Ode to Marie Laveau

Ode to Marie Laveau

Caiman walk in the liver’s dream

up stairs of missing waters

the atoms at last have agreed to work

Hiram was Hydrogen exalted brother

wearer of all clothing more and more

let talk reach its terminus

where the unformed lends its edge.

What good is blood if the second comes first

the priestess asked, vervain and vetiver

don’t tell anyone what you choose

for third, a personal door to be free of your desire.

notes on Éliphas Lévi's "Magic"

Notes on Éliphas Lévi's "Magic"

1.

He re-veiled

the tablets,

the meaning of reveal

these words to keep you

from the luscious stone

and not even he could find his way

back, water now, endless wanderings

to the door of her room

and she would come to his door

as if they were waiting

as if to say in some way

simple as forgetting itself

that grand organ of silence.

Jordan, meaning descend, flow down.

A word, a door

to the river.

Undo all this revealing.

2.

Silence never forgets.

So what do we mean

empty headed geometers

tracing our difficult way

quote this book at your own peril

there are no quotation marks

the captial letters are temples

and the sentences are cities

punctuated with obelisks and by the

sphynx.

Red jasper

for courage

the black moon’s

shadow banished by my headlights

back into the trees.

Silence never forgets,

that’s what Liszt heard us

the philosophy of angels

let the animals speak

if you’re good you’ll find

the magnets that teach their language,

wake like lions in each other’s Assyrian arms.

3.

A Movie: 

The Magi agree to apply their power to the light. Semiramus passes from intoxication to intoxication and he and his precious stuffs, his favorites and accomplices shine in the palace like divinities. Sardanapulus is illuminated and blazes with such splendor that it lights all the consternated city. The vault of heaven seems suddenly to set back, and enlarged opens a vast and sinister splendor such as the night of Babylon has never seen. Tongues of fire penetrate the cedar panelling; the frenzied songs replaced by cries of terror and groans of agony. The walls of the city collapse. The palace of Sardanopolis is melted, and in the morning his conquerer finds no trace of its riches, no trace of the king’s body and all his luxuries. 

***

Build a city from your last breath,

the way Zoroaster disappeared

with all his secrets and all his riches.

There’s nothing here without us.

Anyone knows how to use death,

to watch the film as it burns.

The past is still now but now the now burns through it.

A game of chess.

“Do you ever stop questioning?”

“No. I never stop.”

Showy stars sneak from their bright bodies

and meet quietly down by Brighton Beach

touching their immense hands.

Celestial lions whose cities we are.

The movie is over at any point. 

You can climb back up their paths, to the other side of the     screen.

After a painting by Louise Smith

How long have you waited 

to make me see this by accident

the way the moon is always between 

any number of stone stoplights.

The ground is covered with math like that

in this city built of seeing

under the sky in a blue cross

between your two hands. Tau,

the third thing,

between us too, that makes the whole

Kether, crown, completion.

They say Qabala came from the Greek

but Qabala is not scholarship.

The book that matters is being written still

and today the great polymaths 

of Renaissance systematic science

have finally begun 

to speak themselves in paint. 

What they always meant but couldn't

say, the name that calls her back

because this is the name she left

sign and seal she sailed out from under

on smooth Aegean, Atlantic, bathtub

to mysterious Greenland.

Was Atlantis in Chicago,

the salt of her primordial sea?

4 Valses Oubliées (Liszt)

1.

Down the stairs

your old friends

but no this is a memory

the house has no chairs yet

an empty sieve

what glory drips through

the cat’s leeward paces

things move themselves

or is it measure

scratch their noiseless claws

in an empty house.

2.

Whose house am I haunting

haunt of the world a stain 

on the light. So close to the trees

and their strange dances

light feet in the air

all the weight of heaven bouncing on them.

Let an old man have his reveries

why are my children always scientists

the last drop of real water I’ve watched

for all these years

dangling still as death

never touch that water

the coachman doesn’t know

and that is his wisdom

he shares 

with the gloomy red lights

of that hidden district

carrying it to the next Atlas.

3.

Poor Beethoven

home to that chord progression we could never forget

of deftly lifting the flower and throwing it in the air

that’s a calm that only comes to killer’s eyes

away

let’s think no more of it

toss from the fingertips

into the open hands of the air

the more desperate I get

the harder I throw

but the fingers stay

there’s no way

but in

the music pulls you

arm firm around waist

like pleading angels

I am your gut

just listen for once to what you say

green moths bouncing down the polished 

silver mirror

the brush of her hand against the smooth cotton

making the same sound as your thoughts.

4.

Move faster than your feet

history as drama

the men in their long tails

hoop dresses

a dance of the gestalt

monkeys on the veranda

of the theosophical society

ladies no one sees

their serious focused eyes

look out of no one

at no one 

moonlight through the attic porthole

burning through the document.

Apollonius on Snakes

Weave golden letters

onto a crimson cloth.

It can’t resist

its golden scales

sound like bronze

beneath the earth.

The unprefigurable beast

can’t resist

it reads

and falls asleep

the bearded head

oddly heavy in the

palm of your hand.

Nothing is innocent.

With axes and spells

they chop off its head.

They take the eyes.

The eyes that will never

cease to scan from the

crest of wake and sleep,

hard as jewels

some say

with the power of the ring

of Gyges. Invisible body

from which they trek

across the letters

in the Indian’s palm

the mill of skies

the letters that throng

in conclusive rain

the streets of dawn

its wise denizens.

They’ve given up

building and just live in it

now. Study all their strange work

by the luscious measure of 

themselves. This the snake

reads, its eyes the door

the missing beat

that have an 

“irresistible power”

for there is no teacher

and no listener

no subject,

no content.

You can sing

on your long guitar

of mountain goats

and its endless skin

of skies like sandpaper

in a wallless room.

The eyes awake

its missing body.

When you can hardly 

stand amid the animals

crowding around

the boundary stone.

It’s body awakes.

A release

in the guts 

of the mind.

from Philostratus' Apollonius of Tyana

They were traveling in full moonlight when they encountered a phantom, a vampire that changed into this and that and yet was nonexistent.

The bed will tell you what’s hiding underneath.

I can hear their generalities again

the lie of their arms and legs

don’t fall for me, they cry

look, look at our false movements.

If you experience lust it is the work of  phantom, phasma.

The curve that is not the road bewitching you

down the hillside. Up the hill.

All the ways away from home

that crowd around the door

if you experience lust you are almost home.

Through the bodies of demons I could even

touch your hand.

The thing about phasma is you have to fuck your way through

himself rebuked the vampire and told the others to do the same, since that was the way to counter this attack. 

The vampire went off gibbering like a ghost.

Dragged back.

Gravity is a wave too, like light

strange solids we can never quite grasp

never follow either.

waves cresting on your mother’s shore

just loud enough to wake 

too quiet to remember.

All phantoms are vampires. Rushing towards you with your own blood. Daring you to dream, wake your birds into the shapeshifting sun.

After Aeschylus

The Understanding (After Aeschylus)

Will they understand these lamentations

in our foreign language?

Athenian actors speak their best Persian over

black sheep and knick knacks in the shallow cunabula.

He meant the distance between worlds is one of 

understanading. 

I remember 

the actors then had to be prompted by lately conjured Darius,

who they thought too divine to address (anymore).

No one wants to be understood.

Words would keep understanding away. Only when the gods

are silent do we tremble. When all the doors

swing open and the corn rustles in.

Who’s speaking anyway?

Voices have a way of hiding in you.

Perhaps that’s all I ever have to say.

You already know everything, and poetry is how I listen

chip quietly away with you, undo what there is of me.

It is a sin to have two of anything.