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Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand

Page 32

by Sleights of Hand- The Deception Issue (retail) (epub)


  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.

 

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