TOTEM

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TOTEM

 

 

          They were difficult to see. I would stumble on them. At night they were invisible and they were always surrounded by shadows. Shadows danced around them. They dissolved in water. The females bathed where they drank. They would slip away to a quiet pool where a willow trailed its tresses and they would follow their stares into the water. They reluctantly emerged from the skipping light, and I was pulled out from the shadows to look at them. I was barely myself then. I knew myself then for the first time looking at them and I couldn’t move. I eddied in the whirling dance. Light surged and pooled inside me, and the willow rooted inside me-sad, longing tree-and I was no longer solid. They saw me then. They were constantly in season and they could see me now after they had been renewed and mated to the dancing light, when they had descended into the serene, perfect world beneath the surface. They had found me there, and now they could see me. They surrounded me and hung flowers from my horns and cupped their hands and had me drink from them. All in season together when the meadows bobbed in periwinkle, we were heavy with green. I shone, and I wed each of them, and they called me Taurus or Krishna, and they sang lullaby to our offspring who eroded me as they entered their wombs to dwell forever, each bathed and baptized in shadow and light and bountiful emptiness, speaking silence. Only there I remained, finally and at last, my head bowed and tears flowing, just my eyes like pools.

 

          I approached the fires the males made. They stared into the flames and embers. Outside the circle of firelight I watched. The men saw my eyes glowing red. Their eyes reflected nothing. The flames and heat fell into them. There was nothing to retard it. They were an empty lung inhaling flame and heat and a tabular light. Maybe, the fullness in other creatures that topped off even to their eyes and shown out in darkness had passed to some far bottom inside them, for certain images seemed to have sunk deep and would up well and fill their eyes from below and paint themselves on their closed lids. Didn’t it seem that the flame and shadow in the fire entering them would cast figures out from them, figures that flickered and hid fugitively or mischievously inside them, figures that stared at them from outside the circle of light and now were spinning in the embers?  Such tricks played on them. Only in the corner of their eyes were they able to fully discern these figures that were pieces of themselves or who by some vagrancy in their natures, some disdain or mistrust in fixity and for a noble stand or setting, had found hospitable accommodations in their empty chambers.

 

          Solemnity choked them. Admonitions came from outside and squeezed a settled form onto them that seemed punishment and great glory. It struck them as struggle and feud against all things and separation from them.

 

          Not from fear of leopards or climate or dark, but from a desire to forge and refine, to mend the tear, they went into the caves. They would re-make and regain themselves. What thief abroad in lightening and storm with toils of pious strength and indifference had torn them from everything and left them at startled odds, with only fleeing and startled glimpses at what was lost. Against this obdurate power that dimmed their flesh, they ranged themselves and set up their dream billows in the caves.

 

          Through the throat into the belly they went to conjure the inner light and dredge forth the deep images and cast them into form. I couldn’t follow them, not until they had conjured me from the flames. Then I saw. The fires were made from green wood and dry and this thinned the smoke and kept the flame governed to mere stripling, supple and grace insinuating, throwing figures onto the facets in the wall and drawing figures out of them.  The men danced imitating the flame. Round and round the small fires they went, spinning about themselves, throwing the inner haunting out to the walls.

 

          They didn’t bring any animal shapes into the cave. No buffalo head or leopard skin, no antler crowns as mantel for those lieges sired to heroic stoicism and service. No loyal trustee in all his inherited grace and power at his blessed and sanctioned post could enter, only the amorphous suet that still disgorged fire. Only what creatures coursed within them might be brought out to dance free and awkward in the cave, as if that moment dropped into the world like a gazelle kid in the nimbus of the amniotic sack to stand with knock knees on tiptoe and drying only enough to spring about in joyful ignorance of the leopard.

 

          They painted an animal upon their fellows, and the animal gamboled like a kid, colt, and cub, and like purring tigers before mating, and whinnying horses before coupling.

 

          They had birthed a separate kingdom, another realm. I was reborn onto the facets of the cave, that fertile, luminous womb stolen from the globe.

 

          The damned pain thrust on me; I was infused with their nightmares and gutted by their emptiness. They called me coyote and raven, apposite jesters who let the lion benighted with nobility and opaque to all but service, feed them adequately for their meager forms and then some, belching raucous at the lion’s righteous labor and at death that is only a pittance against free moving light.

 

          Cursed by deformity and amputation, I long for the garden and still carry my yearning for the moon. With me, your paradise will always be what you have lost. I am your memory and prophesy. And each generation at the moment of conception, at the peak of coitus, foretells death in the light bursting from each cell.

 

 

FERAL CHILD

 

 

          On April 4, 1958 at 2:15 a.m., a ten-year old male child was nearly struck by Ralph Sansabot along Route 66 in New Mexico. Sansabot claimed lineage with the Algonquin Tribe of Mesa Rondo, though no such tribe can be found in any history of the area.  The Navajo and Hopi were familiar with Sansabot and believed him to be a grave robber, an accusation they could not prove, and an alcoholic, which police arrest records for drunk and disorderly can verify. The child that Sansabot brought to the American Indian Museum in Santa Fe was naked and covered in dirt and could not speak any language.  Aware of his own notoriety, Sansabot had captured the child to prove he had not been drinking when he saw him.  He was eager to relate the details of the encounter and the Santa Fe Boca of April 9th carries an interview with him on page 4 next to the classifieds, but the following quotes are from the sheriff's interrogation conducted by officer Cabezavirga.

 

           "What it was, well, he bolted acrost the road quick as you like, and his bare butt flashed up in my headlights.  I won this '49 Buick, I did that in a card game.  With a flush, that's why I don't have no pink slip.  Nobodies talkin' about any stolen cars, are they?  I'm telling you my heart went out to this bare assed brat way out there in the desert right that minute, short a time as I saw him.  Something about him.  I rubbed my eyes, you'd a done it too, and I put on the brakes.  Now, this Buick has a visor right over the windshield which is a wonderful thing for the desert, I am a lucky man and I know it.  Goin' East or West I will be sitting pretty.  But, I'm gonna tell you how lucky I truly am. My Buick, you hear me, my Buick fair and square, well, it has this spotlight and I caught him in it and he froze up just like a wild animal and I just plucked him up, which I never could have done after how fast I seen him run.  He must of scared himself with that close call and was just sitting there, on his haunches, that's the way it was, scratching his ear with his left foot, anyhow, he was til the light caught him and he was froze.  No, he never put up a fight, well just look at him, you can count every rib, he must of figured his time for running around like that was about up.  Raised by coyotes, that's my guess.  Lord have mercy, them poor pups eat puke til they get their real teeth.  Rather be raised by bees myself, or a stripper, that'd be nice...B.S., a fish."

 

          This is the last feral child to be reported in the United States.

 

          He misses fur and excreting in the open.  He does not miss hunger, cold, ticks, fleas, nips, trying to keep up with long legged brethren. Or, carrion. And worms. Berries were good.  Water was good.  Sunning on a rock.  The red and yellow rocks were good to lie on after the sun went down because they were still warm.  He did not have the right body to sleep with the pack. With their thick pelts, they could sleep in mesquite.  They had scars everywhere on their bodies.  Black cicatrix on their long snouts, and tattered ears. Social intercourse involved many harmless snaps, but they drew blood on him.  And without fangs to bare he slid down to lowest member of the pack and spent much time in submissive greetings, baring his throat or genitals.  He was worthless to sleep with; his shape did not fit with theirs.  Winters were the hardest.  Cold and snow came to the high desert. The hair on the pack grew long and thick, they looked well fed even though they were eating mice and fighting over the occasional hare. They put their plush tails over their noses and slept comfortably while he ran around in small circles and shivered. Feet and hands were the worst, he pushed them into horse dung, but it was too rare a treat.  They rang with the cold.  No one saw him, the pack was color blind, but in winter his nose and ears and even his tan cheeks were scorched red by cold.  He learned techniques to get his circulation moving. One way was to basically throw a tantrum without the yells.  He would lie prone on the ground beating it with fists and heels.  This worked better than running around.  The lesson is to flex your muscles with as little deep breathing as possible.  The pack, of course, when covered in snow was like bread in a kiln, toasty and warm.  He had to wander until he found bare ground.  However, winters always moved the pack closer to human settlements and/or the highways.  In either case, there was bare ground to be found and he learned how to shoplift carelessly spilled warmth from around gas stations and diners, or intoxicate himself on epileptic fits thrown on the plowed tarmac.  Like Rudolph the red nosed reindeer, true cold and misery redeemed him with the cliquish pack.  He was the only one who could exploit varmint-proof garbage cans.  He was a toothless, furless bag of bones when it came time to curl up together, but his clawless hands were a skeleton key for the odd puzzles guarding the dumps.  It was the best food he had ever tasted.  There were donuts, sugar and fat and salt, cheese of a sort, soft drinks, potato chips and fries- more salt and fat and sugar-and pounds of barely rotted meat. Winters even turned lucky. He could gorge inside fence or cabinet without having the food torn from his grasp, all the while throwing booty out for the rest, who actually fawned on him a bit.

 

          He does not really remember any of this; these things move through him under dreams making him twitch and yip while asleep, and when they wake him, the covers are pulled in around him, making a cozy hollow around his form.

 

          Summer time was the time of thirst and bugs.  Most creeks dried up, they moved nearer to the streams and rivers, which had become thin ribbons cutting through wide banks of cracked, brick hard clay.  However, summer brought the great migration of tourists, or to the coyotes, the manna of road kill.  They battled the buzzards for dead deer, sheep, horses, rabbits, dogs, cats, rats, and succulent refuse.  In fact, the pack had become dependent on human beings a dozen generations before and lived easier lives for it, oblivious to their loss of dignity.

 

          He was always brushing up against his own species, but with the coyotes as his culture, they remained a deafeningly load, blindingly bright confusion. He could never divine the purpose to anything they did.  He did not project himself among them and figure from there what he would do with a house or a restaurant or a filling station.  And yet, he was lonely among the coyotes, and unlike all other creatures, barred from an evolution of form into maturity.  While pups changed into coyotes, he remained hairless, clawless, toothless, deaf, blind, and without a nose.  His body was closer to a newborn than anything else in the pack.

 

          The deeper canyons could cache summer while winter whistled and groaned on the plains above.  The pack would descend from the pinion-studded mesas into arroyos and gorges where streams meandered lazily between broad sandy banks.  It could be very still, a shadow might drape half the gorge, the red walls were reflected in the green water, trout coasted among green stones, shiny blue and red dragonflies patrolled the air.  From the mesas he could see for miles across red rock canyons, buzzards and hawks hanging above.  The pack, of course, was colorblind.  He was the lone member who did not have the animal genius of brain.  That organ never worked in such perfect unanimity that he did not sense it and could, like other beasts, exist totally unaware of himself in an imageless waking state that is as pure as dreamless sleep. His only true companions were the puppies whose pleasures still extended to curiosity.  When the older members of the pack were not spurred by instincts, they relinquished their lives to the guardianship of their senses and left their bodies to do its digestion.  Only the plump puppies pushed their noses into every thing, chasing birds and butterflies and harassing snakes.  By adolescence, their senses had been trained into sentries.  He could never match their keenness, but perception is more communal than competitive, and the tendrils reaching from his senses found no place to root.  And it was because he had heard no answering echoes from these perceptions that he had already left the company of sheep and deer and joined the coyotes whose senses seemed riveted to a world he shared.

 

          He had first nursed on sheep, butting into their udders like a lamb.  Sheep are used to submitting to people, and he was accepted without controversy.  He nursed in the corrals at night when the shepherds were asleep in their adobe cabins or mobile homes or government-issue cinder block.  The sheep dogs never barked at him.  By morning he had slipped away to the pastures where the sheep would be herded, and waited out of sight until the shepherds dozed off leaving the sheep in the protection of their dogs.  In the fattest days of summer the sheep did not return at night to corrals; they followed the creeks from meadow to meadow. These were the best times.  He lay in the tall grass looking through a forest of black legs at the blue pasture above where clouds grazed.

 

          The society of sheep is calming.  The lambs kicked up their heels and he played with them.  Lambs are soft and before the onset of rut, their games are all muted, mountings and head buttings and prancing pirouettes, and so he was never bloody afterwards.  Even their voices are tuned to gentle pleadings.  This world of vegetarians; how much more generous than the world of coyotes.  The ewes and rams grazed through the day, moving slowly across the meadows, and  barely compelled into motion, he would reach up, and like a man with a wine sack, squeeze milk down his throat.  He was lulled into sleep, would wake seamlessly from a doze into the green and blue and the intense industry of bugs on nearby stalks.  Lifting his head, he would see a few feet beyond the band of sheep that had drifted away, and taking just a few drunken steps he would lay down again beneath the udder that had floated away from him.

 

          But, a little boy eventually becomes restless inside these rhythms so broadened to the scope of the earth as to become flat. Herbivores with their fermenting digestions divide time no more finely than the seasons.  He looked into their eyes but could find there only his own reflection in the black pool of their large pupils.  Try as he might he could never find the chip in that nearly three hundred and sixty degree of vision through which they looked out; nowhere could he find the moment of time in which they were awake.  He could not maintain their silence.  Discontent, surprise, forced him towards exclamation.  Suspended across a whole season, no sound can carry, but for days parsed into minutes or less, where most things seem immobile, sound is needed to call to others cut to the quick.

 

          Deer often grazed among the flock, taking advantage of the protection of shepherds and dogs.  He began following after them at night to where they bedded down beneath the pinions.  What did they promise?  They were a society of does and fawns and yearlings, and even more silent than sheep, but there were chords strung taut between them.  Though he was not included in this network, this community alarm system anchored them in a time nearer to his; they were aware of him.  But, the kinship he found with deer was in their form.  A shape within their shape beckoned, drawn between their spindly legs and bony haunches, and the gingerly step of their pointed hooves barely alighting on the ground. Suddenly, with none of the startling quality of suddenness, they would appear in the meadow, as if they had always been there. They were as temporary around the movements of that inner shape as he was himself.

 

          He was beset by nightmares and images. In his sleep there were sunsets over still bays, and there were ocean waves that threatened to drown him, and snow capped mountain peaks, panthers and golden cities with minarets and domes.  In a garden in one of these cities he had witnessed willowy girls transform themselves into deer and laurel trees.  Without words, he could not mark his memories off from dreams.  Dread and beauty walked in his world and lived in any form they chose; when he was with the deer, he could see them moving from one disguise to another and even sense them passing in the open air.  At six years old, he was in love for the first time.

 

          The coyotes moved towards the source of their food.  They were driven by statistics; the closer they moved to Santa Fe the more food to be found.  Other species were doing the same.  Of course, old grazing and hunting lands went under the tarmac, but the truth is that no beast that could weave itself into the pattern of roads, yards, parking lots, shopping centers, gardens and garbage cans had ever lived as well.  A salt lick, a water hole, these are parsimoniously given in the wild, and these treasure troves become killing fields as the pilgrims gather.  But, in cities and towns, or on ranches, the world was suddenly disgorging its hoardings in a flood.  People were never seen as the agents of this bounty, and confrontations occurred when they tried to assert ownership over their discoveries of food vomiting geysers, but for the small or wily or fugitive, it was a year round feast.

 

          The pack was sometimes glimpsed in early morning, silhouetted against a silvering sky.  They foraged deeper and deeper into the city limits.  They were loath to leave off gorging, forgot the hour, and found themselves miles from cover with daylight already upon them.  There they were, single file along the shoulder of a road, mistaken for dogs until something fey in them was sensed, their nomads' airy step.  Santa Fe was still more realtors gleam than realized sprawl, and though one day the pack was routed in sullen drowsiness from a golf course-they were napping near a pretty pool- there were hundreds of acres of scrub largely untouched except for a quixotic grid of dirt roads and rusty strands of barbed wire where they could have slept undisturbed for another ten years before development finally reached the parcels it had staked under evangelical titles-Yucca Blossom Fields, Saguaro Shangri-la, Hopi Happy Hunting Grounds, etc.

 

          He was spotted frequently.  His association with coyotes, if it were noticed at all would have been considered coincidental. Frankly, not even Indians or Mexicans had any interest in a runaway or orphan Indian or Mexican child.  They were not that unusual, and neither was a child driven insane from his mother's alcoholism running bare-ass through the wasteland.  Sansabot almost certainly did not discover him.  What he did was pluck out of obscurity a street urchin who the rest of the community would have been content to leave in shadow.  However, once retrieved he served as a diversion and palliative.  With him in the spotlight, the rest of the shattered families could be left to shoulder their own guilt, and disowned by man and myth be swept under the carpet.

 

          He had always been excluded by mutation from whichever creatures he adopted.  Since he was ten when he was hauled back to human society, he had yet to conceive of sex as the sea in a conch shell a civilized person can.  He had seen plenty of it-it is perhaps one mark of its tautology to beasts rather than microcosm, that boundless privacy is rarely sought.  The animals he had chosen were quick about it, though in sheep and deer incontinently frequent, and during the short minute of mounting-though the lead up during estrous had been as transforming as disease, visiting the pain of desire and longing on placid beasts-the aphasia that enveloped them was a more complete eviction of him than their usual cud chewing or post gorge coma.  So, he entered the city as the creature that had never heard a returning echo of his own subjectivity. For him as it is for other mammals, at least, the volume of that empty space cast a silence into the world that he sensed while others were sleeping, when over them is thrown a cloak of sacrosanct invisibility.

 

          One morning he did not follow the other coyotes when they returned to the empty acres.  Had he changed his mind later on, they would never have admitted him to the pack.  How he had insinuated himself into de facto membership was a thing he would never be able to recall.  In fact, soon after leaving the company of beasts and shadowing the lives of people, he began to forget his time among beasts.  What would remain alive in his brain as a physical ache for the rest of his life was the era of childhood before the dew had lifted. Undoubtedly, it was during that period when innocence obscures form as completely as sleep that he had rolled around with other bulbous lambs and knobby fawns and yipping puppies and shoved his big head against their mother's teat; a creature whose geriatric immaturity extended to him the mammalian cues for mothering which neither sheep or deer or even coyote could refuse. But, come the steeply angled light of the afternoon of even the same day he hung behind at the garbage dump, the approach of a threateningly upright creature with a toppling gait and the overpowering and appetizing stench of sweating vegetarians, though noble in form as an angel, and the pack would have bolted from him, varmints though they were.

 

          Those first days of intense observation and complete aloneness can only be compared to amnesia.  Certain habits continued to pilot him and were enough to keep him fed and watered and hidden from view, but he remembered nothing and would awake like someone from a faint or a binge, a splinter of self awareness without origin in a universe that had no means to exist.  The fear of extinction and the pain this fear caused was the extent of his being.

 

          He started in an industrial section, a blight of used car lots and body shops and junkyards and bars and diners plopped down along a two-lane strip of cracked highway. At night it was abandoned; a few lone cars hurtled along the highway, one of the terminal drunks somehow still standing would stagger out a doorway and catch up with the others slumped against the wall. The junk man lived in a corrugated shed in his junkyard.  He added his empty bean cans to the piles of tin, and the child would lick them clean in the rusty cab of an old pick up truck without an engine where he slept.  Maybe at one time the junk man had gone about collecting for his yard, or maybe disposal had been consolidated into a municipal dump drying up his sources, but the yard was not disturbed by any commerce.  All day the child heard a drone similar to a beehive; it was the man's radio.  When the sun was up he came out of his shack and sat on a chair and listened to his radio.  He sat under a faded beach umbrella drinking beer.  He spit frequently. It was commentary and philosophical, and he brought the phlegm up from deep down in his gut.  He hauled himself out of his chair and wobbled a few steps in the direction of the morass of junk and peed.  After shaking his penis dry, he would stand holding it, surveying his kingdom.  Then plow his way back to the chair.  Either the child had never seen a man pee before or the impression left on him by the shepherds had been wiped clean with the rest.  He had always peed down on all fours like the animals.  The utility of the man's organ was remedial; He tried peeing standing up.  At first it did not work, apparently the hose was not large enough, but after several days he learned how to release the sphincter without having to spread his buttocks, and for the first time in his life, he peed without wetting his forearms.  He also tried spitting. He was a wiz at imitating the introductory sounds, but had no idea how to cough up phlegm or where it came from.  What he could do was vomit, a thing he had learned from the coyotes who are always starving and rushing whatever they can down their gullet before a sibling beats them to it, and as a consequence poisoning themselves. He would hunker down on all fours and set his stomach to convulsing and back away from the issue as they did, imitating too the more or less daffy, submissive expression they wore afterwards.  This could not be applied to spitting.

 

          The junkyard man was innocent of bathing and the child liked his smell.  He did not know the man was listening to ball games and he could not filter music out of static and hiss in the radio, but because the junk man spent his time alone, and in idleness like an animal, and smelled of dirt and piss and sweat, the child was not startled off. Had Sansabot not collared him a few months later, his life would probably have played itself out in the frayed margins at the city limits where eating garbage, mumbling incoherently, being bare-ass and bare-foot and defecating al fresco-in short, living like an animal-would go unnoticed. In these despised precincts where insanity, failure, exile and shame engineer devolution, the direction of his migration would have remained hidden.  But, he did not just settle there. At night he wandered.

 

          Imagine him for a minute.  He can barely see this place he is in, and cannot remember it at all.  In fact, he has no memory. What can serve for coyotes and is useless opulence for sheep, is insufficient for a boy. And immediacy and reflex are vanishing small within the emptiness of human potential.  He could not find them to grab onto, and fell into the well.

 

          He walked through a golden city following the sound of a flute played by a boy with horns and the legs of a goat.  The gardens were breathing out and the smell of flowers and fruit was in the air.  A crash and a boom startled him into a run. It was a symphony playing on a phonograph; it hurt his ears.  A bird disturbed in sleep began to sing from a walled garden.  He climbed over and rested in the fragrant damp.  A light came on in a window above and a woman came out on a balcony.  It was the golden city; this was the shadow of the golden city.  This was its reflection cast here, the width of the streets, the placements of gardens, the fig and lemon tree, the bird singing and the woman come to the balcony to listen in duet with him, all these had happened before in the golden city and were reflected here.  He could hear the flute; he could hear that the tune had found the flute. The flute was only the scantest coalescence of the tune, the rest overflowed into the city that was built to catch the song and hold it from trailing off.

 

          Soon after that he recognized himself in a broken mirror left under a street lamp to be picked up with the trash.  He saw the street lamp first and recognized it in the mirror, and then he saw the little boy's face with the light beside it, and he knew it was his, and he cried.  Not for lost years, not for loneliness, but for the universe he saw there.

 

          He was remanded to a foster family who were paid for the discarded children they processed.  He was a tough case and they did not spare the rod.  A ten year old who is not toilet trained and who can not talk can be handled in no other way.  He did learn to use the bathroom and wear clothes, and because he was not actually born to a sheep or coyote and must have been lost no earlier than at two years of age or so, he was able eventually to cobble together a kind of pidgin language, mostly nouns and signs, and strike out again on his own after a few years, and as if following road kill back to its original source, wound up in New York City where beasts, chimaeras or saints can be accommodated. He never did master letters beyond what was needed to read envelopes and so gain employment in a mailroom along with the retarded and debilitated, and so he could never tell us that instinct is not an irritant that must be staunched but instead is the longest distance light must travel to existence.

 

          His dwellings were always nearly bare of furniture but cluttered with the wrappings from fast food joints.  He kept his taste for grease and salt.  If someone had ever seen him sleeping on his mattress on the floor, lying on his side, his arms and legs making palsied jerks, and yipping, they might have found it sad, but no one ever did.  He was dreaming of the moon.

 

 

JANISSARY

 

 

          She needs constant care. She lost her mother too young. She is not a baby or I couldn’t have kept her alive, but her mouth is small and to feed her I chew our grub and spit it in her mouth, as birds do.  Often, she won’t eat it, but some she accepts and this keeps her alive. I have wrapped her in a blanket and she is strapped to my back along with my bow and khalig. This is no life for a child. She shouldn’t have seen what she has seen, especially with her cornflower eyes. They had been yellow river pebbles, but I replaced them with flowers. I couldn’t protect her, but at least this way her eyes have a chance to have once been young. A small chance, for once the dew dries she will never again cry.

 

          I collected straw from the stables and shaped her small limbs and chest. It was after the battle at the steep banks and we had gone among the fallen harvesting the spoils. From the infidels I collected what luck threw my way, but from the horses heavily dead I gathered her body. I gathered the straw and fodder we carry in saddle bags to soothe the horse the night before battle and remind him of the hand that feeds him so that he will serve it for love and gratitude, as a horse trained by lash honors no bond and will bolt. I descended the steep banks to the shallow stream, and scooped mud from cut earth and mixing it with the straw and buckwheat, fashioned her small limbs and chest, and solidly I shaped her wattle head and planted the two pebbles for her eyes. Then I said a prayer for her in the language from the village where I was requisitioned for the sultan, a Christian prayer, and breathed life into her. That is why she speaks Slavic because that is her soul, and was my tongue before the madrash, a language for children that I speak to my horse when I feed him. It is made from much the same things as she, steppe grass, melted snow and the voyages of sun and moon across the sky. From these things, too, horses are made, and myself, and especially a prayer and kind hand.

 

          These are the things that made me along with others. Large things moved through the hut where I lived and it was my task to build myself into them from smaller things that I could find.  How was I to build myself into my father from a spoon and bowl and buckwheat? Should I add a fish, but how and for what? Could I see a fish in him? And his footfall on the wooden floor, and his voice rooted through my bones. From this collection would I be able to build a bridge into time where I might come alive, a wooden boy, a spoon, a dish and a kestrel, rapture in my eye?

 

          Then, they were lost into forever when I was requisitioned by the sultan at ten.

 

          They built a metal soldier from me, slapping swords and boots on the wattle boy and covering him up, and he can’t speak to his father who had built a passage into time because into the metal soldier they put a voice box speaking Turkish and Arabic, and the saints can’t be called, either.

 

          I have never taken a new recruit to my bunk. I could, now, since I have been in battle and have killed. I would have been taken immediately; I was already ten, nearly over ripe. It would have been by Ukrainian or another Slav, and he would have yelled curses in Turkish as he shafted me, and later whispered to me in our native tongue and comforted me, and treated my bleeding with a salve we use on horses that staunches bleeding and prevents festering.

 

          Instead, I was taken by an officer and for two nights he gave me gifts of jewels and gowns and bathed me. He fed me dates and figs from his hand. Each night he left me to sleep alone perfumed by oils, in a bed with curtains. On the third night he beat me with a riding crop and cursed me in Arabic and slapped me. With the welts rising he forced me to dance and spat on me as I danced, and directed my steps as he would gait-training a horse, snapping my ankles with a stick. Then he entered me, facing me, and forced dates in my mouth.

 

          My madrash studies began and my martial training. We were taught to suffer pain without surrender. Sophia tried to speak to me, but I wouldn’t trust her and wouldn’t mold her to house her voice.

 

          Whenever I could, I went to the stables and the stableman befriended me. He alerted me when foals were to be born, and let me assist. First dropped, they looked to be precipitated from tallow. I suspect them yet of being cast in the inner light, that foundry of tabular light. I watched them in the meadow. Early, the stableman secreted me to the paddocks, and mists would rise from the meadow as the stars dissolved, and the foals coalesced from the mists and gamboled in the grass born still in paradise, and I never took a requisitioned boy.

 

          Tonight I have picket duty. Tomorrow, we will put the infidels to the sword. The horses chew their fodder. The sound gives me peace. The grass tears lushly; I hear the water in its deep note, and they chew with an earthy note, like their hooves on loam. They have no foreboding and remember nothing but calm days and return to them as soon as the battle is over. Should they be killed, they have only known heaven and can never be lost.

 

          “Wake up, Sophia. It’s our chance.”

 

          “Amir, I was dreaming and you have stolen my dream from me.”

 

          “Tell it to me. Then you’ll have it back.”

 

          “You speak selfishly, Amir. I had dreams before you took me and they were all of things just as they are, and now I can only remember them. But, that’s the way it is, and you don’t even give me a pretty dress, and I would prefer periwinkle to corn flower for eyes, they would see more sunrises. I so like sunrises, and evenings, too. I was much given to play at those times. Such light, and the shadows are out for mischief, not even a grouch escapes being wrung into strange shapes. Find me a dress made of such colors, or the colors of fall will do nicely, or shall it be sky blue, or a winter blue? But no, a horse blanket and this sack, but why not let me sleep so once again I might weave a dress from twilight, and jewel it with the first three stars.”

 

          “Hush, chatty girl. My officer’s coming to check if I’m awake at my post.”

 

          “He’s gone. Now tell me what I will dream when I’m at last allowed to sleep.”

 

          “Will you get me the dress?”

 

          “I’ll try.”

 

          “Will you? What’s certain is you won’t let me sleep, anyway. Well, if you wish to know, take me down to the stream, and I’ll tell you things you might dream before the battle tomorrow. But, you must take me to the stream. I won’t tell you until you break an order given to you in Turkish.”

 

          I had to promise her the dress again and then she told me.

 

          “I can tell you where this stream has been and what it has seen. I understand its tongue. You baptized me in such a stream. This stream talks with other rivers, even the Don, and this river knows a certain family that lives beside it in the Ukraine. Yes, it does. Tomorrow, no later, the dress. On your soul.”

 

          “Yes. Yes. I already promised. And my soul, no less.”

 

          “This family has come for years, the river has seen them christened and buried through the generations, and it has collected their reflections, and here is one of them to seal your promise. Two children, a boy and a girl, came to this river and they wee naked and they were all alone but they weren’t afraid. They ate only what grew in trees and the animals weren’t shy around them. They were your parents, before you were born. The world was their garden where they held hands and they walked by the river, and the river tells me it is everywhere like this. If it looks out from its bed it sees all the children like this, their cottages and the paths they follow into the garden. Sometimes the garden is only a single flower, and that is enough because it’s a periwinkle, and it is always that way in reflections the stream caches. So, looking in it you’ll always see yourself reflected in a world where your happiness is promised forever. Now, let me sleep and keep your promise or next time you’ll have to try to dream what horses dream and answer forever to metal spurs.”

 

          Next day we put the infidels to the sword. They had not given the sultan his tribute. With my khalig I pierced the farmer’s heart. His blood gushed out, and from his blood-dyed shirt I will make Sofia her dress, because blood dries into the color of autumn leaves.

 

          That night I dreamed a family across a stream. They came mornings and evenings to eat on its banks; mom and dad and their children, a boy and a girl.  I saw the boy fishing, and that day, while dozing, he caught a reflection and brought it up from the stream, and looked across at me where I lay sleeping beneath an apple tree.

 

          Every sultan has ordered his jewelers and smiths to fashion him a golden bird that will sing to him a song that will live forever without tarnishing. When this bird is fashioned, he will live inside the song.

 

          The sultan brings us to the palace from our barracks, those who have kept their golden hair. We are his servants and personal guard, and on Ramadan we sing to him. He asks for cavalry songs during most of the year, and we are dressed in battle regalia. But, for Ramadan we wear children’s clothes and sing lullabys. Every requisitioned boy is required to sing a lullaby to the court musician when he first arrives. The sultan likes best the one taken from the Armenian infidels. We sing of almonds and raisins, a cradle with a little white goat beside it, and the sultan whose beard is white, cries as he listens.

 

          “Do you like the dress, Sofia?”

 

          “It’s better than a rag.”

 

          “Can you hear the lost boy?”

 

          “Maybe I can, but if you want to know you must gather wild flowers and build me a crown from them.”

 

          “You are worse than the officers.”

 

          So, I gathered wild flowers. If you are on the lookout you can find them peeking from any place. The woods and streams have sent emissaries to every neglected spot-a corner in the latrine, a garbage dump.  In her new dress and crowned with flowers I tried Sofia again.

 

          “The lost boy is living among the fairies and birds, not far from his parents but invisible to them. When you were first taken, he tried to come with you, but all the military training and religion bored him and he made his way back. The same stork who delivered you to your parents as a baby dangling from his beak, ferried him home again. He called and it recognized his voice and stopped to add him to his cargo received in the clouds.

 

          He could not rejoin his family because by now he could only be heard calling from remembered things, like a ghost. He determined to learn all the animal tongues so he could be heard again. The fairies told him that people only understand the sweet melancholy sung by birds. He snuck into their nests and learned along with their chicks. He learned wren song, and meadow lark and even the nightingale.

 

          When he had thoroughly learned the nightingale song he would sing it by his parents’ cottage and they would think of him and he could enter their dreams. In one of their dreams he was carried towards death, and he stopped his song. Dizzy with his narrow escape, he clambered his way into a swallows nest. He shared their diet of insects that lets them darn the hole opened when they fly between here and the land of the dead. Now, he could escape from the current of his sadness.

 

          This is enough for a crown of flowers and an ill-fitting dress. For more, you must discover what I want. Otherwise, I won’t believe you love me half so much as he does. He can only give me songs, but such songs; you just sing stolen songs for the sultan. Gather a song for me.”

 

          The sultan’s oldest son had rallied his allies to help him usurp his father. We had to closely guard the sultan. His bouts of nostalgia pulled him towards the other world. The sultan didn’t have the will to execute his son, but to his son’s allies who had nurtured this betrayal and impatience, he was merciless. We were called on to torture them until others were named and then execute them. His melancholy grew worse. He had the royal yacht made ready and accompanied by twelve of his palace guard and his boat watched by a small armada of navy ships, we sailed upon the Black Sea and through the Bosporus to the Aegean.

 

          Dolphins led us through the straits.

 

          And then it was night. I woke Sofia.

 

          “I have learned a song from the dolphins”, I told her. Then I sang her their song. It tune is from the Armenian lullaby.

 

          “Soldier, when you will die,

 

            I’ll take you where the sun sleeps,

 

            Deep within the waters.

 

           There you will sleep, too,

 

           Surrounded by stars and by diamonds,

 

           Now sleep while the moon longs for you.”

 

          When I had finished, Sofia told me the stolen boy had sung that same song to her. And that he had learned that death is where the sun sleeps at night and it is not dark there.

 

          “All the seeds that will grow are tended there by songs and they teach about the day by the longing they have for it. This makes their vision of it as sweet as heaven and from this the peach grows, and they have imagined blue sky and green leaves and so it comes to pass, for the seed knows nothing but what they fill it with.

 

          And here Saint Nicholas is loaded with his gifts. Prayers are spoken here, and Jesus gathers them and from them he makes souls that shall always build heaven from longing and the prayers of children.”

 

          That is when they seized me and Sofia and took us to the brig.  They took Sofia from me and left me in irons. But soon they came for me and steered me to the sultan’s quarters.

 

          “Since we have entered the Aegean your hair is more golden than ever.”

 

          He was holding Sofia. Was he looking at her with sadness?

 

          “My son who rebels against me is the first child of my first wife. He was born with blond hair and until he was four his hair was blond. I dreamed of his mother before I married her. When I was only twelve, I dreamed of her. And when I had fever, long after I had twenty wives, I dreamed only of her, but as I had dreamed of her before I was knew her. She is the only wife I have loved and her son the only child who gave me joy. My own father would have fared better had I not been born. It is natural. But, I am tired of fighting against life. Only this son and his mother have been abandoned by me, the rest can only accuse me of formality.”

 

          He beckoned the soldiers to release me, and for me to approach him. He waved them from the room and gave Sofia back to me.

 

          “My son had a doll. It looked like you. A young soldier, a Janissary. I had it made for him. He had no weapons, instead a lute and flute. I had him taken from my son when he entered training. I believe life requires this from us. But, what does Sofia say to you that has turned your hair golden on this turquoise sea with its golden sparks?”

 

          I told him the dome of the Blue Mosque is what an infant knows sleeping on his mother’s breast.

 

 

CARGO CULT

 

 

          I had wandered the world. I had loved truly. At least, nearly stupidly enough to be whole-hearted. Enough to fall.  Enough to have found myself and lost myself, enough to be a stranger to myself in a way that seemed completely myself.

 

          We had planned our wedding. That was all we would talk about. Otherwise we were largely silent together. We planned the feast. We had nothing to say about the ritual, only the feast. We planned dozens, and dozens of dishes. We rhapsodized on each dish to be served. There would be peaches. We remembered our first peach.  We recalled later peaches that revived the first peach for us when it had been lost to experience. We tried to recover these peaches by reciting details, trying to place them on our tongues.

 

          They would return during an embrace, the peach, the plum, the garden; our senses reborn.

 

          When I had been exiled I wandered the world.  I screwed with pure pity for us all. I met the eyes of beggars, cripples and mad men. Any who made due with what we were, or were what we were in innocent completeness. All things seemed brave and tender to me then, living without anger that would have accused and so resurrected love.

 

           In Asia I saw ghosts. Flesh was parchment thin, stretched over silence and light. I saw the Vale of Kashmir. I had already dreamed it. I realized I had been dreaming all this time that I had supposed I slept without dreams, my body transported to its own empty genesis. Sleeping like a stone or the dead. In Kashmir I had remembered, like a stone or the dead.

 

          After this betrayal, I drew a bead on the theaters of illusion. Church to ashram, wherever I could find the camp operas parodying the solemn piety in living.

 

          I found myself at the foot of Mount Athos. To get to the aerie, a basket would have to be lowered. Pull the cord, a bell rings in the Abbot’s chamber. Maybe. There were rumors it was tied to a rock a hundred feet above. Like prayers, it might not be heard.

 

          I was part of a crowd. There were always new faces.  And then some disappeared, disappointed. They could not have been snuck aboard without our noticing. If the basket should ever be lowered I wondered at the scene that would follow. Certainly not holy. A stampede, I feared, like the doors opening for a holiday sale. Would the most worthy or needy win the plunge?  How would I have recognized the proper candidate?  Someone outside my ken, I thought, uncanny, archaic. Most looked like tourists. Maybe, those were the ones with the greatest need, the most in peril of a soulless existence. Or, maybe it was too late for any of us. We were curious and eager to be gulled, but this likely for its entertainment value, a spice for jaded palettes. The authentic was a fresh taste. But, that’s harsh. We, too, were souls, though we looked in our staleness, our sated hunger, hardly worth the candle for wars in heaven, hardly the spoils that launched the angels.

 

          I longed for the patient discipline in the VD clinics that agape screwing had steered me towards. I was reasonably happy in their waiting halls. They had the common dignity and gravity I associate with locker room nakedness. Meditation and skepticism reigned there equally, as did generosity and reserved judgment. There was a common reluctance to rejoin the fray along with a resignation to it, a kind regard for the human critter. Then I tried practicing that vision at Mount Athos base camp. After all, I wasn’t the one to answer if the soul had once been palpable or always this hysterical symptom.

 

          Whole families were assembled; did they really expect to be admitted to a monastery? Or had Mount Athos been converted to a theme park? Vendors sold gyros and falafel and yogurt.  And tee shirts with the mountain air-brushed on. And there were teams of women. They looked serious. I gleaned they felt a convent was for wimps, tempered for the feminine and they were ready for the real thing or to throw the bums out. Music played constantly and telephones rang, and tour buses stopped for a few hours and livid eyed seniors wobbled and hobbled around the grounds, taking photos and listening to a tour guide chatter shtick. This was us, prayers and brays, in tennis shoes and synthetic fibers, the pilgrims from the what is, the material at hand for a divine intent, the searchers for credits and punch lines, rhyme and reason, a chorus, a crescendo, a Jacuzzi, or yes, still, unchanged, unreached or spoiled, the flame that singes the moth.

 

          If we didn’t starve the monks out, they must already be picked over bones, for certainly no monk sworn to silence and gruel could walk through this crowd to gather spoils from a stony garden. So, I left. I decided to follow a drunken goat trail, not being eager to retrace my fruitless steps. I provisioned myself with goat cheese and hard bread. Goat was my ethos. What better guide to harvesting slim pickings and the implausible answer?

 

          The trail wound through barren land. Stones and low shrubs, much the substance of our globe and our life and times, much the beams and rafters to our lives. The sky was glaring bright and cloudless. Small, drought-pinched shadows, night gelled cold and heavy, stars salt-smarting the eyes. I followed the aspirations of goats to cliff flanks over the sea. Blinding clarity stretching into nothing. In my canteen water had disrobed and naked relinquished itself to me more fluent than a peach. Black bread became the pith of stones. Perhaps, if I’d followed a bird, a canopy or leafy bough would whisper; a bee then flower and honey be dulcet, but from goats comes scant comfort save snub of the vaulting atrium and a gut for fugitive graces in un-anointed acres. And a map to find miscreants with similar tactics. Namely, a monk, so habited and so easily identified, rooting under stones, a bracken wig of mussels slung across a pointed shoulder, and gaited, I found as I tried to make good on my own request to follow him back to the pen, to a flickering pace that affected aphasia in me.

 

           The eyes in him, the furtive weld we struck before he re-appeared ten feet down the road and gaining. I hadn’t asked before what I expected saints would look like-the waxy marzipan of icons, or the hallucinogenic cartoons in stained glass panels?-but somewhere lurked an expectation for luminous eyes, a bestial, stolid vapidity and avidity to bring the four elements into a zealot’s merely rhinestone sparkle. This monk nailed the unrealized expectation. Candlelight and silence might dissipate cloudiness in the eyes, and then the mussels and capsized stones-starvation lights the tabular corona in the iris while whittling a shoulder to a point.

 

          The gate into the monastery was a path between two Mediterranean cypresses. It was on a promontory, a shive poking sea and sky.

 

          I’d clung, and gimlet eyes, not able to shake me, now pointed towards a group of monks working on a large wooden contraption. Stone and light and the grand, insipid pressure of empty heavens, such was the proscenium of Athos, and his stage direction as good as I was likely to get or could be offered. After this-the intervening twenty yards-everything was tumbling into ruin. Stones toppled from walls, roof beams sagged, swallows flew in and out of the gaps, and goats and feral cats had the run of the place, along with lizards stuck to lumpy walls.

 

          The monks were working on a catapult, and obviously had no idea what they were doing. The strawboss for the crew-the abbot-scared the piss out of me; he was the most solid man I’d encountered. The abbot’s body was the nimbus of marrow. His brow ridge was a parapet, his jaw massive, he scowled, and every movement seemed to barely restrain fury. His lips were full and cushy and ruby red like an idol fed sacrifices. I believe he had walked into Athos and taken command because nobody dared oppose him. An ancient, pale figure, a white cricket, scuttled about the grounds. He had been the abbot before this usurper arrived, I assumed because of his age and his glee. He was a man now free to play the divine fool.

 

          Under the new abbot’s reign it was every man for himself. Feed on roots and berries and fish you might charm from the sea. No sense would be forthcoming, though orders freed from reason’s constraints would be plenty. Thus for long has spoken the silence save for our echoing voices. And it wasn’t in a night such ripe ruin was achieved. The old abbot had let things go. He was barely of this world. Lifting stones, even conceiving of lifting them, was more industry than he could bear. Years of silence, the body becomes a bindle sloppily knotted to the dowel. The stars, all opportunity provided, continue silent, but crickets wax into an odd sympathy. To chirp, to chirp, perhaps to hop, and leave sonorous chants to plump self-pity.

 

          The catapult would not throw the rock. I’d wondered before how they worked; what the speed materialized from, considering the claptrap jerry rigging. I knew the movies could cheat on their action. Then, just like that, I had it. The pitch was all in aggravating the tensile strength of a key log; the rest of the machine just housed and flexed this protesting log.

 

          I didn’t think I could explain my insight and I could never re-rig this machine even if they consented. And looking more closely at the catapult I decided better to butt out. It was knocked together from plunder. The frame was roof beams, whether opportunistic salvage or the spoils from demolition who knows or dared to ask?

 

          The rope lashings. I studied the ropes that tethered this rack. I looked at the blazing strength of the abbot, a conflagration of bones bound together by divine or profane edict. Best to tip-toe back between the two cypresses. The ropes had been requisitioned from the monks’ sash cinches, and the thickest, some fathom of it slick and mossy, from the single monastery well.

 

          The abbot plucked a skull-sized stone from the hurling basket, snarling at it. Then he pitched it against another in the pile they had collected to fire a broadside at…blinding blue?  When neither rock exploded, bleed, or shattered, he threw it himself against the empty loft. Incredible toss, no food or board, staunch ranged with no quarter for retreat, full rage, the stone arched, weightless, perfect parabola limned across the Euclidean void, and then down it floated, aglow and victorious, unchallenged, right for the deposed abbot’s wispy pate. Who launched himself, landing a full league-some redoubtable earth measure-from his lift-off.

 

          Then he noticed me. Several expressions wrestled with his features before each curdled with effort. He poked a nearby monk and pointed at me. He was quit. He stalked off to grind his molars.

 

          The monk assigned me was a light-footed, crafty plotter. Nimble as a weasel. Wondrous sleight-of-hand; he conjured the bread from my pocket and was nibbling at it before I recognized it as mine. We neared the shapeless pile of a ruined building. He began stalking towards it. I thought him daft. What happy madness to reminisce surprising someone in this ruin?  Or was this the brute abbot’s tutoring? A crow mocked him; he winged a pebble and it flapped to another perch, razing with the baiter’s delight at an easily goaded target.

 

          The robes and blankets were piled here, folded and arranged with straight corners. His stash. Who did he expect to surprise casing this vault?  An incontinent strategist, who else? Himself perfected and confirmed, coveting a market discerned by a select few. The brief parables squirreled in neglected objects. Maybe, such a parable had brought him here. Christ had said he would come like a thief in the night. Wasn’t that an invitation to the cabal of ferrets, magpies and other sneak thieves? Hadn’t Christ meant he was gathering discards, that things worthless to kings and tycoons were hoarded in heaven, and that the man or pack rat who collected finger-nail clippings and shaved whiskers, used coffee grounds and cigarette stubs was putting together a treasure trove with sky high value?  That a certain fellow, stooped under the weight of one humongous sack filled with blankets and robes and other junk might just drag his bony ass up the service steps to heaven with equal promise as the winged hosts?

 

          He did surprise a cat, quite droll of eye in the near afternoon, lounging in the hunching stone kiln.

 

          A wooden bowl, a wooden spoon, a robe and blanket both gay with fleas. Suddenly, a bolt. The icons. Where had he hidden the icons?

 

          The speed of these monks. Amazing. Whatever the wisdom wafting from dust and ruin, it didn’t slouch or creep. Quick as my thought, he vanished from the room. But, equally quick, my pursuit, already a full-fledged player in this catch-as-catch-can contest that pilgrimage had veered towards.

 

          He’d been in training; what is scant flickers and gutters, only the speedy may pick the pocket of its moment. Fast, cut a corner on a dime, zig-zagging like a species elected most edible, but instinctive miser, he tacked to his crèche. He stood spread-eagled to block a fissure some equation describing tumbled stone leaves open. I stood breathless, facing him, triumphant and asinine in equal measure. I absolutely would tag the fleet SOB, and used all my hypnotic powers to freeze him in place with an insane glare. Slowly, I lifted my arm, but abracadabra he was gone.

 

          Cannonading laughter and shimming a sexual violation, I entered the passage. I was several long paces farther from starvation than the ferret, and it was a tight squeeze. Several times I thought I might get stuck and end a phony relic myself.

 

          I popped out from the crimp into a chamber riven by sunlight spears. What a benighted, fugitive’s fascination he had with light. What a keen, petty thief’s eye for its winks and signs, its black market bargaining paralleling the national bourse.

 

          Not one gold candlestick, his treasure was the nearly crude paintings of saints and apostles, and one of Mary and the Infant, and on each a sunbeam trimmed to spot. This cairn so rigged, sheets to toiled winches, to sail as bird-breasted hull upon the azure dome, in its hold what claw and maw pushing brushes had rendered of the tender light torturing their savage hearts. And most fatal thrust: Mary and Infant, the sweet state when the angel suckled at a woman’s breast.

 

          For a week, the abbot’s unfortunate cadre took shifts on a sledge hammer breaking rocks. The abbot formed hunting parties to search out rocks. The standard was not some egg a statue piping within signaled to their eyes. It was something in the texture, a rough look, those chipped off the block to free a lighter form. Tailings, dull and drear, beetled and carbuncled, scab-skinned, these they hauled back to the monastery to beat to talc, these darker materials from the raw loin in the undivided dark. But, not a spark leapt from these for the gravely buried.

 

          The old abbot’s flock followed them keeping out of reach for grabbing to labor, and they sifted the hollows left by the dragooned rocks for bugs and worms.  They popped them in their mouths.

 

          A manly world. No prescription here for marrying Jesus as was open to nuns. What a shortcut that would be; carried off to his kingdom despite a warning in Genesis about such correspondent brides. And that warning in Genesis against illicit trysts, mangled to a fare-thee-well is the one active promise a monk can grasp at. These were men, foul habits, sloppiness and grumpiness, downright ornery, fragrant as dungeon cheese-the one gainful push they could make, offer to the pitch black in their reeking forms, is a mingling with the raw classes. This to draw down the fine-tempered harmonies from the rare hierarchies.

 

          With the ropes from the catapult, the abbot marked off a ring on the monastery’s grounds. Stripping his robes, he slapped his slate chest and challenged the angels to a match.

 

          Here the loins you sought to subvert or filch with finesse, gentle embrace and fine spun tunes. Since when did a woman seek tender charity in an embrace, tepid motive, conceited alms? She would lay with the lion and pull the thorn from his heart. Test your reach and your desire.

 

          Under heat and cold, the hairy-assed creature grunted and bellowed.

 

          No answer from those scattered to the sea bottom, the scuttling crab-walkers, no slapping wings, squandered daughters and broken hip bones, no angels from a younger heaven still game in the germ.

 

          The ferret was part of a loose posse federated by dynamic tension. They ate the same things and kept an eye peeled to jump in if one of them found anything to chew. Their speed resulted from their prey, locusts. These were not grasshoppers from plush paddocks; they were armored assemblies, bolted at the joints and seemingly inanimate until triggered into flight. They also ate lizards, but their favorite was frogs. They trooped out from the monastery, and following them for a full day, I found they would station themselves by a frail creek where frogs caroled shrilly.

 

          Had there been former bands of hapless refugees that had eaten such a diet?  The path to their disappearance would be unmarked by stone. And what lost or gained from lives so ghostly that their own breaching of the veil might be mistaken for wafting?  And yet, for the suspicious, skinflint lot I knew them, their patience was bottomless. How might they appear in the vast space they entered while waiting for events to bring a frog within reach? Might their patience drift above this realm of accident and longing like a white cloud?

 

    Another group never left the monastery grounds. Action was break-back to them. They were emaciated. Their cheeks were hollowed out and their temples squiggly-veined. Their eyes were huge. Closed, the globes large as walnuts in the cups, opened, all expanded pupil without an iris to ring them. Beautiful were these nearly sheer sheaths about the light distilled from desire. These sleepers-mostly they dozed-were clarifying their dreams, reducing the broth to transparency. Ultimately, dreams unstirred by desire would leave only tracings by geometry, the subtle vectors that spool images across our closed lids and lay the boulevards for migrating songbirds and stars.

 

          The first to arrive was a musician. He carried a stringed instrument, maybe a lute; it looked like a cross between a guitar and a gondola. He seemed pleased in his scruffiness, perhaps mostly in his beauty that wildness brought to the blossom, tangled locks, coal-black as were his eyes.

 

          More musicians came with instruments I had never seen before, folk instruments or improvised, and some from Asia that barely played and never adhered to a tune. Plucked, they released a fermata, and the next single note not so much followed the other as delved deeper into it.

 

          Then came soldiers, or was it a carnival? Whatever they were, tumblers or lost platoon, they spat in their hands and flexed their muscles and seemed altogether taken by their swart power. Was the abbot looking for a tussle? They had some pretty busted up looking customers in their number, blokes who were perfectly happy to take another poke in their flattened noses for the pleasure of returning it in kind. Their retorts rang out gleefully. The more rusted the throat, the more it croaked out succulent insults. This troop of brigands was all for chunk, slap and abrasion, and positively set on getting your goat. They were for the headlong toss and bouncing back against solid mass. Their rage for smells; musk and sewer were catnip to them.

 

          The new comers were eager to trade. They wanted a market. They wanted manure on the ground. They wanted children running about and hard bargaining. They wanted haggling and cart horses pissing in splattering cascades. The musicians would sing for that. There wasn’t an original verse, challenge or haggle they could muster, but as every minstrel song first heard during plague or famine is sweeter than times of plenty, there never were more impish and skipping tunes than these from such brief springs. Goat-legged Pan piped such airs. These pipes so recently slipping from the fearsome, regal chorus of church organ, these pipes pranced in the meadow.

 

          The old abbot was fleet to the chance, hawking treasures. From under his robe, the authentic, the venerable, for your eyes only, wooden spoon, wooden bowl, frayed blanket. But, that was just a line, for your discerning eye these sandals, and yes, indeed, these holes in the sole, fragrant wonders sold for a song, and just the one for his ears only, the very answer to a prayer, a fair exchange. Warmed his cockles, caught his drift, spoke the castaway, did this commerce that stokes the heavens and earth, these lovers’ dreams of lovers.

 

 

RIDING THE RAILS

 

 

When the chock-a-block, cheek-to-jowl leaked from my life I was left with a do-it-yourself kit. The directions were imbedded in the inseparable conjunction of the parts.

 

          Ice boats, astronomy, and railroads; the rest was lost.

 

           This continent is laced with abandoned railroad tracks. These railroads were built differently than the later adventures in eminent domain and manifest destiny. People were pulled from their separate beds into a night humming like a big bell. They were called to follow the resonance to its source. No railroad had been built, but that’s what drew them into the soul of the sleeping land.

 

          It had thrown the covers from my bed since childhood. The long whistle, a window and the moonlight outside.

 

          I dug out old surveyor maps from archives in land grant colleges.  They could point me to these forgotten lines, and from them branched others, some pirated, some bribed for, some persuaded or seduced, lines aimed towards flanking hills, blue or green on the horizon

 

           These maps all marked failures. If these lines had succeeded they led to New York or Los Angeles. These were still quiet enough to hear while sleeping.

 

          I built my boat on such a rail line. I scavenged the wheels from dilapidated boxcars, planted them on the tracks and built on top. No need for sea worthiness, but I built it carefully with an eye towards the subtle substance it would ply. My bed had carried me in my first dreams; that went into my workmanship.

 

          Companionable geniuses junket about with a boy. Most squint up inside the single life he leads. In other lives they might have walked beside him and yarned around the cooking pot. Mine resisted civilizing especially having my ears cleaned. They called me outdoors. I could bound over river rocks faster than anyone and launch a stone into ever smaller hops until it nested on a pond and reflection would smooth its dander and settle around it. Mine were a scruffy crew who preferred scamper and scrabble and the quiet that mortared between them. They tutored my hand to their liking and use, following echoes.

 

          I completed her in the merry month of May, stocked her and stretched sail. I’d oiled the wheels to a fare-thee-well and glided along barely chipping the quiet. Many a critter’s dainty introversion I trespassed, all sharp attention pawned for an idyll. Cub and fawn bobbed at flowers, the springy stalk a teasing tether to a vision completed in its utterance.  I came on couples in their nuptials and would have excused myself, but wolves, deer, bear and wolverine had no miser left in them, but overflowed and raced beside my boat, and birds hitched a ride without their remembered hauteur but in a way I took as all of us were equally aloft-a coincidence in purpose steadily and gently appraised.

 

          I picked up wayfarers. They kept their own counsel and gave little in conversation for passage. I named them as I guessed them, vagabond, refugee, migrant, fugitive, pilgrim.  Birds of a feather flock together, I thought, and wondered at the iron coursing in the currents I rode.  Charon’s temperance worried at me, the drier hemming to peace.  What are his cargo, these shades?  What fining, distillation prepared them, and what reconciliation that king or slave in umber realms can tender only coin for passage, the rest chaff to the boatman.

 

          I gnawed on this as the passengers I took thinned in substance with the miles rode. The gull that landed on my craft fair alone raised the jib on my prow. A cold eye he cast, our speed gaining. I saw in his stare a shearing from the long winds, what a carpenter’s plane may peel from a beam, rind but pith, too. Swift upon distance he took us until spreading his honed wings he lifted from the bow and held pace until veering and swept to a climb.

 

          On the clear, moonless night when the stars crowded in and not a breeze, a snowshoe hare and snowy owl kept détente on my still boat. So still, I heard falling starlight and was there to catch the moment that single thimble spilled a light’s life away and it was seized into dew and foundering flake. And the hare looked into my eye and I heard the moon’s sheer train sliding over the deep.

 

          That the clear heart of light might be empty put sorrow to all routes.

 

          She waved me down and I reefed mainsail to bid her passage. Dressed for the city but would serve for the road, garbed with a low-heeled shoe, brass buckle and broad toed, near glamour in stern times and mile-worthy in a pinch. Her coat for fog through to sleet and the smaller snows have lost their down and pelt salty sting on their empty fall.

 

           Sympathy, even charity not haggard in her weary face, and ardor never once supple, her chin set for the arduous, leading to breast every blow, her eyes bruised though only by tears, and true and sharp without wile. I knew her at once she climbed aboard in workmanlike fashion and took my assisting hand in a comradely grip. She’d clambered aboard many times before and cobbled the gangways from crates and wire spools, and fashioned gowns from wool socks and newsprint glued with spit. A tin spoon and plate had fed multitudes, and I recognized her even had she never leaned against the mast, steady as the pole, the moon a lamplight on its foremost height. Lilly of the Lamplight for the ready answer to every query spoken, growled, or cursed. She’d opened her coat in the teeth of a gale, lashed to the mast by every soldier’s siren, and fixed on one leg, the other around their waist, dispensed the lyric verse for less than Charon’s fare.

 

          I rode the rails and found myself at a common speed with music. There light dons lightness to gain its senses, the song begins and light girds its loins to enter the moment.

 

          Green boy abed, light bobbin, that long song was a round, call and echo, that bid you passage.

 

          I rode the rails, grim and gothic, girdling this gathering of longing that troughed emptiness so starlight pours in. fit to burst, such is the tuning, ripe to bloom, hardly checked and sweet unfolding, this fruit and flower, perishing, opened past chance to close, the song from red silence is tears indistinguishable of grief and joy.

 

 

PITCH THE GREEN CANOPY

 

 

          Clear, clear night he picked to get his bearings at sea after shipwreck; deeper, cleaner into bottoms up this high-fall season. The ballast being the green leaves and grass that invites you to plant your feet steadfast no farther than the eye can see, so raspberry red, pumpkin orange and fool’s gold birch say sally forth knock-kneed and wobbling and tumble where you might with the whole stretched dome yawning beneath your feet.

 

          Venturesome industry took hold of him this season. Psst, touts from everywhere beckoned, bargains afoot, high returns, dazzling windfalls kicked up at every step. And spent in a wink, and another offered, so out into the bright dark to be grabbed by the sinew itself that was rocking the boat this early October, hiking trails in the woods and along ridges, guessing at the stars’ fragile hold on the rafters, looking for what spilled, what necessarily spilled as perceived by a head purged of grave responsibilities.

 

          Emu egg was his thought for the rock on the deer trail he was following. That size and on its own and the potter’s craft upon its shape, no hewing on it, and put it in his back pack. Not that it could be an emu’s egg but emu eggs struck him as drunken science and were objects of his affection. A tribute to an egg, sculpted from marble, and the green-blue gauche on it a planetarium view of a day sky that might be the foiled desire of heavy-footed, flightless birds, what filled their bird brains, an envy become religious icon. Enough seasonal harmony in the association for him to shoulder the graceless tome.

 

          The furnace was running, double panes on the window, he shrugged off his pack and shed his woolens, squinting against the lights he flicked on.  He pulled his prize from the pack. It was a tactile find, probably to be passed up in daytime. Amazing smooth it was considering the place he’d found it. In a stream it would have been lost in the crowd, even a bit dowdy in comparison. A finer stuff had shaped it and unlikely ridge where it had stumped his toe and closer to bare-assed sky than any nursery for rocks, it was empty space that had polished it, and time stretched thin. However, it was no meteor an emeritus astronomy professor could say with assurance. Smooth, calico coat, but no heat annealed facets, should it have sluiced from a heavenly horde, soaring down on feathery wings would have been its agent, a great swan requisitioned from myth. He laid it on the coffee table in front of the couch. In the incubating warmth, removed his shoes, placed his feet in woolen socks beside it, and soon nodded off. The moths repelling on the window panes not completely silent, skittering a bit, and he without reckonable mass out there, eating from the dark fabric as moths do wool.

          He awoke from his nap-a seventy-five year old man wafts his way into dementia during such faints and wakes with childhood superstition or insight and more, the frightened, gullible wariness and opportunism of the child incubus he carries. He spotted that the rock had turned a bit and it was certainly a dragon’s eye had watched him while he slept, he now knew for the brief moment before some scrim of psychology could be painted over revelations. He’d kicked it in that nerve reflex just at slumber’s border as the anesthesia takes effect, obviously. Still, his mind played in the gifted grog from his nap, and spun a tale as the old star gazer climbed the stairs to his bedroom carrying his boots to insure finding them in the morning, at least a better chance. He was long a victim of his disembodied eye traveling the interstellar lanes, a napping state long preserved in his profession though now lost to subsequent generations. And it’s to be noted that out there he had been permeable to dreams and whispers common to the mane, mermaids of a different stripe, horsemen, hunters, and mostly as is the case, a longer for the sea spume kicked up by the prow, the dolphins that surge upon the driving urge of amour captains the eye. Had cost him the respect of institutions those crowded seas of Byzantium. The amorous flesh of god and math, the choruses out there, raining down inherited melancholy and destined loves. It was fall, more foot loose and fancy free, a license to events and adulturies. Monsters about with tenderness in their hearts, all souls night in the offing, its churning descent already inspiring the unrequited.

 

          The old man racked it up, doused the bedside lamp and went to sleep.

 

          Clunk. A real, unapologetic thump from downstairs.

 

          What give him the courage to search for a clumsy culprit? The worse alternative of lying in bed with his imagination going hypochondriac. He’d left the light on downstairs and descended without flashlight or flicking on the light in his own room. Oh yes, he sensed someone had been here; you feel such things. But, the cause of the clunk was the stone had broken open and a longitudinal half had dropped from table top to floor. Now, that a stone may ripen until its cup runneth over is hardly likely, but what sights a dragon’s eye may have seen, and more to the point, the broken stone revealed itself a diode, and retina or no, in a petit glittering cosmos destiny piping can’t entirely be ruled out. Just such a thread ran through its black yolk to the batty astronomer walking a trail and its own imminent hatching. It was in the right hands. And now he noticed the kitchen door was open to the whole wide night and he went to close it. The chill smelled snow and he was too slow to close it off before he let himself be drawn outside.

 

          Uncanny bright out there this moonless night. Snow had fallen and he mused on a crash of silence must first have startled him from sleep, a crescendo or an overture for the snow fall that spilled over brimming from sleeveless reaches. The intent expressed in the transparent humming that migrated through each thing and lit them from inside so that now he needed no more than this heartfelt roll call to lead him forth without stumbling. Snow, the drifting fall of mourning angel’s wings, such far fetched longing oversaw his steps.

 

    The white sheet was scripted by cuneform starting at his slab porch. And the ode finished with the faun herself under the crippled apple tree. Drastic surgery inflicted on this old tree, only one of its major limbs had been spared the saw, and from this one limb a flare of smaller limbs still offered apples. He would give her one. It was love at first sight; he would give her an apple. A hard time for a faun with winter in the offing, but bright hopes were on her. An innocence tested against greater odds might prove more complete. And his was puppy love, lucky find, for it is boundless. Sighting him, she leapt and pranced. She fancied him and took the apple from his hand. First love, the natural outcome of innocence cleared of debris or yet to be encumbered by it, the creature falls into the globe’s singing heart.

 

           She led him and he picked apples from the dying tree and she ate them from his flattened palm. She led him through cold reaches, the first dusting from the flensed skies, this old man who had left only his peak roofed cottage prow in the heavens, his sprightly walk and his head among the stars. All he had was this heavenly harvest that so completely whispered requited as a plea. He followed her and what she touched blossomed and recited its verse, and they found him beneath Orion, and on a table in his house they found a diode whose sparkling traced clearly a faun’s prancing leap. And some few noticed or could have noticed around the vacated body found along a route of pure serendipity in the moonless night, a constellation drawn by what before the stars impelled their brilliance. Faun could be seen in it, changeling it was, a girl’s face or an island city, and constant through them all the ligaments of a throat just bursting into song.