Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand
Page 32
And the turtle was fed on light grasses by the house.
And passed under his hand and was sliced open
to reveal the mountain tortoise’s marrow.
And slipped his fingers black with blood
beneath the shell and poured its blood into a cup of silver.
And cut the reed stalks to measure and fastened them
by piercing through the back of the dead tortoise.
A nimbus of blue light when it fell apart in his hands.
When the crosshatched pieces didn’t hold.
And the lyre played dead.
4.
Out of black beginnings.
Out of corded night’s marine sense.
Deadlock’s mysterious Other.
Parent of the dead child before the living.
Was I my mother’s bride
brought to the burial of her dead son?
What do you want me to remember of my birth?
What do you say I must not remember of your death?
Was I your memory by another?
Black leveled night rock tripod shot.
Shed milk of gray sky on your breasts.
Shook inside the cradle of your arms.
Shale rock under our feet.
Was it a traversal at nightfall through black mountain ridge?
Was it your agonistic wish for a better life
sending your son across the sea?
And what did I learn from my father?
Thievery and lying.
And what did you teach me to find?
His body blackened & cut to pieces at the edge of a ravine.
And the surroundings are etched out of view.
And the river near our village is blacked out.
Madrigal signs of an island’s inscape.
Littoral scraps of memory pasted onto board.
Eidetic death of Liknon’s mountain light.
5.
The sentence is a dream of the falcon flying above us.
The black night is a sentence the dream has sent us.
There is one skin, one face, one eye.
There is no skin, no face, no eye.
Was it his song gave birth to her death?
Was it her death gave birth to his song?
Namesake’s epitaphic gift. To parent our taking
in a circle of red ash, to barter for its skin on a hill of poplars.
To drift out where the Cyclades end.
Barrier dream of land’s ending, birth’s beginning.
Saw the sails set back in sky’s carousel.
Blue Aegean night passing over us in passing.
Throat song when the lute was lifted from our hands.
Island’s cattle-herding son given back his instrument.
Song that became a circuit of rain and light. Came to give back what it robbed.
Silent when they found it replaced by what it had taken.
Shelter of low moon in place of stars. Slick knife
crossing through the shell of tortoise skin.
Blue-black horn of the bull rising in the west …
—April 1, 2015
SEVEN HERMETIC SPELLS
I attempt to sow a seed in the survivor that runs through his reversed expectation of doom into the shadow of the non-survivor. It is as if they embrace like man and woman and the shadow comes into the light. It is indeed a seed or frail bond between light and shadow, a frail window of strangest flesh-and-blood between the visible and the invisible.
—Wilson Harris, The Infinite Rehearsal
1.
Like a query sent to reveal everything was sound before there was light
there was the sound of light forming on the lips of those
descendants of my people there were your voices in the ruled light
in the hush of your voices when the light broke over the hills.
Unnameable hills I can’t say their names in the bright dusk when the hills
are overrun with black birds falling from the sky
they seem to open up like balls of heavy ash
thrown into the air where one comes back covered in black
filaments like a cloud of names in the black principle place
where the Circean falcon and milk of a black cow
rest near Attic honey and milk offered to us
then denied once in a lifetime. It is clear there are so many
yet to be offered yet to be denied one must rest awhile
with an undyed piece of cotton cloth and place it beside the fingernails
of a dead woman resting near papyrus rolls
a work of dead women resting near paper unfurled.
So that the effort is a rite of purification calling to one then the other
saying their names in unison saying their name in unison
twice over in a lifetime of name keeping
saying they are here with us in the old country
rescued from hardship
yet no different for the effort.
And the shrine is made of juniper wood.
And the nails are black lanes of metal closing in on the fists of a child.
Nearly without form he is written into their breasts.
One then two women forming at the side of a river
where he is nameless held by the contents
of his flesh.
A nameless child
blackened by ash from the shadow of the falcon.
2.
These are rites of purity when there is no purity.
These are rites of name making where there is no name to be made.
One walks backward without shoes
and sets himself to the enjoyment of food.
Blind spirit mouth
eats the food it is given
in finite portions
lays the foundation of his mourning
rising subterranean angel dust
on his lips
cries out with a black Isis band
covering his eyes.
And his right hand
grasps a falcon’s head
lying down in the soft cypress
hearing its name relayed through tree crossing.
Black spell of encounter
he nears the edge of transference
on a lofty root
inside clothing he wears
black cotton over white
a garment cut to his body
for his encounter on oblong stone.
3.
In the fakir dust
pine wood stretched beneath the body
of a shepherd
lying beside his reed the body inside
not without aid he can pronounce his words
not without aid or love he can
say there is a visitor to his name
an accompaniment that follows his body
like a visitant
and sees a blazing star descend
pale night star descending over the field
where he was taken years before
spellbound native
to original landscape.
And came to a stop in the middle of its ground
and saw the star dissolve
like a band of wheat stolen
from the light and given back to oblong stone
and held for him what directed
his will.
Saw what directed his will from within
with his own eyes an angel
summoned and sent to return
earth-black inside a seraphic drum.
Come to him in the narrow room where he is laid
on a carpet of blue wool.
And his hands were oath bearers.
And his eyes were formed of what had seen them
a bringer of fire from the falcon’s wing.
4.
What closes over memory in the month sad month
delayed by mouths shedding their voices
shredded voices limpid along the line of an interior coast?
“I felt your nakedness imparting to me its signature of indeliverable lore
improvident core of unnameable lagoons covered
by the death’s head
mounted on a stream of lagoon water spreading its foamy tide
across my body until I am completed in their passing.”
And in memory it is what comes first unable to come second
it is what comes first from the fire pit of ancient regression
encircled with blood on the hieratic papyrus
like a stone borne aloft under the talons of a black falcon
circling above the memory pit
body of the cave spell where each rite is given
back to the dead in hermetic spoors of indecipherable ink.
And spring water cleanses the hands until they are clean
seven springs where the body is calmed
lying down inside a well of springwater the hands atoning
for their sins beside a pure branch of cleansed olive.
Moon of seven nights high in the eastern sky with the seventh night.
5.
And did it come
without barrier in the first signal
without light from the far shore
dreamt up as cure for
agonies inside the spell wagon
invisible to the eye
wet telegenic writing
ripostes of unkind mental conjuring.
To believe in the waxwork of self
relieved of unity harmony undistorted sound
from within the absolute cataract of homeland
like a seized incipient rib stagnant and transitory
rubbed in salt placed on black fronds of peony
burning inside a shield of sea rose and white lily.
And these are the names
you are going to write down
on linen cloth separated into quadrants
from the first hand let there be the integral space of the second
giving back its character of seven leaves
spread between the two hands.
And let the lamp that is not red
be fitted with a piece of linen cloth and oil of spikenard
and dress yourself in a prophetic garment
and hold an ebony staff in your left hand
and protective charm in your right
and wait in readiness for the spirit to arrive.
In skeletal musk of a wolf’s head
plead amid offerings of storax gum, cassia & balsam
inhabit the named place
beside a crown of laurel feathers.
Call the god with this chant let it claim what it will of your being.
6.
Grieving, looking everywhere …
moon inside of moon
starred rite raked over blind
paratactic shoreline—
say Re inside black harnessed idiom
of a far-flown bird
blue-black feathers rising in April dusk
navigating their flight
across western sky’s serenic pitch
warding off the spell of its dispersions.
Here racked on a rack of language
built of lagoonal waves dispossessed voices
of those who preexist us
rustling dead wings of jagged conch
orphic ellipse
driven like a sea hawk’s descent
into tropic waters blighted
sun caught on a rib of distended coral
as if to exist were to cry out in starved ciphers
of wayward incipient speech:
“Oh heaven when you clothe me
in your garment cover my body
in black silk let me float on the waters
of native Crete
and capture our beginnings
in burnt myrrh and cinquefoil.”
But the ink isn’t dry
the spell can’t be undone
year after year to find them in a position
of abject ceremony
row upon row of black letters singed by sunlight
AKAKANARBA KANARBA ANARBA NARBA ARBA RBA BA A
as if to recite their names were to form wings
from an alphabet of cedar ash
stripped elemental strips of sea salt and coral
fluctuating symbols mounted on shards of black sand.
To endure episodes of infrangible repetition
abducted phrases of errant prophecy
when the ink is formed against one’s will
dry pots of clay and broken splinters of laurel
implanted on ground near the circle where prayer cloth
fell from the body’s intricate habitude.
And a new well was dug
and flowers placed on a rim of clay
wings of balsam and cherry wood
and the garlands were ropes wrapped around his waist
until his mouth opened to the taste of myrrh ink
made from laurel and Ethiopian cumin
nightshade blackened in a clay pot
blackened and ground together
here in accession of daily greeting
mind-swollen rites of constellate improvisation.
Morning’s whitening shell hung by a spear of leech
root from the cypress branch.
7.
Rogue light of spring.
Ritual rite of rising smoke.
Hard-recessive tender articulate flakes of sorrow
seeking throats … flouts of the whip … the journeyman’s cross of seven letters.
And I, I—
black-eyed island son
dark skinned
heeding this avowal of erasable days
leaning into supernal horizons of blond light
slanted to receive its mariner
star-crossed eidetic wheel of passage.
Wandering past spring’s bitter lentisk.
Wreathed invisible sesame planted on the tongue.
Birds flown from their rudderless position in April skies.
Night’s paper kites flown above gypsy grave song.
I was bred to receive their message
facing black letters in pages of unread books.
I was with them when they came
forward from the sea’s dark caverns
turning to face them among nettles and snail grass
bloodless thirst of Rhodian palm tree’s branch
noon’s splenetic carved letter
imprinted inside a cove of needles.
And our two names were written as one.
And the seven vowels were spread on a fabric of olive.
And from the black bough of Orpheus’s staff
a single falcon rises in red sun.
—May 16, 2014–January 24, 2015
Curtain Call
Terese Svoboda
I dislike the theater. I used to go, yes, but I preferred to watch those seated in the orchestra, to see how they removed their wraps, how they turned their heads in idle greeting, the way they covered their coughs with their gloved hands, and not the actors running in from the eaves in bright clothing and p
owdered faces, all upset by something the playwright remembered from his childhood. I also preferred the lobby at intermission—or, even better, after the play was over, when everyone’s faces were still fixed, looking out onto the street with the same foolishness that held them a few minutes earlier.
That is how I managed all those terrifying months, by observing and learning from those without pretense while cultivating my own. Newly married, we had funds for a year in Paris, but my husband and I chose to settle in a pleasant little town close to the border where money would go much farther. We loved everything about the place: the Tyrolean gold cupola for weekly musicales, its promenade of better stores around an ancient fountain-and-statue, even the greenery, so well kept due to an abundance of civic pride—until the arrival of the military.
The border closed instantly. It was really too hard for my husband to walk out the back trails. He was much older than I, and suffered from gout. In retrospect, we certainly should have crawled, hopped, or arranged for him to be carried out in a sling, but my husband refused to flee, like so many others. His family had always been wealthy and lacked the imagination for bravery. Besides, when the Nazis appeared, so blitzkrieg, a different commandant every weekend, butter returned to our table.
We were the reason the hotelier was still working when they arrived, we had preserved his raison d’être, providing him with enough income in those last weeks for the hotel to remain unshuttered. Mr. Lucchesi, a transplanted Puglian, smartened our rooms with eau de cologne daily in lieu of changing our linens or anything else a maid might do, whom he no longer employed. He apologized, with double sprays, about not anticipating the Nazis’ bivouac. My husband, glowering, said nothing in reply but I leaned lower to do up my laces. I was not without cleavage.
When the first commandant appeared for dinner, we smiled and raised our glasses, we tried not to shake visibly. Mr. Lucchesi introduced us as “the Verhovens from Milan, who come for the waters every year.” The commandant was so pleased with our company that he suggested a round of cards after dessert. Though my husband excused himself, I persevered, winning often enough, telling a joke when I could.
The next morning, Mrs. Lucchesi knocked on our door. They will find you if you hide in the village, she whispered. If you are the visitors, coming and going, they won’t remember. Besides, she said, you improve our business. It was true, the townspeople had dropped by to watch me play cards, buying drinks of their own, if only watered, making secret wagers on my nerve. We approved her argument, partially based as it was on Mr. Lucchesi’s position as the town’s informant.