Four

The Green-Ey’d Monster

I	She lov’d me for the dangers I had pass’d, and I lov’d her that she did pity them.
II	As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds, had been incorporate.
III	In thy dumb action will I be as perfect As begging hermits in their holy prayers.

I. The Mezzotint

		Imagine a picture.
In an English countryhouse, Salop. or Derbyshire, Essex or Sussex possibly, upstairs in the gallery, to the left, between hunting engravings by Weenix and a sketch by Gainsbourough, ‘Lady in the wood with two Pomeranians,’ a mezzotint, of negligible artistic merit. You pass through the darkening galleries, at dusk, past modest rows of arms and armor, whispering sallet, greaves, ambrace, gauntlet, quarrel, snaphance. The print is there but impinged upon, by the house, by the windy park outside, the cawing of the rooks, it is a mezzotint, 15 by 10 inches, black frame, (illegible) sculpsit, scoured, harrowed by the hand, manière noire or English manner. It is the picture of a house, a manor-house, Salop. or Derbyshire possibly, not this manor-house, but similar. The pseudo-
		Grecian porticos, the mansard-windows closed.
				But one casement-window stands, to the left, in the
		moonlight, slightly open.
		But this is not the picture. The picture was
				painted by the dark-eyed interloper, vendor of plaster figurines,
wares of Autolycos, free ladrone/improvisatore who, after having inveigled into the arms and favors of a hapless (downstairs) maid, having access to the kitchens and the larder, just had escaped though that window, facing woods and
		dark oblivion.
	The picture is of an Italian villa on the bleak Dalmatian shore, a
woman (his sister)
		in the foreground, vacantly regarding
			the iron billows of the Adriatic waters,
				leaning on the gray granite, hands clasped
			behind her, dreaming
of the handsome giaour corsair,
			mustachioed, with cone-tipped hat and puttees
who killed her parents, raped her, abducted
			her young brother for a ransom and left him
	on an islet, for dead (shades of Böcklin!). She does not know
her brother has recovered, discovered and abandoned
			painting, in Germany, Westphalia, where now
				his masterpiece is housed in Folkwang, Hagen, and
at this very moment (when? time is indeterminate)
			escaping through a window in Salop. (or Essex) with
				four shillings sixpence and a half-eaten
			leg of mutton, buttoning up his trouser flap.
				But this is not the picture.
The picture is being painted far inside
			the gray granite at a time indeterminate, by a
magician, some poor relation of Sarastro,
			who in peaked turban and wide, star-spangled cloak (some soup stains)
		is called to Frederick Barbarossa in the mountain.
			He is now preparing, for the Eighth Centenary of Old Redbeard, a mandala
		of Oriental opulence and splendor
				straddling the world.
			But this is not the picture.
		The hardly perceptible spot (minestrone?) on the golden
	turtle’s shell, just beneath the Eastern
			foot of the blue elephant:
			a speck:
this is the starship U.S.S. Enterprise bringing a suspect
mimeobionic, infraquarcine, microplane android artist to Starfleet Headquarters for questioning
			by the Galactic Council.
		His crime is Re-Creation of the Past,
	and palinpoietic activities are, as every callow space cadet will know,
punishable
				by Eternal Life.
			In six days he divided
		light and darkness, sky and water,
			named the turtle and the elephant,
		built the granite, cooked the soup and spilled it
			and raped the maiden,
	spending the seventh wandering down the dusky galleries, whispering
intercalary, astrolabe, Sidereal, diapason, equinox, in that manor-house in Essex (or Salop.)
			But this is still not the picture.
* * *
		O precise pleasures of pedantry, ineluctable
routines of the imagination! It is the
		sensuousness of the commonplace that breeds
			philately, curling, Culbertson bridge
				rather than ghosts;
		yarrows talk auguries
			ouija confidences
				and orifices.
		Indeed, this has nothing whatsoever to do with
				the picture.
	Imagine a child, lying in bed wide awake in the whey-
		coloured light, looking
				at the rustic tapestry, counting
the tines of the antlers of the heraldic stag emerging from the
	woods, surrounded by does and fawns,
		or seeing faces of people, to be met in life or not
			in the russet damp-stains
				on the ceiling, or thinking of
the frightening figure who has just disappeared from
	the mezzotint, leaving the window ajar
		with a dead child in its fleshless arms,
	or of the little boy who decided to
stay in the walled in, wainscoted bed of the old, old
	grandparents while the house
		crackles with fire,
going behind the fusty draperies, into the pickled air of old age
	as if into an upstairs gallery,
		whispering soup, sun, morning, prayer, breakfast, embrace;
	Or imagine two lovers who have long since ceased
				to talk
to one another, or who will go on talking to them-
		selves, whispering quarrel, gauntlet, equinox, soon, same, graves.
			This is the same picture, the same
	treasure-filled Spelunca,
		darkness scratched from the dry copper plate.
Every conversation is inbetween these two,
	not between the maiden and her ravisher, nor the child
		and God, nor the artist and his shrunken world.

II.A. The Conversation: An Ode

1 So she says: “The lambent disguise of my future employer is the case in point.” And he would say: “The cruellest enemy to my face in town. And I wander. endlessly forlorn, evading the obvious recompense of the peat turf of my childhood. Then I was an Irishman of the mind relaying quarrelsome	1 A magician and a sorceress vie in single combat. The transformations begin. He tests his weapon. (IIBc)
2 murders in contumaciam. Remember? And I revere actors like John Qualen, Andy Devine, and pity poets (like the imitators of Frank O’Hara who invariably refer to The Cinema. Which is, after all but a poor substitute for Nature) Where Wordsworth would have hissed along the polished ice, or else, ‘cut across the reflex of a star,’ benignly to forfeit the movements of the ruse,
3 naturally, she goes, where existence, a mandible, belatedly, of Science, chewing the fat with who knows how numinous and tuberous a crowd, laughs, uproariously, at an opportunity of health and variously dastard mulch, foresworn in innumerably wicked ways to what I call in lucid moments despicably voracious happiness.
4 That is how we have it plastered, friend; (and do not spurn that sobriquet!) Maranatha admen split our world in twain, and for two short years I skated down the wold, sequacious to reason and to my eye; how much I loved you and how much foray I rapaciously bestowed upon myself is quite beyond the point and ludicrously connected with other questions.”
5 “May this aduncity suffice; let foregone conclusions in antres vast beteach the adumbrations of the bizarre bananas of intelligence,” he says, “(indeed, as was observed by Pantagruel: ‘Que diable de langage est cecy?’) thus, harnessing clandestine strategies, in this world of blanc-mange, I am looking for the crookedness, the corners, in language and in love.’
6 Then he says: “I like to tell you of Iamblichos, how he twice stepped into a spring and twice summoned a youth thereafter. One with golden hair called Eros, the other, darker, Anteros. They clung to him like children, like right and left.” — “Better,” she says, “Eunapius, he told that.	6 He resorts to anamnesis. (IIBb)
7 (Or else, of the leaping hare, how she springs unto the fire, and through it, singeing her back, through crackling may and brambles, emerges as she goes, with one enormous bound, homing to her form, or home-hollow, as does the poem, facing its self-destruction, find its form,
8 or, for that matter, any life or force – )” So she adds: ‘The curls of his beard are wet, Glaucus, and white as gushing fountains to the sight, but the little god Palaemon, sleeping on a dolphin, is beardless and suckling. The isthmos is a recumbent demon. On the right it has a youth, on the left are girls.
9 These are two seas, fair and quite calm. The sacrifice is in progress. Life seems a joke, a cruel, grim joke. You are a laughable incident, or a terrifying one, as you happen to be less powerful or more powerful than some other form. You are a comic little figure hopping from the cradle to the grave.”
10 And: “Furthermore, I don’t like irony,” she says, “it indicates a small soul.” “But metaphor,” he intervenes, “however politic, never slaked a dry throat? To enjoy Caprona’s romantic suggestions we must have water,” “Succotash! Cumquats!” he suddenly ejaculates, “as W.C. Fields was, with some justification, wont to remark.
11 The gravedigger with the gravelly voice, yes, in stronger moments I do identify with the sage and his rage; who, I say, is willing to look after (all things being equal as they most decidedly are) the casualties of verandah, or jacaranda, elmtrees dying in the West Country, old men flimflammed out of their lingering lingam.
12 Hey, you (and naturally I mean you) greatgranddaughter to forfeits, beldam of advice and underwear, so you merchandised me out of my life, inspiring petty murders in the better circles (how gracefully: you once gobbled it up, not the splinter, but the whole bloody ice-cold mirror).	12 Political solutions are tested and abandoned. (IIBd)
13 For this poor right hand of mine is left to tyrannise upon my breast —farouche memento of its spiel!— simulating mascara-like evoe (Yeux glauques: green stalagmites of ocean floor, verdant pools of peevish massacres) in decking, speleologically, with labyrinthine favors any growth of fur one might suspect,
14 as when Dolomedes, the intrepid fisherman and skater, with coal-black cuticle, majestically is striding cross the pond, pushing his shadow like a wheelbarrow. Often did I see him when a boy, on Scanian peat-pits, contemplate his picture in acidulous dark waters, which is a picture of some kind of quietism, no doubt, part of my life, telling me half-truths, which are, after all, true, too.
15 How can you love a mirror-image? How can you love anything else? Such is the emptiness of enantiomorphs. Is anybody happier, scanning, radiant with sleep, time and time again, the same hand, like a zodiac with equal emphasis to all twelve fingers, spelling out the alphabet of simulacra to the biosphere? O romance
16 of the gravity-defying leap when in exalted Stimmung belabours with might fa belle baleine the oil-stained ocean and, emerging al fresco and full length to view above the eldritch image of its taunting paramour, meets the refracting spectral gleanings of its colloid hue; confirming thus its habit of mating not a tergo but, like Narcissus, frontally.
17 “Jealousy is the delirium of signs, at least according to Gilles Deleuze,” he says, “how much more debris then in the other green-eyed vituperative blandishments which have learned to eat, Catullus-fashion, their own organs. Left-handed electron meet right- handed amino-acid: is called life, an extension of the right hand, like the Nuer spear.”
18 “I am sorry to interrupt your masturbatory fantasies: Nuer spears indeed!” she retorts. “May I remind you that Deleuze speaks of aggression against the self answer to Evans-Pritchard’s allegations) which ensures, fastidiously and blandly, the mere refusal of everything. But the blunt feeling of irreparable	18 She enters into eschatological detail. (IIBa)
19 loss, the yearning for one’s lost loved ones, the numbness of social injustice, the irrevocable pain of past happiness in the present; those are the real transmigrations and not this paltry transmogrifactioning; for solace please reflect on how Loki in venom-induced convulsions, remembered the feeling
20 of how to be salmon, and, sequestered in some icy cataract, endure the slackening of mighty muscles, the dimming of his eye, the loss of teeth, the shaping of his jaw into that humiliating hook of age, knowing that he never would reach the looming estuary. So you never shall, or could, catch me.”
21 “It is not so much,” he says, “in personal terms that I believe in vampires (I’d rather believe in the pelican whose blood siphons off to its nearest) but the fantasies of colonialism are rife with creatures winging the night with streaks of darkness; an aide-mémoire in how to use the fustian in writing: sparingly.
22 Yes, magic is equity, necromancy national independence, autochthonomy. My wife not a vampire, not a poor harassed creature doomed to terrible woe, but a splendid woman, brave beyond belief, patriotic in a way which has but few peers even in the wide history of bravery!
23 No wonder that she could find a way to the battlements mysterious to everybody else! As she is a real woman, she is in greater danger then ever in the hands of Turkish ruffians. Life-long misery and despair must be the lot of a Christian woman. She must be rescued – and quickly!”	23 Political solutions are once more abandoned for scatological detail. (IIBe)
24 “Consider instead,” she muses dreamily, “the pallor of the ptarmigan, or of the streaking cotton-tail of the hare, running errands for the shrivelled crone. Magic is equity, yes, but milk-wise, white as her talented hair or the stolen sticks in her apron, insurance against the tabernacle weight of humdrum charity.
25 “No,” she resumes, “I do not like it, this studied innocence, this wearing of an ‘I was a teenage werewolf’—badge on the sleeve of a mouldy shroud. That innocence smacks of insouciance. Ah, this is what the poem tells you: Can’t we get a laugh out of shroud? She came shivering, looking for a fire and found a dressing-gown.
26 Instead of food, what is sent to stangers is pictures of food, XENIA. The hare in his cage is the prey of the net, and he sits on his haunches moving his forelegs a little and slowly lifting his ears, but he also keeps looking with both his eyes and tries to see behind him as well, so suspicious	26 She deflects from her time loop. (IIBf)
27 is he, and always cowering with fear; the second hare hangs on the bare oak tree, his belly laid wide open and his skin stripped off over his hind feet. In a bed in her cottage the old woman is dead, from hypothermia, or abdominal cancer, or hunger: she has tried to chew the white whittles off her firewood.”
28 First now he says: “Lansdale, CIA Intelligence officer of the Philippines, most ingeniously used psywar methods against the Huk insurgency: he had his men catch a guerrillero, puncture him and drain him, hanging from a tree. The blame was then on a local vampire, an asuang. Like a dank breadfruit from a tree.”
29 And a little further on: “My friend who had been a naval petty officer, told me a better story: once in the Philippines he had done a band of Huks a good turn. They came to him, in the evening, saying in soft Tagalog lisp: ‘Hey, senor,’ you done us big favor. Is there anything we possibly could do for you,
30 mister? Anybody we could kill for you, a superior or sweetheart, no?’ And that really puts the lid on the question: is not every true poem reading like the ruined phrases of endearment at the end of a relationship or life: ‘You are killing me, lady,’ ‘My heart bleeds for you,’ and ‘Thanks for nothing, lover boy!’”	30 Cycle completed. Hostilities resumed almost immediately. (IIBg)

II.B. A Dream, A Memory, A Text Translated From Memory, Another Dream, Two Recursive Devices. Concluding Anecdote

a. A Dream

In Southern Sweden where the sky is wider but the day is smaller (than in pretty parklike England) I found myself one morning at that chill hour when the owls have stopped their hooting and the birds not yet commenced their singing on a huge estate walking with my (then) love past the derelict cottages of tenant-farmers in the back of parks and gardens. A younger woman in an apron, hands akimbo looked out through the door almost rotten hanging on one hinge; over her shoulder we could see an older woman, an immensely old and shrivelled creature, born before the Flood it seemed in the absolutely bare room sitting motionless on a high stool. Her eyes were closed. A voice, belonging to neither of them, was saying:

Gack till de nidhra tecknen

och kallom opp de undre vecken!

which means in slightly ancient Swedish more or less: “Go to the lower signs, and let us call up the subterranean undulations.” My companion went past the younger woman and, almost gracefully, pushed the old crone over. I tried to stop her. We went out: the morning was as crisp as glass. I looked into her green eyes: the world had ended.

b. A Memory

When my granduncle was a boy, also in Southern Sweden, he was working as a sheepherder. His dog was called Pædo. One evening, when on his way home, he met with two very small men standing by the roadside. They looked at him and said, with utmost seriousness: “Dagen är förliden och natten tillstundar,” translated: “The day has gone by, the night is nigh.” They wore peaked helmets, like Bismarck, slighty frayed. Faintly, they smelled of pickled herrings; their eyes were invisible.

c. Fulle exerptis ot the Tryal, examinynge & Executionn of ane Johanne Andirsdother, a Witch, at the Forum Judiciarum Malmogiensis, or the Assizes there, in the yere of Our Savior MDLXXXVIII, in Inglis transl.

—ITem, ye saide giudwyfe Johanne, bein arraignit at the Assizes on various Testimonies forasmuch as schee tuke in hand tae helpynge those sairelie aggreivid & sufferyng with Sicknesse and Infirmitie & prepairynge Potions & Ffiltres for thos panit by Lufe vnrequitet, wars accuseth by ane Mogins, a youngcarle, ane orra lad and a Tinkler, og maleficia, quaha wars unco inamourit of ain Judith Hansdotr, a queanie of Alberta parishe quha nae abidith him. Ye Saide Guidwyffe Johanne had gefan himm a Locke of haire in Pretense it came of the heid of saim queenie Judith, ilkamorn to mixit inta hiss bros or Denner, But (quodh hee) qervpon hee hadde Lost his Powre of Manhuid. Said mogens thervpon seekit advyce & Succor of ye Weelkennit Boye of N. Aasum, a cannie man & auld, frae quha he learnit he bee beglaumit and For spake.

—ITem, the saide Johanne quod I was ganging furth frae markit in urbe Malmogiae in simmer at Whytesunnetide ooten East Tolbothies shee met aforesaide Mogens acomin ore a Style hee caim vp tae her an liftit her Kirtel & sark. I wars nae afered thoo he lukit ferefui an Sweety. I thocht he was oer keisty & wishedh his wille wyghed mee, awthocgh me bee ane auld carline an mawkinhaunchit. He anelie pluckit twa hairies frae me Priuadys, neer tooching mee quihim lippis afore he slenkit awa.

—ITem, Ye Saide guidewiffe was examynid as to quaar her Maistere, war, an wyth Pilli Winkies vpon her fingers quid is greevous tortvre, an schee tolde her guidman was deid and her bairn ill an her kyne deid, & she was make and hevye sair dule wyth hirself qhen shee met ane honest, wele, elderlie man, gray bairdit, and had ane gray Coitt with Lumbart slevis of ye auld fassoun; ane pair of gray brekis and quhyte schankis gartanit abone the kne ane blak bonet on his heid cloise behind and plane befoire, with silkin laissis drawin throw the lippiis thairof; and ane quhyte wand in his hand, and ane blak buik. He said he wars the Archebiscoppe Absolon and hadde come frae his Antres or Spelunkerhame on Yvey in the loch queher he hadde bee brocht by the Elphis levande neathe the Muckle Stane near Liungby. With him hee bracht iij Servant Spiriti or Familiares, a Merle blacke wyth quhite wingis ane Mawkin, and a Blacke Puddie quho weren to serue hir ilka quhim & licke ye Priuy Parties of Her bodie. Aforesaid Johannem confessit & fylit she was conuicta et combusta fuit in Anno Dominie 1588 feftane ochtye ocht on the Mounte of Executioun at Kiersebierghedh in cruelle paine quhill she gaiv hir ghaist leafande her the iij Familiares, l:mo ye blak Merle, secondo ye Toade, Third and laist the Maukin aspringande outen the Pyre.

Synchronicity, the me mory-trace engulfs everything, annals of suffering and effluence, focus on two discrete points of geography. Desk-memories of Mogens Madsen’s Ciceronian periods: names of Rutger MacLean, Malcolm Sinclair, frigidaire nighmares of three mercenaries burning and lost on Swedish ice; Bothwell’s trace of pacing length of table in Eric of Pomerania’s fortress: he could have seen the reek of his desire: the burning of the witch. North-facing City, sequestered like any northern town between gasworks and canals, tethered to the cemetery: child watching sky-written letter of blood across the wake of père Ubu escaping, Hamlet haggling over the price of drugs with pirates or William Burroughs. Reich, the other Wilhelm, in his Wanderjahre commuting for nine months, before rebirth. As she said, in the sweet transport of burning on Cherry Mountain, haunted by the prevenant wraith of Anita Ekberg returning to nativity, echoing the fortunate fall of Melville’s ghostly sailor, from the tallest tree of the sea:

Oh ffilme… that bluidy ffilm before me eyen.

d. Another Dream

I was dreaming of Robben Island

that the inhabitants were,

somewhat like centaurs

half man, half sheep,

expertly stitched together

with South African skills

in grafting and immunology.

One man showed me with pride

his honorable scars

his record collection

(mostly bad)

and the little anus

in his left side.

Naturally, he was pissed off

with being forced

to give up the dietary

habits of sheep.

Due to the shortness

of the alimentary canal,

he was now training

to become a predator and insectivore.

I hate bugs, he confided,

and in particular the crunching

sounds they make, between molars.

e. The Lyndon Baines Johnson Lavatory Seat Refurbishing Rightwinding
Leftbranching Recursive Selfperpetuating Paradox Memorial

Here I sit thinking: Aw, shit, think how great our country is.

Here I sit, scratching my ass, thinking: Aw, shit, think how great our country is.

Here I sit, smoking some grass, scratching my ass, thinking: Aw, shit, think how great our country is.

Here I sit, sticking my middle in, smoking some grass, scratching my ass, thinking: Aw, shit, think how great our country is.

Here I sit, farting through my ring, sticking my middle in, smoking some grass, scratching my ass, thinking: Aw, shit, think how great our country is.

Here I sit, flexing my prick, farting through my ring, sticking my middle in, smoking some grass, scratching my ass, thinking: Aw, shit, think how great our country is.

Here I sit, sucking my stick, flexing my prick, farting through my ring, sticking my middle in, smoking some grass, scratching my ass, thinking, Aw, shit, think how great our country is.

Here I sit, blowing my horn, sucking my stick, flexing my prick, farting through my ring, sticking my middle in, smoking some grass, scratching my ass, thinking: Aw, shit, think how great our country is.

Here I sit, bridging a loan, blowing my horn, sucking my stick, flexing my prick, farting through my ring, sticking my middle in, smoking some grass, scratching my ass, thinking: Aw, shit, think how great our country is.

Here I sit, entertaining a friend, bridging a loan, blowing my horn, sucking my stick, flexing my prick, farting through my ring, sticking my middle in, smoking some grass, scratching my ass, thinking: Aw, shit, think how great our country is.

Here I sit, waiting for the end, entertaining a friend, bridging a loan, blowing my horn, sucking my stick, flexing my prick, farting through my ring, sticking my middle in, smoking some grass, scratching my ass, thinking: Aw, shit, think how great our country is.

f. In Freedonia

with apologies to Professor Quine

In Freedonia all men are free. Rarely is a capital sentence being pronounced, more rarely still is the punishment ever carried out. The reason for this is as follows.

It is deemed inequitous to inform the prisoner of the exact time of his impending demise. But it is considered equally unjust to let the poor wretch sweat it out for an unspecified number of days. Therefore, when pronouncing sentence, it behooves the judge to give a fixed terminal date for the period within which the culprit can be executed, e.g.—given sentence is pronounced on a Monday—”before next Sunday.” The prisoner then knows that he cannot be executed on that Sunday. But he can also rest assured that the execution cannot take place on the preceding Saturday, as he then would not be ignorant of its date, having survived all the preceding days of the week. When he realizes, however, that this is the case, it is equally impossible to carry out the sentence on the preceding Friday. Come Thursday he is already alerted to the fact that any execution is out of the question for Friday, Saturday or Sunday: he can spend that day in happy contemplation of his safety. If it is further taken into consideration that he on Wednesday must fully realize the impossibility of using any of the days Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday as day of execution, he is clearly in no danger on that day. Again, considering his awareness of the necessary exclusion, for purposes of hanging, beheading, strangulation, garotting etc., of the entire week from Wednesday on, the omitting of Tuesday from the list of possible dates is already a matter of routine. He then knows that he must be executed on the Monday itself, but this knowledge is evidently contravening the intention of the law. Consequently, the prisoner is safe.

When last sojourning on the bench of the accused, I conveyed this argument in identical or similar terms, to the judge. The result was unexpected. “Then, by all means, let’s have it over with right now, while you still think you are safe,” he said, carefully refraining from looking into my eyes.

g. That’s All, Folks!

with apologies to Myles na Gopaleen

When falling on bad times financially, which frequently happened, Keats and Chapman were wont to help out in the kitchen of a well-known Tottenham Court Road inn, called “The House of the Rising Sun.” One day, when arriving at the establishment just before tea-time they were surprised to find the chef, a sturdy German lad in a terribly agitated state over his dinner preparations. “Look here, fellows,” he hailed them, “I have mislaid yesterday’s remains of nasi goreng; be sports and try and find them for me: I cannot leave the parboiling of the rollmops unattended, as you doubtless perceive.” They gladly complied, looking everywhere for the missing victuals. Finally, in despair, Keats exclaimed, not without emotion: “Indeed, I know where the ‘House of the Rising Sun’ is situated, but where, oh where, is the Rice of the Sousing Hun?” Overcome by the enormity of this utterance, Chapman reeled backwards and fell into a trough of Friesian coleslaw, where he was granted a speedy and merciful release from the shackles of human existence. Thus ended a beautiful friendship.

III. The Zodiac Of Life

“Lord Saturn is a dry, cold and dexterous king

only fit for hanging or burying alive,

or, perhaps, for dancing. Old

age is elaborate and dumb.

A carmen saliarum hurts my head;

feet and hands drumming, stamping:

‘Round and around and around

we go. Sow your seed under ground.

We are raking the fallow…’

The cruellest thing you did,

Hartgrepa, was throwing a strangled

cockerel over the wall.

I could hear it crowing…:

‘The little animals follow me

everywhere: they importune me,

they enter through my eyes, my skull

and bring with them of their anxiety. Close

your eyes, o soul! let us absent ourselves

from all things, so that we are seen

no more, nor can see them.’

* * *

Inside the mountain dwell the paladins

of pain: Ogier le Danois, Frederick Barbarossa,

Arthur, Charles XII, Durandarte…

all of them seated round the table,

beards and hair growing like tendrils.

I saw royal children playing,

armies clash, and clearly heard

from the other side of the enormous

wall a wasted cockerel crow.

They all seemed to be saying:

‘We were here long before you,

we are not awakened yet!’

The hebephrenic girl, barefoot,

with grimy legs and glittering eye,

the paranoid mutterers, the stony-faced

depressives, the catatonic old man,

contriving his own crucifixion,

they are all there, in silence,

but yet saying: there is pain here,

but more pain in being wakened

and remembering. They are the

houses, the little animals of cunning

wherein our lives, the wandering

planets, move, interpreting signs

which are not their own. These dragomans

inculcate, unwillingly, like the

dead trapper in the hut, the devious

truths of time and all times. They

court the sparagmos when round-

faced Titans, their features stiff with

gypsum, tear them limb from limb.

They are the emblems of their

own silence, of the thoughts that never

were, and never can be, uttered.

* * *

The woman who rose from the hearth,

was it you, Hartgrepa, fostermother,

nurse, more to me than lover?

Enveloping me in your cloak, as

you had borne me many times as a child

on giant arms, binding me here in the

earth, my skull shaven and tarred

to mimic the stones of the turf.

Do you remember the time when

we came to the deserted house

—no food, no furniture, just

the skins of small animals—

where we found the body

of a man long since dead?

You sang your sullen runes,

dancing in the rank smell of furs,

stuffing herbs under his rotting tongue.

Slowly it rose, stiffly prophesying

the end of all things, us in particular,

Were you prepared for the monstrous

hand that you held while I

hacked it off with my sword?

Were you prepared for the

invisible hands of your nearest…?

The little animals are posted

in my head, an antonymic sphere,

charred island in the green sward.

It is an orrery of stealthy

motion, like a nesting-place

under a bullock’s hide,

a head concealed in the Trappist

monastery of the mind.

The cave of Montesinos,

the head of Madame de Montbason.

It was your head, Hartgrepa,

torn from your shoulders by the

invisible hands of your kinfolk,

as the limbs were torn from the soft

body of the child watching its face

in the mirror. It was your cloak

enveloping the child in the fire,

like a bullock’s hide covering

the two dead bodies, shining,

and between them the child,

their grandchild, with only one

finger charred, having said:

‘I want to be with my grandparents!’

while the clasp of the cloak is

wrought in solid brass, not an

ouroboros, the scaly serpent

biting its own tail, but a snake

with two fierce heads, an amphisbaina

signifying the openness and pain

at both end and beginning (although

it’s hard to know which is which)

This clasp is fastened to a torque

with plates where the golden eagle

spreads its wings, of jasper, and of

pale selenite (the fading stone,

geared to the phases of the moon).

Where the two brazen heads

of the serpent come together

—mouths yawning wide over

the eagle—peering with ruby eyes

unto a sea of grass-green

emerald containing all the

denizens of the deep: dolphins,

fish, whales and crustaceans:

not least crustaceans, like

the trusty crab, the lively shrimp,

prim prawns and the majestic lobster.

This is the necklace of Harmonia.

* * *

Both brazen heads will say, in turn:

‘I claim divining space and hallow ground

where I have duly named them with meet tongue.

Whichever tree is good and true which I

declare to have pronounced, to the right

divining space and ground belong to me’; and the other:

‘I claim divining space and hallow ground

where I have duly named them with meet tongue.

Whichever tree is good and true which I

declare to have pronounced, to the left

divining space and ground belong to me.’ I asked

the heads to read my thoughts and future.

The Left replied: ‘Of thoughts I have no knowledge.’

The Right: ‘Thou knowest who thou art.’

I knew that one of them was lying,

so I said: ‘Answer me truly this:

is it the other head which is lying?’

They both said: Yes. And next:

‘Is the right head lying?’ Left

said: Yes, and Right said: No. ‘Is

the Left Head lying?’ Right: Yes

and Left: ‘No, I mean… No!’

Again: ‘Do both heads lie?’ The

Right said No, Left: ‘No, Yes… I am sorry.’

I looked at my hands, they had been

chopped off, and I had no more questions.

There were no tines of antlers to be

counted: no harts, and leaping does,

nor rust-coloured spotted fawns. The woods

were like the tapestry, two empty hands

clutching each other, writhing worms.

As I walked away, the heads were saying:

‘Fare-thee-well, hidalgo. We know who thou art,

from thy sorrowful contenance. Thy fate

is writ in a book whereof we know the ending.’

I wish they had been more forthcoming,

especially the lying head

who is the more sincere.

* * *

The ekphrasis is, as always,

pertinent. It is comforting to talk

of the sea when one is born to be hanged,

as it is to wash the gypsum off one’s face,

or to be buried in cool earth, or fall.

The phalarae, or little reckless monuments

of words are shining bright, but words have

no medulla. Or, to misquote Dr.

Samuel Johnson, to be hanged elongates

one’s spine most wonderfully. Inside words

there are dwarfs within our Giants cloaths,

but no Degree is vizarded, no little animals,

just a monster mocking the meat it feeds on,

green-eyed, or whey-faced like a corpse.

Everything else is in your head, just like

the crab inside its shell, the dead

in the earth, time in its moment.

* * *

There is something right down

sexually attractive in the Jungian

way of confronting one’s own

anima (which should be you,

and also, through you, me)

but the experience is a little

like the feeling a cynical

poet might be subjected to

after having concluded a bio-

graphy of one of the lesser saints,

or, when a comedian has

so perfected a double act

that he knows it can survive

entirely on the strength of

the straight man and doesn’t need

the funny man (i.e. himself).

Yes, perhaps more like the comedian.

The poet may be more ardently content

with homilies. My song is

soon to end, but don’t mistake

my placid tone for equanimi-

ty. Most of all it is itself

a metaphor, in which the

vehicle is missing but the

tenor, in wonderful belcanto warblings

goes on and on and on. Encore, da capo:

‘The little animals follow me

everywhere: they importune me,

they enter through my eyes, my skull

and bring with them of their anxiety. Close

your eyes, o soul! let us absent ourselves

from all things, so that we are seen

no more, nor can see them.’”

The voice stops. The earth continues to fall

like the first snow of winter, filling the space

filling his mouth, his eyes, silently

save for the faint sound of dancing feet

growing stronger and stronger as in a film

exposing its rhythm and gaining momentum

in this new rhythm, thousands of feet

tapping, finally to lose itself

in the scream of a falling woman…

Sleep tight, baby…