Odysseus was said to have awakened a Roe after 600 years but found it listless and grouchy and it begged to remain in bed just 200 more years. The Roe is reputed to sleep for 1000 years and then suddenly rise in flames, particularly if it was smoking when it dozed off. A mythological beast with the head of a lion and the body of a lion, though not the same lion. Killing a Frean is bad luck and in a poem by Sir Herbert Figg, a sailor shoots one and his boat suddenly founders in a storm causing the crew to seize the captain and jettison his false teeth in hopes of staying afloat. Freans are said to possess fine singing voices that drive sailors mad when they hear them, particularly on Cole Porter tunes. The Frean is a sea monster with the body of a crab and the head of a certified public accountant. When the Emperor awoke he was in a cold sweat and couldn't recall if he dreamed the dream or was now in a dream being dreamt by his bail bondsman. JOHN UPDIKE (JOHN UPDIKE'S new novel, A Month of Sundays (Knopf), will be published in January.) Lone, I took a bath with, your soap and had no towel not paper ones and dried in the air like the floor. Even the dirt seemed a gift, a continuity underlying the breaking of leases.Īnd the soap, green in veins like meltable marble, and curved like a bit of an ideal woman. Your lives were a great wind that has swept by. How often did you dance on the floor? The place was broom clean. The long hair in the sink was a clue to what? Were you boys or girls or what? I tried to scrub the white floor clean, discovered it impossible, and realized you had tried too. Thank you for leaving the bar of green soap, the roll of paper towels, the sponge mop, the bucket. The Nurk also appears in Babylonian mythology but here he is much more sarcastic and is always saying, "Ah, come off it." Some readers may be acquainted with a lesser known opera by Holstein called, 'Taffelspitz," in which a mute girl falls in love with a Nurk, kisses it, and they both fly around the room till the curtain falls. Zoroaster was said to have received a Nurk as a gift on his birthday although what he really needed was some grey slacks. The Nurk is a bird two inches long that has the power of speech but keeps referring to itself in the third person, such as, "He's a great little bird, isn't he?" Persian mythology holds that if a Nurk appears on the windowsill in the morning, a relative will either come into money or break both legs at a raffle. (The following is a sample of some of world literature's more imaginative creations that I am anthologizing in a four-volume set that Remainder and Sons plans to publish pending the outcome of the Norwegian shepherds' strike.) 1
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