Book of the Jewel Worm

'I am' and do not think 'I am.'

—Sri Ramana Maharshi

VII.

(.11/.12 nibes.)

Dear Urze: I have insomnia. So I'll write at length.

Respond, if you can,

under this new moon—within thirty-two of your hours.

Yes, your father buried fish heads in the potted violets

and the German Shepherds went searching for them

then ruining a whole plot of herbs

and my mother's stand of salad marigolds.

She was not forgiving about it. Samuel

was never forgiven, in fact. But she had

predicted all this before the dogs were adopted

by our father. In the same dream

she saw the Snakedeath Wreath's concentricity

blossom in rose and amethyst, taking all the LXT Remnant

with it:

the great migraine she had as a girl was a clear-audience

to my voice drowning in a brim light

and the whole Phoebus calamity. Your grandmother

began that famous headache

during father's production of The Tempest. I fell

in love for the first time that evening—

she had Smythe for a last name and played

the viola. The lilacs were dragging themselves

over the ground that spring. There were amazing rains.

The Khandro is intolerant of our attractions— she

exploits our disgust for this and that and which . . .

Well, the Great Black Mother

and her attending masks have been our protectors

in this family for nearly six centuries.

To be exact, it was 1703

in what we now think of as Sikkim Minor

that our blood found her practice. She is our red prayer

and Guru Rinpoche is the white. These Tibetan

dieties are like two closely drawn lines on a piece of paper.

You pencil heavily in between them with devotions

and all is lost in lead

eventually to the margins.

We call this great mother, the Prajna Paramita,

who takes all projected space for her image.

Her voice, though, was siphoned twice.

Once by a collapsing worm-hole of incalculable dimensions

and later by her nemesis, the Khandro of Lux.

Meanwhile, why she isolates our family

and others for chit-chat is a mystery. She's not necessarily

unfriendly to us. Regardless, we stand against her in playful

'mirror-speech'

and I can say safely under this new moon

that she both likes it

and is distracted by it too.

Her concentration is often lost

to extant spirit tablets, in quick repetitions . . .

The most effective is perhaps the number three:

                       turquoise bees & a white fleshy stamen.

                       it is the agreement of a summer morning

                       to an autumn night. the Chinese symbol

                       for discord is π

                       revealed to fifty-two decimal points.

these are the ghosts of noon, in flight . . .

Yes, Urze, there are two anagrams like dice in every tablet.

There will be several other translations from your mother

before you're asked to commit it to mind. I am

sleepy now. Write if you can. Paul Ekajati.

Post Script: You know, for what it is worth,

I've always found the Perseids dull.

Meteor showers should be like snowfall.

Love. Your uncle.

VIII.

Dear Marie: good for Urze and her suspicions— I did not

write anyone from the gibbous Sunday

through the vespers of the new moon. Yes it was

Khandro's first communication to Urze. Believe me,

I was in the shit house with the energy that whole night.

The shocking thing about it is— well,

her letter is the straight skinny, gospel, every word

of it true. The number three tablet often

has an exordium, a silly

fading italic in three lines. It reminds me

of the apocryphal number nine. The exordium,

it seems to me, said:

                        & the secret character for this sea

                        rises out of it

                        like red moons beyond a turquoise roof.

The apocryphal tablet of the standing horses eating salmon,

number eleven, is in the same Wisdom Tradition. This is all strange.

It seems Khandro cares for your daughter. Or,

perhaps, is unable to lie to her. If this is it,

then Urze might be the one

who carries the memory of the full Mk'hagro?

Then our calculations for Maitreya Calendar

are off by three hundred and eleven years.

Let's keep this between us for awhile.

Also the penciling in of a blank page

seems an odd metaphor for a Khandro, free

in time and space. What an odd, distracted and

clerk-like thing to say? Tell Urze

it is queer. Though Melville did

run the licensing bureau

for the recreational existentialist,

those one hundred years

of meringues and playing the tambourine by ear.

Marie, you were right to abandon literature for painting.

Lovely Oslo's practice with pain and appetite

was simply to clear and then occupy.

'Nothing happens,' indeed?

His 'goldfish bowl' was the only Mahamudra

that worked against the Khandro's scripting

across all of the LXT. "Nothing happens," indeed!

His anger and clarity were supreme. And explain to Urze

that the little orange fishes were potted with the violets.

That is to say the same bowl is empty.

I've been drinking your purple absinthe

with Urze's wheat crackers and cheese! I'm drunk, I think.

My love to you both. Uncle.

Post Script:

Yes I do have a theory about Khandro and her markers. Each bundle

in the photon wrap

tapers twice at the ends only when the stockgram

originates with her. But I don't believe it has

anything to do with Mother—just

simply that the distance they are traveling

refuses our ideas about the speed of light

and curvature of space. Or else it's the tumbling

of the molten make-weight shells within the earth

versus again her incalculable distances.

Laura always understood this—

when the great tapers or flares utterly withdraw within our sun

and its winds and plasma become coherent,

the earth eventually returns this energy

to some as an ecstatic wisdom.

These episodes are, I believe, little rehearsals

for the final death of the sun and our exile from this star system.

Even Cook thought that with epochal solar clarities

the photon terminals must crimp as well.

I can't believe the dark goddess told my niece

that there are two anagrams like dice crossing through the tablets.

Khenpo Karthar said just that

in secret to me when I was twelve.

I fear the Paramita

Mother must love this ripening daughter of hers.

Salutes and sweet dreams, my dears.

IX.

Dear Marie: I was remembering your sister, Laura, talking

about Cook's open radicals. If the photon bundles

are crimped twice at their terminals,

both in a black sun Abraxas and the young dakini's stockgram,

then our Khandro must be learning

the respirations of a modestly large sun.

This is scary, Marie.

It explains the storms across LXT.

This is not the spirit of the mountain.

It's more, I think, that a dakini sky-dancer takes a whole sun

for the still object in her shamata ritual.

I think she's in some trouble. This must be the adolescence

of her growth.

She may now need a full Mk'hagro, though she recently

destroyed ours. Now,

try to recall all this for I won't repeat it:

again, this could make Urze the old oracle and boat—

Lama Yeshe's joke

about the coracle of goat. Do you understand?

X.

Urze can not be that woman: remember

your labor, Marie, was induced

and then nine hours later in the manner of the French, an intervention

of chelates of breach . . . so it just can't be,

we know the lotus birth is the mark of the chosen one!

All our blessings, Mum, in this confusion. Ekajati.

Post Script:

The crossing anagrams that describe the birth

of the handmaiden are in The Legend of Ur fragments,

and I'll script it to you at the end

of this stockgram. Prepare for phaxx, & lading.

XI.

                                     —phaxx & lading for a schilling fragment of an Ur

Kingdom manuscript; (circa 2100) the dark mahogany cell of the late scribe, Yeshe

Tsultrim.

With bits of pale colored chalk

my wife has made a pious study of this fire of rhododendron:

a very few branches, hunk of yak fat

and a whole brick of dung. She points

to the red coral lake deep in the wasteland

surrounded by orange fields of borax

and the rusted machines

are littering the sad alkali shades . . . more snow

in the box-trees; then, the wall of canvas

set against the west winds: she hated

this lurid passage through time

and told us

we should dress for glaciers

where once she'd sold her body with rime.

Madame 'Xiang began to cry.

The tea is gone. There are herbs

for her mother's neck. A poultice of goose skin,

some flour and cold mustards.

She was blind, I think, before joining the Lhasa expedition.

Above, the standard mandala of airships and the taxis; dirigibles

like blue farts on the horizon. The clanking

of the diesel airships has frightened the children

though the fever dulls our hearing; one

voice whispers to my wife about our dying in the night

and that seems right, my vision

of a procession away from the hospital tents:

the convulsing legs

of several hundred teams of starving oxen

ploughing through snow to make

a way for the bearers, their green poles

splintering in the cold wind. She sings

while applying tree gum to the hem of her apron.

The loudest of the airships drops gliders from the belly

like happy trout and then the venting of hot diesel

scalds a dozen oxen: here

begins a stampeding to the yellowing cliff

where, by teams, they are falling

while a quarter of a mile below

the water is freezing to the blue heel of an escarpment.

The west wind carries the cries of those poor beasts

who are still falling now, far below to the work camps

and first glaciers.

We thought we would go to the South, there is

rioting in the coastal cities—

but with the deaths of half the oxen

the litters are put down by ranks in snow,

I heard them coughing for hours

before they had all froze. It snowed some more

and that was their burial. I recognized

it was a dream when lame 'Xiang at first light

went out with the Red Cross.

Their dirigibles were freshly stocked before the rains.

She found the wretched pile of broken oxen

had softened with the balance of the storm, snow

leaving the astonishing figure of Chenrezig:

bodhisattva of their children's intrigues, bodhisattva

of compassion, with a thousand arms

and a modest gold bodice like the orange brick

chimney of some isolated Mongolian monastery.

In the crosswinds an Arab's parachute opens and descends,

the Gurkhus from their firing-nest open— the fog bank is

marbled first with long threads of his stomach blood

and then a whole flood of it over the mind, its plateau

and glaciers . . .

I hallucinated— what,—

a supper bell and two dogs barking in the cold. The Panchen Lama

our needs out of my wife's ravings. The witch

had black mantras and a silver bell on her heavy keys

which kept hungry ghosts out of the peach orchards. And

her brother, she insisted, could squirt blood from his eyes

like lizards.

In the old shrine room the silk brocade

climbed thirty feet in wide banners

above a blue top-knot.

The souring butter lamps

nourished thousands of active mice

which gave the brocade a silver muscle of life—

Now the nagas move in the stream outside.

The smoke from the flesh-colored incense closes my eyes

while I chant like Grandmother taught me

on account of my wife's illness having become blood. My mind

turns down in spiraling rows

of even whiter blossoms

while over the hills I hear the small pig

that is still being slaughtered in our childhood . . .

XII.

Dear Urze: your uncle can be a stupid man. In all legends

of 'an egg halved by a hair'

the chosen girl suffers what could easily be a chelated birth.

This is one possibility for the lotus born. So I am

your Philadelphia grandmother writing you for the first time. I guess

this is my Christmas letter to our small and fragmented

family of Buddhists.

I went to confession and mass the week following Thanksgiving

and it was all delicious. Well,

your uncle accidentally sent me, in phaxx & lading,

the schilling manuscript— maybe he did it for nostalgia's sake

whereas my mother, Elise, knew this Crow Woman to be both

a registered nurse and shamaness with a birth name

of Edith Polanqé.

When the village gates were shut, regardless

of your uncle's ideas and sincerest etceteras—

just regardless, Urze, when

the village gates were shut with rags of cotton,

Edith then

put on her nakedness of black paint

with white stripes. She danced for hours on Yalpi Point

with no fewer than eleven fat rattlers clinging to her.

Opposite this moment in summer,

come early November, in fact,

she danced again with her snakes

up in the peach orchards

and it surely wasn't intended to chase away ghosts—

my two-cents says it was the calling of them.

Your dear uncle

further ignores the significance of 2100 as the fixed chronicler

of his dark lama's account

of the death of a first-born Chinese son and his family. You know,

It was 2100 when Polaris

began to stray from us. Over time it will be replaced by the yellow

Darturus. I've sent this stockgram

to your mother's horse farm in Virginia—

tell her i don't forgive her

for divorcing my son, Oslo. I told him she would prove to be

a heavy maintenance— painting

and lawyering just don't mix. Do you ever hear

that delightful screaming deity, Hayagriva, out there

in the larger barns? My husband used to hear him in New Mexico

when we lived along the river. You'll have to forgive your uncle.

All that buddhist tolerance

will make a fool of you, but he's useful like a shoe.

He's lived too long out there on his copper lake.

The atmosphere

they gave to that small parcel of Mars

creates for him a violent season of monsoons.

A great wall of red wind

followed by isolated electrical cells. In this season

he comes unstrung, just between us.

But, chelated child, in the arcana you could still

be lotus born. So do take some of your yoga instructions from him—

he has sideways approaches to 'sleep-nearing'

that would make a sound transmission

for a young cadet with your gifts. Well,

I've found being your grandmother,

just these few minutes,

quite exhausting. So, of course, my dear,

with concrete and sincerest etceteras,

I am your true mother,

and I am the Khandro.