These are the griffins. Fabricated from a wishlist of beauty …
helium breasted, negress haunched
barbie-legged, waxy-crotched—
labial notch thonged from cunt to hip—
a perfect pelvic V for all things Virtuous.
Twist-tie waists, collagenic lips / butterfly lashes, Nefertiti necks. O how we worship you. Sphynxes of a monstrous scientific beauty, V for victory over earthborn nature. Women with wings of wax, scales of gold. Winged heralds of our mute self-denunciation—de nuestro auto-particular—heretics all, the we of all flesh and superfluity….
And in the smoking mirror blearily we see—see? how they are adored / adored by the Eye unrestored. See them bask in the love of god, so near us yet so far above, all aglow in its bluish love. Godlove of a billion blue suns that ring the great globe itself, and burn.
Burn like salt.
Who broke the meaning machine—and left us this? this thing this box—decoder / decanter of our obsidian wine. That in its effervescent thrall, up to the altar we all go—stunned and quiescent, mumbling textos de neutralización … the sacrificial victim’s numbing psalmody that strokes our pink gut / plucks out our hearts’ melodies while our corpses still live. TV Azteca, Channel 13.
Electronic pillory, virtual confessional that adores the Image profanes the Verb. Get a bigger screen mute the sound!—the better to adore the blue van of vatic visions scrolling down and deeper down through mirror smoke. Channel of home sacrifice, glowing hearth of a heartsick hopelessness. Show host that melts like candyfloss on our tongues.
I’ve followed my cedar Virgil down to here I’ve come all this way … haven’t I? So write it, write it calm, slow it down. Try to get this right. This once, this time. For explorers of a future time.
This is not just the death of fire and air. Or water and earth. They call it only entertainment, I call it the death of the fifth element. Not ennui, not absurdity but accidie—Inquisitorial relaxation’s soulslack laxity. Call it indifference, inertial victim of the sun.
This is the death of the soul.
Name this!—the dragon Apophis—enemy of both storm and sun. Indifference, Enemy of Both Sides.
FEED US—life love hate anything not this
Together everywhere—even here in this pass we bend before the aura/cling of vastly meaningless event. Oracling of unrequited Godlove rendered down to purest semblance. Welcome to the god channel, vision on a global scale that wakes our hunger for communion.
Once this was the divine ground of archetypal myth … this neuron-bombed lot strewn now with spent Cokes and surrendered Nikes—our cathexis confected on Madison Avenue by bluebloods steeped in Classics and Humanities. This … vacant scatter of voided universals on the scale of race, the shared needles of a virtual experience—
Rapturous.
And over this, our everlasting Conquest’s littered battleground of broken glyphs—cross and eagle, serpent and thorn—transcendent at last, one blue banner waves its parabolic ascendency above the harrowed field….
And higher still a starry sky of burnt out satellites. Beckoning.
Six billion frail hummingbirds hover round an electron bath … sugary solution too thin too dissolute to nourish us—endless cycling of little wings—cycling recycling one last lovesong—we the lovestarved, consuming ceaselessly … even the BlueHummingbird of the South starves now—for love, for an end.
And hapless, calmed, in this faint blue grasp we are danced to death.
Bear witness. This snowy night, before this blue altar, we are the same. Pressed close for warmth … weary shoulders, chilly knees. Here there are no differences. We are together, one, all at last in this…. Tonight you are all beautiful to me.
Women broken bodied, living eyes /
tanglehair waif, pinkgut pig …
cedar man.
Howl of dogs outside, tame to wild.
Scribbler, you are not here to verify. You are here to kneel, where prayer was once valid. Lay your stub of pencil down. Close the notebook, the last of books.
SUBLIMINAL SNOW
[21 Dec. 1994]
LAUGH AND STUMBLE of children’s voices between the heaves of dream.
Day, morning it must be, but such a light!—swirl of orange and lavender—here in this mountain pass we are woken into cloud. Through the flap of canvas I see the other tents, their snowbent brows / frowning down the dawn. Softest of snowdrifts.
Step thigh-deep into morning!—children running laughing waist-high in this lambent cloud torched by the sun’s rising / screened yet in the sway and swirl and bloom—prismed, dry and crystalline—of an icepetal mist. The littlest imps charge up to their chests—launched and caught—fall back cradled, upright still, backed and banked in drifts.
After all you have offered me, let me show your children this … all black agleam their widening eyes watch me flap and flail out robes and angel wings, then they see they understand and we are all a choir a host—an angelus tolling out our backstroked script in angel dust.
Now all around us as we sit up / barks then panicked bleat of hounded goats—neck-deep slow-motion chase—slow lunge to ford the flood of white, their prow-throats ploughing out a mole-berm maze, their wake dawnflanked in a crumble of pink.
Another moment of grace, stay of peace.
Vats bubble over low fires gouting char and steam as the tentcity denizens pause to watch their angels fall.
What magic is this?—northwitch craft—
this tropical snow
this sunrise without sun
these falls of weightlessness …
Sunshred lasts of cloud … rainbow veils slowrent from the pass up towards the still-shroud tops. Slowfade of roseate mist burled and dissipate, up to a white-shouldered day…. Glow to gleam to slow flare of light—blinding brilliant the world in snow renewed!—a beyond all etched in clarity.
I stand blinking stunned in this air … then feel the river of cedar friendbreath / his tobacco baritone warm my ear.
Good morning, hijita. You see La Malinche now over Puebla City of Angels as though we were standing on her slopes? Sixty kilometres, easily! And that cone farther to the east? You see the detail, the folds, ravines, the soot like the velvet on a boy’s lip, yes? You are thinking it does not seem so far. This is el pico de Orizaba almost at the Gulf of México though we are standing in the centre of our nation. You understand, but maybe even better through numbers this is at least 180 kilometres away … yet as if just beyond the stretch here of my hand. The span of an old man’s arm, a hundred and twenty of your miles.
Look long, look carefully. Though you are young we may never—neither of us—have eyes like this again.
Feel the sun hot off the snow, melting everywhere now at a furious pace, can’t tear my eyes away, gorged on scans of distance, spans of light….
Up here we have seen this before, this transparency of the air returned to us. I myself once or twice, but the old ones maybe half a dozen times. I wonder if it is not more beautiful than even when Cortés looked on it. Now that we are so close to losing it altogether.
Maybe this beauty of the world—so much, all the time, would be too much for us, what do you think?
Maybe we would all go blind with it. Maybe we already have, cedar man. Tell all the truth but tell it slant….
Yes daughter—todos acegados, you may be right about the blindness. Come, there is a spot not far from here where we can see the capital, as Cortés first did.
Mexico City 30 k. away through this air’s transparency as sharp and clear as a quarry’s steamshovelled floor. Street grids under snow like a gallet strand—like the rubble it will be again—raked sandbox of summer dun under a freak of winter, out of season, out of time and tune.
Soft featherfall now, of ash across the newfallen snow.
Here are my eyes of wonder restored to me! Here is the beauty of a world that is lost. The eye restored to beauty is not just awake to loss but accepts … finds loss itself heartbr
eaking in its beauty. Welcome it, this heartbreak!—and choose, let’s all choose to make the last loss beautiful, together. A little dispensation, oh yes call it a finesse.
See it—see it with the Eye Restored! Love loss, love its beauty—its contingency.
Without the slightest hope of a return.
Look, child, there at last is WhiteLady, after so many days! Me I have always thought her more beautiful than Popo lying there asleep—see her hip, her breast, her knees? We know all great mountains as gods but everyone comes here for El Popo. She is not quite as high but the WhiteLady is also more than 5,000 metres. High enough for anyone, or should be. But you know?—I never climbed her either, not even as a boy. So many little peaks up there you can’t be sure when you are on top … I should not be saying all this, next you will be climbing her.
No? but you surprise me now—why not?
Because I can see her from here. With you, Raúl.
I am glad, little daughter, because those heights are not for us. We cannot breathe up there. You are right we can see enough of their beauty from here—as much as we can bear, and maybe a little more. Down here there is life for us, yes, and too much work—but friends and loved ones, ¿sí o no?
Dear sweet friend with the laughing eyes dancing hands. I never had a friend like you, how do I repay all this tenderness? I’ll always remember, you. To my last breath’s faltering draw.
I’m ready to go down.
This makes me happy to hear—
Take me down, Raúl … you are a very handsome man very very irresistible.
Yes I know and you, child, are very delirious. I will take you a dondequiera—but maybe first you will let me take you to a doctor for that infection in your hand. You can leave for the capital first thing in the morning if you like. I will talk to the caretakers at Sor Juana’s hacienda and you can stay with them. No—I would ask you to stay with me where I rent a room but with my wife at our home in Chimalhuacán it would not be proper, you understand.
It hurts you that I say this. No it is not because of what you just said. Please we are friends you must not be ashamed you have a fever. Do not be hurt it is only that you are too beautiful for the neighbours not to wonder. No—Dios! I see now I have hurt you more with a stupidity—in Mexico beautiful is not a dirty word I do not mean it as an insult now you must try to understand me. Please do not look at me with those big green eyes. To us beauty is a gift. Part of it is very temporary and many people have this. The other part, a few—you, will have always.
Understand that this is for my wife’s honour not mine. It is not your fault there were indiscretions in the past. A very long time ago. She is well respected here. With many friends. There is a sadness in her life I can do nothing for … except not increase it. And it would hurt our friends and hers to have to wonder about me again. Even for a minute.
Tell me you understand. The caretakers at the hacienda of Sor Juana are good people. They have a daughter who is your age. Quiet people, please stay the night with them. You can leave once you have seen the doctor who is also a good man.
Please I did not mean to hurt you.
I’ve been climbing the wrong mountain all the time. Am always. Why can’t I get it right? Cortesian error mine the same mistake as the stout stoat Cortés—sunblind on gold and transcendence—blind to the enchantment of the fallen world, to the Conquest as clash of geometries—cavalries of the ascending line that crush the helix’s infantry.
But the sublime and the transcendent were never the same. This is our old mistake. Sublime—sub/liminus—under the threshold. Threshhold we can imagine but never live beyond. Not up there in that breathlessness. Down here, find the sacred down here—in the high passes yes, but under the threshold of impasse.
So take communion—with the earth as host! Tongue with firecleft tongues the wafer’d / earth. Trace the faultless fall of chariots, to ground zero, down.
Make this the ceremony of immanence! Eat god—not the other way round—our vice is in the versa—in eating the godseed we make the cycle sacred, lend the daysun flight / through our return to earth each night. Here are my eyes of wonder. It was here all along—this wide world under the night sun now, so bright so various so new.
This was the greatest magic of Isis—the life that was in her mouth, the magic that returns god to the cycle of the Nile.
So make ready the night sun’s ceremony. Prepare the sublime rites of the fall.
On this sorrow’s morrow of a busride back to the capital, in this optic of antibiotic calm, Raúl there is something I didn’t say to you I’m sorry. Yes cedar man with the laughing eyes dancing hands you hurt my heart—nada grave nada nuevo without ever wanting to. But you also saved my life … just long enough to show my eyes such miracles.
And now it’s too late to tell you….
You never asked my name, Raúl.
My name is Beulah.
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ
chorus
Seraphim, come,
come see a marvel:
that a burial has become
the work of Angels;
and here is the wonder—
that the one they inter
is one of their own!
verses
That ancient Tribunal
of the Supreme Legislator
on stone tablets handed down
a hard law to hardened sinners,
only later exchanging stony frowns
for soft compassion:
proving Time’s passage
moves even mountains.
Eminent is the sepulchre
glorious the shrine
of the incorruptible cadaver,
her mortal remains containing yet
a breath of hope, even as a vessel
retains the savour
of a liquor
it once held.
Just so does a holy spirit
leave its imprint
upon the lovely Virgin’s
martyred corpse;
while the blades that on other forms
inflict dark horrors,
on hers project
only glimmerings and reflections.
His merest fingertip the burin,
God composed
Ten Commandments
on slabs of stone;
but with a People sunk in vice
(and Moses so zealous they be chastened)
being made of stone did not suffice
to stop them being broken.
And to this end, it was God’s will
that a new tablet be incised—
this, the Law of the Gospels—
in the whiteness of her faultless form.
Vengeance is the Lord’s …
yet in this holy text
there remains much more
that speaks of tenderness.
Catherine would not have wished
that those vainglorious pyramids
her forbears had raised, however high,
be the final resting place
of her blessed remains,
but rather holy Sinai
whose stony heights
were once, long ago,
the smouldering Throne
of a sacred fire.
Up there, it is not the gravid tonnage
of a mountain pressing down on her
but rather her own sweet weight, as of a lover,
that presses down at the summit.
Rest, then, in peace, there on high,
asking nothing more
than to be so near
a body that is Heaven.
HARLEQUIN: SURFACING
APART FROM ITS LOCATION near the hospital, this struck me as the most thoroughly improbable meeting place. A steak house catering to the insatiate college-age carnivore. It was hard to square the choice with the alphabet soup of letters behind Dr. Elsa Aspen’s name. I waited inside the entrance as a congenitally chirpy hostess bobbed up in a tight rugby shirt. The corporation
’s costume designer had evidently forgotten that rugby players claim to eat their dead.
“I believe a Dr. Aspen is expecting me.”
“You bet.” She smiled deeply into my eyes, then after the briefest instant lowered hers to scan the reservation book. “No problem—44.” Another brilliant smile. “Right this way, sir.”
She led me deeper into the narrow-gauge train wreck of lapsed styles so perfectly emblematic of Western low-brow chic. Sallow pools of light from low-slung tiffany lamps lent the room a muddled air of obscurantist mystery. Unplaned planks and high-backed booths evoked the homely cattle car. The salad bar feed trough under the EXIT sign extended a hearty invitation to fill one’s boots, as we say, on the way out. Over the whole business hung a ‘faint whiff of bear grease.’13
Dr. Aspen slid out of the booth and stood to greet me. She was fully my height, almost six feet. Firm handshake. I took up position across from her.
“Thanks for coming,” she began, resuming her seat.“The cloak and dagger’s for me, mostly. It would have been awkward to bump into her family at the hospital.”
“Nice spot.”
“I was fairly sure I wouldn’t see anyone here I knew.”
“No, but I might.”
“Students. I suppose that’s true,” she said with what I first took for indifference.
“Yes, I suppose it is.” And so the battle for the high ground begins. Of course her real work, her true work was not here but out there, out in the wards, in the streets, among the multitudes, out on the great plains of Ur-consciousness….
“Actually it’s pretty dark in here,” she added, sounding concerned now,“and as you can see, not exactly packed on a Saturday afternoon.”
“Not exactly, no,” I said, forcing a smile. “Let’s start over.”
“I would have thought after what the media has put you through over the last few days, being spotted here would be the least of your worries.”
“It is.”
“Drink?” she asked, hoisting hers, nearly empty, as the waiter pulled up.
“Scotch, rocks.”
“Would you mind bringing him a scotch and me another vodka grapefruit, tall?” With a wry look she polished off the drink for the waiter to take. “It’s supposed to be my day off, after all.”
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