Book of the Jewel Worm

PROLOGUE

I dreamt of wild horses bathing in white water again.

One stood and ate the salmon like a bear.

                        What of the Wishbone Pulsar, those cooling wicks

of the dark mother, lodged

deep in the throat of Cygnus; the merchants' charcoal-

ballasted ships crossing the dead cluster district

where two of the lost tablets

are miming the iron lamps of a black dwarf.

I.

(.1/.9 jibes.)

Help us, Paul, to understand. The photon stockgrams

found us in New Philadelphia—

your drawing of the yarrow sticks

has been copied by your sister

who, with her usual seriousness

about your poems, insists these new hexagrams

are just simply more of them.

Your poems, that is. They are insane

but lovely

in their ratios of fear to arrogance. You will never change. By example,

'Martha Smythe, naked, weeding out in your garden'

is long dead, but you say

'her breasts like faux plaster waves

mechanically lift before the lilac hedges.' Or, of course,

in the opera pit

tigers are eating the three cellists?

Listen to me, son:

your poor memory

of a watercolorist's horizon and its sea. This is

the seminary's first production

of your father's version

of Shakespeare's most excellent last play.

Your chewing gum on my yellow gloves and hair.

Our young cadets studying

Eight years later and they are all shipwrecked

on a strange moon; well,

I can't imagine what you've witnessed:

their cruiser entering, with two hundred sleepers

in suspension, that crushing

brim light of a data-clear nova. Yet,

distanced from it, so that their many dreams

became the one dream

they wake to screaming— first blood

at their nostrils and then machines

everywhere reading the flat line.

'weeding the garden indeed.' How

you lived through these things? Your father

always wondered what you did for a living?

I didn't. I'm sorry but if I'm speaking

of him, I should make this quick addendum:

Samuel died this new year eating mescaline

in that burnt-out Mercedes

and his two German Shepherds were with him.

I spoke to his corpse with no kindness.

It's all a joke, of course.

Like your cadets in their basaltic wilderness

with goats standing

to their bellies in a white mud

and in the high loft of the chapel

the rose light focused

on Martha Smythe's dress

just where her breasts

separate beneath it

featuring that pitted copper crucifix.

Those violet ash-paper hives in winter,

she said,

had been opened for the sugar

by two large-boned naked men,

hair cropped by the mayor. Their love

was a cannibalism of branches to the sky,

the horror occurring not in the burning barns

of their village

but in the songs of a chloraplastik

spring offensive.

They are trying to forget the hill fires,

bloated animals flying into the night, birds crying:

né-too vic, né-too vic,

the six syllables like a butcher's knives.

The cousin saw the naked men and their young sister.

The men with a fur wrapped around them,

joined at the hip. Their black high heels

with a small jewel in the eyebrow or lip.

They were walking out among the land mines

in hill fog.

I had you there, old mole! For a moment?

Asparagus slips in the vinegar jar. And rowing, rowing.

Paul, you make me sick . . . Khandro.

II.

—the Port of Gommed-Kyi-Pnalbyorh (.7/.4 ibis.)

Mother: so, still the stockgram about our two dogs.

You forgot that they ate the potted African violets.

But not him.

Father, that is. A burnt-out pink Mercedes?

Mind slippings and a quick wiring-tack, more

telegrams from your great black sock.

It's true I was the monitor

for that data-clear event on old Phoebus IV. More horror:

scripts flying like invisible fish-hooks: lost

memory, sinus rhythm

and then that heart beat. Large rocks

in the solar plexus. The hemorrhaging, of course.

Those old emotions and a small boy's spruce gum

in your hair. Yes, mother,

mousetraps, hundreds of them, snapping

at once in that big clean house by the marsh. Birds rising.

Thank you for taking the risk

of scripting your old son from that vast electrical storm

that is Philadelphia . . . with yoga

and the packing salts

I'm certain it went smoothly.

There never was a sister. Remember? It was

our brother who studied my poems. He's dead also.

His history of the ampersand

as clear Sanskrit drool. His idea of the dead

borrowed from calculus and polkas.

I'm miles from the lake today. The full moon is a sick lavender.

The warrants of childhood

are visited upon us here. I know

it's quieter where you are. But

all that brillo in your bones, nails,

and hair. A literal ocean

of electrical storms, insomnia . . .

But no memories of attracting scripts.

It was on those docks

that the Senator Galbraith had his throat cut?

Vacationing in that god realm. How sinister

of you, my dear.

(She laughs at the edges of the old brilliant mums:

mistress, we are on each other's bones

while rowing out there in our long coats.)

Oslo actually

ate the potted violets. It made him ill.

Khandro, I know the difference between you and my mother.

And I know her mantra:

Oh, Ben Ezra, crows to die

calling the alms across burial urns and sawgrass.

That's it, isn't it. We are

all innocent. I'm tacked

into an old prophet's filthy skirts, the gourds of water,

ah-ting ah-ting . . .

The wind in golden wheels moves along the palm lined river

of that sandy crescent

where a whole cranberry bog is filling with beer,

branch water of cocaine and cinnabar; you sopped

it up for blood, Mum. That clever pharaoh

tamed you for a thousand years.

Here's sincere signatures of possession, inks & all. Your boy, again. Paul.

III.

Marie: I miss my brother. I thought you might

forgive me if I wrote. You had

divorced him just months before I found

the magnetic aqueduct of the Keet Sleet,

every laborer left on its wide runnel

his or her inscription, elaborate to the vanishing point. It was

a great algebraic mural of melons, flayed deer

and the one stylized moon of a very blue planet.

Khandro once let slip that there was

a bismuth rail in the aqueduct

before the whole population went telepathic.

Their föhn-storms must have been a terror:

spikes to the extremities,

smoke & snowflake, then the bulging eyes, brain vise

and finally an ecstasy. Their dream practice

came last.

Their rainbow bodies across the chalk cliffs.

Poor Oslo's body was in the North Platte: the Ouija board

said, wrongly:

Stateline, cropside; volcanic ash in the trees

and no apricots that year,

not anywhere. Oslo

had disappeared. The stars over the river grew beards.

I'll never forget that picnic at Hoover Dam.

Just lamb wrapped in leaves.

Jam on the biscuits. The tea was black.

The bears were the saddest. And my wife was laughing,

stripping for your neighbor in the middle

of the dirt road. Ants had invaded her purse

and then her shirt.

It was the hard candy she'd brought the sick uncle . . .

That night, revolving snake eyes in the mountain sky.

Your daughter Urze writes poems, has advanced

in the ati-yoga? She has studied the Keets, I know.

Tell her to write me. I'll give her

my artifacts from the Plain of Jars.

If she feels ready for it. My sincerest etceteras . . . Ekajati.

IV.

Urze: your father, Oslo, was my brother

and for that reason alone

I will send you that last white mala

from the Plain of Jars. Don't be silly about its

importance. Throw it in some pond.

Seriously, you won't tame it soon. Wearing it

in your sleep, you'll wake with your bones

spinning to the left, your flesh to the right. It will

feel strange like a last guiltless bed-wetting. Or, then, again

your illusory body might wake on the coast of France

while reversing the charges for a stockgram

to new Asia. Ha! Khandro?

It's always like that, though I know the difference

on the new moon. Oh yes I do love Miss Dickinson's work.

Imagine her rolling bandages on winter nights in Amherst

and Whitman unrolling them in the spring

while a sparrow tracks blood out of the canvas surgery

there in the suburbs of Washington. No. I don't think

that war was the invention of their genius. Ignore theorists!

You are either a poet and take language

by the throat, or you quote, and quote and quote. Well,

looking at the violence in my words

makes me think now

that I should read your young theorist from Cornell. With affection. Your uncle.

Post Script:

Damn, it's confounding— Whitman and Dickinson,

the two of them alive, at once,

like that . . .

Him with an absolute manifest detailing a torn sail,

silverfish and sweat on the caterpillar,

or her,

the terror of a reddish sack, a lady's-slipper

blossoming in snow—their spawn

and those poems

as fascinating as yurts: Wally, Willy & Gurt.

Salutes and sweet dreams. Paul.

V.

Dear Urze: yes I lost my wife in a scripting storm like no other.

A whole star cluster gone.

She was on an aerobus when it struck;

a prosperous Indonesian farmer

sat across from her and within five minutes

they were man and wife, all memories

of things past were canceled.

When they do remember in their dreams,

they become violently ill and there's only a few weeks left of that

until it's quite over.

All the people of seven planets

were scrambled and lost in a script

that passed through in one hour. They are all officially dead

and the quarantine will extend to three generations of their children.

It's like the black birdcloth

unfolded for the cage.

On the actual day of their death, they do remember everything

with seizures and a little blood at the mouth.

Your father was in the 'goldfish bowl' when it happened,

and was untouched. Two hours later

walking onto the street he realized everything.

The same day, at sunset, he leapt into the sea

that was literally boiling

with an amorous confusion of species.

The cannibalism follows, of course, and he knew

there were no choices for him.

In the last letter to your mother he said they should

call this event, Weekend in Nevada. I loved him so.

He refused to describe, even for your mother, the pathology

of attractions that formed there in a wink—

he joked about the midsummer night's dream; about rowing,

not with men.

He said the Khandro doesn't consciously do this— insisting

it's more like her idea of snoring.

My yoga is defense, yes,

against a whole other experience of scripts, one that

is discriminating and apoplectic.

If it comes outside the barriers of the Dzogchen

then it is like a fatal stroke

but with rather pleasant sensations. If I can focus

then on images of water, I will recover.

It seems though,

after breathing all that blistering crystal of bismuth

off the aqueduct rail

all these years on Mars,

that I should be impervious to her. The Khandro, that is . . .

I'll write tomorrow . . . Ekajati.

VI.

'Marie: don't thank me for the artifact

I gave your daughter. I never fully made

my recompense to you

for that splendid gift of your painting called "Crypts":

first sun on the bathing brahmins rising from their copper tanks,

not naked says the Ganga, its broken crayons,

and the mist is on the roof where two women

are burning last year's printed cotton amulets. The smoke

and mist together making a miniature of the Skull Nebula

but only if their dark heads, knees and breasts

are visible through it . . .

                                     ah,'

Khandro

did you like this? My brother actually stole

that painting from his own house

and made me take it. I dreamt about it just last month,

Very sloppy work, old girl. You've done some

My love to you, Mum. Paul.

Then I watched an autopsy

with the dead innocent, Göttfried Benn,

opening the chest of a young child:

winter mice having nested

in her lungs, there in the dark river. So

I went mad and father just

shot me in the foot. And by the time the bleeding stopped,

I was cured, sane again!

What if you had said

that in this whole pitiful universe

only a few more than a hundred

souls survived your Snakedeath Wreath

there writhing the circumference of a snowy jar? Paperweight,

accelerator.

What if

it's just us two clams

talking, Mum; again my love . . .