The Gorko Gazette

At the Centro Administrativo del Poder Ejecutivo y Judicial General Porfirio Díaz, Oaxaca City, 1925

Felipe:
The fields roll on beneath our wheels like bumpy
Potato faces, brushed by Nature’s poppy fingers.

The sweet rustic fountain’s gurgle is our Freedom,
Liberty but sheep on a lilac hillock far from the Capital.

Gulliver:
You, Tityrus, swerve low between the green burr oaks
Splash through the rivulet, skid to a stop by that brake!

Country girl with a dirty face in a yellow country smock
Why fleest thou to the city when the city don’t love thee?

Country girl:
Away vile cowstuds, I have no need to cut ye
These fair lips not for kissing, bonny hips none for the knotting.

Felipe & Gulliver (in chorus):
Flee not the dale, glade, and summery sweet glens, girl
Your fiance cowherd, porridge, nor rough hempen jumpers!

Country girl:
My simple heart cries out for the lights of the city
With hay still in my hair I make my fond way there forever.

Gulliver:
The nightingale beckons you from its perch in the sycamore
The lark in the honeydew, melons and raspberries, thbbbtt.

Felipe:
Have you taken a gander at my terraplane, child Meliflua?
Country roads, sweet breeze, birds and bees on its windscreen.

Country girl:
My bud calls for me across the blowing fields of barley
The beat of my heart is as of wild flowers to a choo-choo train.

Felipe & Gulliver (in chorus):
Fear not the dell, deep cooling shadow of the wood
Or fish cradled in an apron, sour jam, nor strangers’ intentions!

Country girl:
Adieu, adieu my love, so long to the fields of my heart,
Fair strangers, forsooth, to sleep, to die, to rest, to quail!

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Commentary by Tark Mackintosh

‘At the Centro Administrativo del Poder Ejecutivo y Judicial General Porfirio Díaz, Oaxaca City, 1925’ The lyric poetry of Bradley Englishman and his cadre of post-war British poets, which called themselves Bucolics after the creamy pastorals of the Roman poet Virgil, has been much imitated, and oft reviled. Bradley and friends produced a highly stylized corpus of work that looked back to the Romantics and their Greco-Roman forbears for inspiration, glorifying nature (more often Nature) and the simplicity of peasant life. GSG contributed several important poems to the Bucolics’ rag Tu Tityre, including ‘Unicorns in the Mist’, ‘Swoop, Swan, Away’, and ‘At the Centro Administrativo del Poder Ejecutivo y Judicial General Porfirio Díaz, Oaxaca City, 1925’ (cf. Stevens’ Bucolic Lapse: Poetic Pitfalls of a Victorian Venture, 1995, 238 ff.).

‘At the Centro Administrativo…’ The Oaxaca City public prosecutor’s office where GSG and Felipe Starks were arraigned on more than fifteen counts of grand larceny, armed robbery, coercion of minors, forced entry, and slapping of a pregnant woman (rhubarbar, in the administrative parlance of the day).

our wheels The desperados, on the lam in a stolen jalopy, traverse the bucolic countryside of rural Oaxaca.

bumpy With the entire federal police force yipping at their heels, and driving upon unpaved roads, both literally and figuratively the opposite of smooth.

fountain…Freedom You can keep your electric lights, nice sit-down meals, and hot water for shaving. The countryside provides us everything we need.

Liberty The boys had made their jailbreak from the Centro Administrativo in Oaxaca City with the help of a fistful of silver pesos, three knotted bedsheets, and the discreet whiplash of “the dark leaf”, Maria de la Encarnación, behind the bony rump of a hottrotting getaway burro.

far from the Capital Dropping from a height of more than three floors from the end of the improvised rope into the hay, beneath which they quickly concealed their striped figures, both jailbirds suffered minor contusions, and the “Cincinnati man” (Felipe) a sprained ankle that would prove costly in the Indiana caper several weeks later.

Tityrus Virgil himself, poet-prince of the bucolic. Gulliver instructs Felipe to pull up next to a strolling country lass so that he can call out to her, at the same time complimenting the driver on his prowess with the written word, possibly stroking his muscular forearm with one index finger.

rivulet A crick, or a creek.

skid to a stop There is an urgency in these lines that reveals the importance of the meeting with the girl. Felipe Starks spins the car across a cow pasture, splashing nilly-willy through a local watering hole, and pulls up by the hitchhiker in a cloud of Oaxacan dust.

dirty face The country girl had left home in such a hurry that she did not even have time to wash the pancakes and porridge from her quivering lips.

country smock British Bucolic term for homespun housedress, above which the bruises on the country girl’s breast and neck have already begun to show. Rustic living is not all daffodils and gently grazing quadripeds.

fleest…city The cowboys take in the situation with a single look: this gal is running away from home, intending to support herself by any work she can find in the sinful metropolis. What work she considers herself capable of finding is left intentionally unspoken.

cut ye The country girl brandishes a blade and backs away from the stolen jalopy, fearing these cowstuds mean her harm.

lips…hips The confidence in the rhyme, coupled with the adjectives fair and bonny (light-skinned and bouncin’) reinforce the hitchhiker’s knife-fighting posture. The weapon is in a sense given a voice.

(in chorus) The choral response provides ironic direction to an audience of non-readers, many of whom must not have deduced the girl’s fiance, porridge, or rough jumper from the preceding lines. And yet this chorus is itself an actor in the play.

vale…glade…glens All synonyms for idyllic forest slope.

cowherd Constrasted with cowstuds earlier, a play on coward. In their naïve state of perfect natural beauty, possibly dressed only in garlands and guns, the fugitive youths cannot conceive of a fiance less perfect than themselves. Yet despite the bruises on the country girl’s neck, the result of rank selfishness and cowardice on the part of the craven boyfriend, the term they have chosen is gentle, hardly condemning. They still express hope and confidence in the country life.

heart cries out Hearts do figurative crying in lines underlined in the pocket Bible found on the body identified as GSG’s own near the scene of his purported immolation and death: Psalms 107, Isaiah 34:3, Matthew 28:12, Henry 8:10, et passim.

hay The tussle that resulted in the bruising must have occurred in a barn or hayloft, or haystack, or in a place where the pillows and mattresses are stuffed with straw. In a moment of blind passion, had the fiance coward cowherd attempted to force himself upon the unwilling country virgin, and been rebuffed at the point of a knife?

forever The country girl is done with the fiance. No amount of chocolates in boxes or bouquets of roses with little hand-written messages on heart-shaped cards shall ever win back her weeping heart.

nightingale…lark The very birds of the field are calling out to the country girl to stay. They are taking the side of the fiance cowherd.

thbbbtt Onomatopoeia: the sound of a raspberry.

gander A male goose. The country girl is carrying her freshly plucked lunch by its neck in her bonny belt, and Felipe invites her to rub it against his brightly waxed roadster.

my terraplane Felipe Starks, ever the philanderer, offers the country girl an alternative: to escape her rustic life of pain and porridge, driving the highways of life with the Getaway Kids.

child Meliflua Honey-dripping flower child.

My bud The fiance cowherd has located his bouncy belle, and hustles across an adjacent field to reclaim her, cows lowing behind him in forgotten, broken phalanx.

heart…train The country girl knows not whither to turn. Her traitorous heart cries out for the fiance, who beckons to her from across the brake, OR she could run and catch the train that has appeared chuffing across the landscape towards the city, and fall upon its tracks in an act of self-sacrifice. Trains in the works of the British Bucolics are symbols of departure and measure of infinite unknown space. The country girl contemplates a voyage into undiscovered country.

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