Here’s where stunt Guinivere jumps on her white steed, circles around the bandstand several times before digging with her heels into the sides of the stallion’s flanks so they’ll both know she means business, her flag-length hair streaming over the horse’s tail, as does her muslin gown; you see, running outside to join Arthur’s men left her no time to dress;
it’s “here we go” and “to the rescue” no Joan she is, but a stand-in Guinivere in a movie scheduled to be released around Christmas when other films with names like “Harry” and “Frida” climb to the top of the box office charts; she knows the competition, rides past apple orchards of East Avalon, ah, a miracle band of nine seeds tucked inside a globe of red stripes to populate the earth with a wild species of fruit, but then, that’s another story filled
with meteor showers as donuts are with jelly; it’s here, in this city where Guinivere rides her horse throughout the orchards of East Avalon, past gangsta parties while traffic meters flash “expired” because no one’s around to take a message, not even a machine, the streets are post 9/11 and this night there’s an orange terrorist alert; she occupies negative space, being not Guinevere in the real Avalon, but in her own place and time, which is
a recreation of a thing people once thought they knew, something she knows she had nothing to do with, which is why she rides her horse like a man, because the touch of Lancelot’s lips on her outstretched hand doesn’t give her the he-be-jeebies, and because the King gazing into the mini-croissants of her eyes leaves her unbuttered; she knows that it is in Lyonesse where babies are burning and where trees are being cut down; that’s where she’s needed.