline. For each canonical hour they allocated a duck to be slaughtered for its blood. At compline, a teal. At matins, a merganser. At prime, a pintail. At tierce, a shoveler. At sext, a wigeon. At nones, a smew. And at vespers, a bufflehead. Out in the fields, sweet little lambs gambolled and frolicked. They would not frolic for long, for soon, in the monastery, it would be bathtime.