ARCHIVES

 

ARCHIVES FROM THE GREAT RECESSION

 

Maybe, he was a gandy-dancer, the guys who can take on the job, when jobs there are, glissading on flat cars, break-men in the shunting yard, pike-men on rafting logs, tap dancing in hobnail boots herding towards the mill. But, he on government red tape, suspended over the ruin. Go forth and interview, get paid for it, bring back the story. What a choice he was, one for the wiggy times,  you’d have to say, fuse boxes blown, grids short circuiting, a time for foxes to get into open hen houses and robbers to purloin jewelry now the alarms are quiet. Streets filled with bashful shut-ins on holiday with the busted banks shuttered and all schedules off. Those who captained companies flat out lost, their compass needles spinning like a stopwatch, staying home and puking into the commode, seasick on the wind tossed economy, windfall profit plummeting down on the ones always bragged on the wormy fruit.

     Go out and take record, and digital box in hand out he rides on the bounding mane of prophesies and prodigies. Sprung by slashed budgets, alms and appeasements lacking, blacksmiths, farmer John, road shows and snake oil salesmen are on the move with cures for the soul.  

 

           RAPTURE OF THE DEEP:  LEAVES OF CHAFF

Gibbiloni: I was this close to Edison, like two fingers. But, I got more music. He got the facts. So, I get a circus on the way to inventing the radio. Yeah. We don’t go to the big cities. We pick up where the big boys miss. We got to find some lost places. I keep my ears open. Well goes dry, factory closes, you get it, now we got a place. Circus is close to death. For better or worse, like opera. With Vegas a ghost town we squeezed back in, now they can’t afford the glamour. The casinos are perfect for circus and opera. Now we got the dead celebrities announce our acts. Big picture, we do okay.

     I read the paper. Recipes for the melting pot, I say. Famine in the Horn of Africa, I’m gonna have human skeletons.  The marlins is gone from the South American coast, the tuna from the Gulf Stream, from the dead fishing villages I’m gonna get mermaids and citizens from Atlantis. Gold rush shanties on the mud flats, I get coloraturas shatter heaven like a wine glass. Dictator falls, I collect the cheetah feeds on caviar, the parrots conducting the monkeys typing Shakespeare, the orangutan smokes French cigarettes and reads Sartre.

     Go ahead. Who’ll talk, you got my okay.

 

               LOCH LOMAND THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL

I come in peace. Don’t take me to your leaders. My message is lost there. My message is love. I live among you and I would not be known except to those who love me. You must mistake me for yourself. I am from the Pleiades, that green archipelago that is as near to you as what is dear. This circus serves me. Here you are wise children. I have lived in Siam. Asian rivers suit me, drowsy dreaming, and the luminous beasts. Tigers and cranes please me for their clairvoyance. Color is much to my liking and sweet fruit. I am partial to the mango, though the apple more stalwart than brash deserves respect for its persistence. Indonesia is most like my home. We are an island people. Each island is different and some are so small that only a few families live on them. Sometimes, a single man or woman will find an island where he may live alone within a bee-sung glade with birds for his companions and trees for his teachers. It is not rare on such opals for a lost soul to land dazed and these he will take in from their voyage and furnish with fruit and music.

     Visiting is our pleasure. Families travel between our close knit stars whose light is softened by the canopy of their tender regard, so that what is bright in our worlds glows from within like a baby’s smile in its mother’s compassion. That is the sea we sail; we ply the prayers for love. Our cast nets gracefully settling on the translucent currents retrieve talking fish that speak your name and the whispered name of your loves, and we are familiar with the plentiful schools of your dreams and wishes. We know babies’ dreams and unspoken conversations that have simmered for a lifetime, and couples in embrace who never met except in a glimpse. And shoals where tragedy has separated hands.

     We find your childhoods and whole islands ring with your laughter and adventuring. You gambol with cantering red ponies with the torsos of children lost before words silenced echoes and sluiced nectar from their tongues.

     Here the Tower of Babel clarified, and tears and moans, song and laughter joined again to first letters, soft consonants and confessing vowels relit and strung, like a gull folded a moment from the trades, itself the lyric breathed by the wind.

                                     INTERVIEWER

His role was a clown. His show odd, miniature, with obsessive folly rather than flaming innocence. He assembled toys and blew bubbles and wended sagas through them, dressed in pajamas and floppy night cap, slippers on his feet. With silverware he made flat chimes and wove a meal of candy and fruit, the while his refulgent, mottled drunk’s face went dreamy and rheumy-eyed, this defrocked doctor of pediatric oncology.

 

                       ACROBAT/TIGHTROPE WALKER

Precision, that’s what distinguishes me, a fine distinction. You hardly notice me, compared to the others. I avoid spectacle. Maybe, I catch you breathless, but it’s not my intent.  I’m no coquette with the impossible. Refinement is my discipline; an austere economy. Space is the field for action. I would achieve one, but a one so compressed it nearly achieves zero. I excise the extraneous. I have become that single digit after pure vacuum.

     What is revealed? To see at all and to see only, the audience must toss surprise. Or fear, relief or joy. Emptiness presses against these appliances from all sides. Quiet! Speech is an affliction on the senses.

     I am not posited by emptiness, I simply do not abrade it. And across one surface I suspend all subtraction. Precision is the shearing away of qualities. Remove muddy grace and turgid form; what feeling the emptiness now suspends the heart has felt as grief.

                                     INTERVIEWER

     I think of him as a matador without portfolio, flensed of baroque to outline the stylized pride, aloof, acutely pre-occupied. Off kilter, the ground and the flat world precarious and all traverses on it doubtful and distracting. Wiry and trembling with refusals of vertigo invited by chance. His ability to audit urges stirring in space has so enlarged his dialogue with clairvoyance and madness that little room is left for terrestrial commerce. He is empty as the sounding bowl of a musical instrument and yet has reason to discard melody as intrigue.

     Formerly, he derived actuary tables for a large health insurance company. The financial collapse left him suspended in mathematical tables. His was a brave awareness foisted on a punctilious, squeamish man. He gained a steady wage distilling fortunes from a universe without astrology. The profession he fell into is one his company would not insure.

 

                                        STRONGMAN

 I am the most rational man in the circus. Business courts euphoria, so Gibbiloni has defeated himself. Strictly speaking I’m a metaphysician. Philosophers have married language. Such technique is overly facile and eventually dizzying. I join the struggle and wrench taciturn truth. No enlightenment is wrung from the stone, solely its resistance to will and seduction. I never whisper sweet nothings or pray for strength. I weigh my words by their reluctance. Those that would entwine or intuit song, I leave un-charmed and ghastly muttering.

     Here are my alchemical stones. They are unsung. Here is horseshoe, chain and bar. Black iron and deep excavated, the red scorched from them. Pig iron. No victory for smith and forge, no after life of finer stuff, dream amalgamations, the detritus from prayers. Watch. The ‘u’ of horseshoe’ now an ‘s’, the chain corset, loses a stitch. Say this, I don’t retreat from the cooling in everything and first causes are accounts given by the faithful. I toil only at this: returning to slag its wayward progeny. I hold the hands of the clock against each subscription to sentiment and the fiery furnace that tenders form, all wombless refuge in embrace.

                                 INTERVIEWER

     I expected to find potted flowers and kittens, a perfumed handkerchief. Signs of exile and a broken heart. A child’s toy, anything washed in tears.

     He looks the journeyman in any trade, the resigned belfry mechanic, the grave digger not grim or placating. Nothing so restless in him as to be brute. Nothing more elaborate than blunt. Among rabble and refuse he has founded his redoubt where light should it ask for entrance or attempt its exiles must make its case against fire, and fire its against all spectacle save what has issued from its bowels.

 

                              THE LIVING MUMMY     

Blind, deaf and dumb. Only a glimpse. A leap of faith. I am agnostic. You are equations, math foreign to my world. I wonder at touch and smell and at my bowels, lungs and heart. Everything changes with a touch. My world is replaced. Touch me without alphabet. I have no names for what stirs. It walks in me. Maybe it is you. Each letter dizzies me. What’s this ache rushing through, this swirl, what sings at each letter stilled only when a word binds them to nonsense. Bright order until you touch, the settled geometry circling. There water pump speaking. Vowel that ruptures me and opens vaultings. Consonant that restores me. You pure physics more hefting than math, you sweep and flight. Leave me. What is this city beneath the waves? What these towers and what reclines  there, and choruses through the seas surrounding?

     Stern is the hand that refuses love. Heaven that is my heart touched beyond me

 

 

                                   SIAMESE  TWIN.

 

If only she were a brother. No, she won’t say a word, not to you. My sarcasm, my parody. Silent critic. Says nothing. Belittles everything I say. I can do nothing without her realism hobbling me. She believes I’m flagrant. We could be invisible if only we did not insist. All would prefer that. A silent pact to expunge us. Half argues against half. If only I had room. We share a lung though are of two hearts and minds. I will marry a poet. Should I steal the breath to voice such dreams, she cackles and curses, and drags me along in a sailor’s hornpipe. Our parents puked us out into the world. They recognized a dirty limerick when they saw one. I towed her to the library. She bellowed into the hushed halls. In the poetry section, she burped and farted when I tried to read. Thus spoke Zarasthrustra, she says. We are the mutterings and rants of madmen. The angels chorusing, you dream, sweet nectar in the pitch, is it?  If we are the issue of angels, they are the fallen monsters sentenced to darkness and we the test of god’s mercy.

     I wish so much less than you. I might walk without chains, not dance, that I might go to a reading and listen with undiluted faith in beauty as love. And that your beliefs might fit me only as awkwardly as they do you, and that my disappointment and grief might have that small measure of holiness given to those for whom disappointment can be justified rather than proscribed. What it might mean to find bitterness at the end for myself, myself, in what was a fermata of coincidence, kind to recovered revelations and errant notes but still to chords was kindred.

     Read to me. Here this book, from here, as you would to the dead, always conscious as you are when speaking such verse of its source in the common destiny, perishing and immortal. Remind them of their greater selves rejoined and the sheath removed that once fulfilled them. Let me hear it now, because I won’t hear it later, misbegotten and discarded, a two-soul monster bared from the gates where you have right of refusal, that mirrors your symmetry, eternity’s darling, real or not, safe for you in the promise you already are.

 

                                      DOPPELGANGER

       A more literal virtual is my sire. I am the wonder beneath so many heavens. It is my eyes that hold you. My body fascinates you but curiosity has become morbid; you are terse and trenchant with it, but my eyes would immerse you, and so you avoid them. You knew me once, but now it’s accusations between us. Still, you can’t face me because your anger is answered with true pity. Once you knew me as oracle and inspiration. What was I made from and where did I live? You knew me then as a creature made from light that might translate its substance for you. At first, you knew I was not held by one form. You would gaze in my eyes and pass through many shapes. These first sights are only now named, then it was the act overseen. Now, sarcastic gabber, you have shuffled so many words you blame yourself for fleshy erosion. You remember knowing my luminous realm as animals, gods and adventures. You saw Krishna, blue god, lithe, androgynous, serene and amorous. Runes circled me and you knew verse composed me from light in the course of its awakening.

     You launched me into dreams and suspected that each time you looked at me another world of light broke off from that navel and continued.  Even brief naps, a winking, blinking and nod transported you to another world and returned you precariously. You are embroiled in many bigamies, and not all your own. She, the one in the train whose eyes met yours, has married you and those facing mirrors multiply generations through the ether. And, too, the French actress who dangerously looked out from that bespoken glass has wed you and thousands and such tragic universes have resulted, physics of eternal longing and separations, rived by endless love bridging death. Because this happened and you know it, have recently and again seen ghosts and awakened in dreams more vivid than the world you abandoned. You know that I have passed from the mirror and frequently enough that even in a world dependent on coincidence to transcribe divine intent, you have several times heard rumors of yourself in New York and Madrid where they swore you were a prodigal son, and in China where they recognized you and were chagrined by your aloofness. And you, you have seen yourself so often, the one strapped to the wheel chair; you knew him so well, and children, illuminated.

     Now, you look in the mirror as you always did at lit windows from the darkened street, now so much older, and in sweet exile, generous pity, weep as you always saw the love that lit my eyes and you turned away from.

 

                                   LION TRAINER   

Trust them more than people. Trust no man, that’s my motto. No hiding for my club. No secrets, no lies. We get along. We’re not friends. No, I don’t drift into that mush. Get killed if you do. Keep it push and pull, straight-forward. Don’t envy or worship. The public does the lollygagging, not me. Lions and tigers, the audience has its daydreams. Thrills and chills.

     I do it because I want to be left alone. Tell you what, I got one I regret. She’s back in the tent. Other than that, it’s move forward, they back up, too close they swat. Turn your back, they pounce. Push pull, slick as a piston, push pull.

     For the rest, writer, go in the tent. I call her Nightmare, only one I have a name for. A black panther. Interview her. She’s my confession.

                             SÉANCE WITH NIGHTMARE

What wears eyes most nearly? The Norseman blue in the Zodiac’s long night? The Arab speckled flecking in the desert oasis?  The gibbon or the octopus? Whose eyes are most ripened fruiting, deepest seed? Mine and the serpent’s mineral mosaic. Two dragons roost the egg, one snake, one cat. Was I nursed Helen. Note the bird nesting in spring floods, cauldrons over brimming, smoke and fire, thunder and war. The seed in starry glade and stony grave.

     Spring the white lily, Mary’s cowl, Virgin blossom, lily white, innocence, cruel and wise, frost and ice. My teats, the snake nurses you, byzantine dome mined from his eyes. As much the maw are teats, this venom the milk of life.

     This is all you know: what’s most supple holds you, and supplest forms become you.

     You love me and less the song and less the dance, so the grail, my blood and milk, you drink and rise and gladly die. Such is beauty.