Book of the Jaspers

I.

Dear Ahyum Lo Nasa Vueh: Marie, this is the name of the dead

that they have given you in the Laotian hills.

And I am weirding this

straight into the Bardo following the tracks

Khandro left when ciphering my true mother's voice

which I detected to be actually present in that ventriloquism.

It's a halving of the 'golden mean.' I've tracked her

past a small nursery of suns'-abraxas near the center

of our galaxy. It's hopeless perhaps to think I'm transmitting

to you.

And yet Ruth Psalter said it was a commonplace, a mourning siddhi

of Angkor Wat.

I think any letter to the dead should begin with apologies

and flute songs.

Your sister Laura has been wonderful

with Urze. She is, though,

concerned about your accident.

Asks if it isn't foreshadowed at several moments

early in the transcripts from Lux.

My answer was,

I think not. There were glad ringsels in your body's ashes:

a stylized Nairatma, blue shooting from its crown

and an Askobya buddha with diamond hevajra tears

on its golden sleeves of bone.

Urze, Laura and I went to the Maine woods

and there under Norway spruce

we all dreamt of a yellow bear burning

while he danced over a still lake —

the canon bone of a moose

for a great red mace

held high above his head.

He was joined in his dance

by a crashing taxi of loons. A net

of grapes over the bear's face.

The moon was full.

The loons together made a sound

worthy of birthing dragons.

We heard the voices of Flute Clan maidens

over the water. There were green lights flaring

in the direction of what must have been Quebec.

We left cotton string around a small water jar

for your thoughts that evening. Your sister is quite

worried about the 'pova-hic passage'

you made to the Four Peaks.

That was twenty-five years ago, wasn't it?

Do you understand my question? If this has worked, my love to the Khandro!

You know, this papier-maché moon that transects the Mars dome

is finally depressing to me. So I've written a letter

to the President of France asking him to respectfully fuck off.

Our little exercise in projective verse must be terse,

or worse, not at all.

Blessings and quick rebirth. Urze-la says we'll find you. Paul.

II.

b.s.: holy smokes, what if no khandro. what if ffee & you, sweet,

are the bees in the bardo's bonnet? lo' vueh.

III.

Now the Khandro is not truly vulnerable.

Ffee is just a paltry echo

fading in that aspect of her consciousness

we'd call the sylvan fissure. However,

if he enjoys a rebirth as a human,

god help us all.

Meanwhile, L. must be alarmed

at the uncanniness of midwife Psalter's death.

She's assisted us there in Winslow, Arizona,

just two weeks past.

Your aunt probably thinks the Khandro

doesn't need a Ffee-cleat satan for a companion. One thing's for sure:

your mother is being reborn in Delhi. They'll call her Kirsna.

The candle-maker's family

                                                        39, Cottonpet . . .

She will be so powerful this time around

that you may indeed feel her presence

even while she's in her mother's womb. This is all very wonderful.

Alfred so far has failed

at your aunt's recipe for the butterscotch cookies.

Our water tower is just now leaking

and I must quickly assist him with the repair.

I love the dance of acetylene in the moonlight.

The vapors aren't bad, either. Love. the Ekajati

Post Script: Out there in the wind

working the torch with Alfred, I felt a great need

to pray for the dead midwife. A thousand words from the Thödal, etc.

I had a vision of an Indian woman, really a girl,

being prepared, not for the heraldic delivery

of the Ming River valley,

but for one of our lotus births with a heated immersion pool

and stacks of bleaching towels. The bowl of crushed cloves!

Guru Rinpoche was there

in the heavy presence of his mantra with tendrils of smoke. Yeshe Soygal

held a burning butter lamp. More tomorrow . . . hung, phet.

I'm glad

I didn't push any of this off to you sooner,

there was another brown-out. Calamity compounded with calamity,

and a cough. Uncle.

IV.

Ekajati: it's Martha Smythe but you'll contrive

to mark this wire

a Khandro clearing her throat. (She thanks you

for the vote of confidence

with regard to the terrible Ffee.) So this is just a packet-wrap

with a jump start

from a dakini in a buddha field. Just that!

You know, there's a rumor

that you killed the Ffee in a pebble breach

below the mountains?

Paul do you remember the Ash Wednesday disaster

with my little sister. You and I were fifteen.

We were down in the coal room making love, then

rising through the kitchen to an upstairs shower

but reaching the landing

there was Kendra's frail voice asking, "Martha?"

Beside the icebox, we turned — coal dust on my face and breasts,

menstrual blood on your forehead like an old stamp.

You carried yourself in the manner of the elect

bearing a golden lamp.

Kendra, screaming, ran down the sidewalk

and across the soccer field. By the time

we were out of a very quick shower,

she was composed and sitting at the kitchen table.

Her feet linked at the ankles, kicking them

to pass the time. She began

the negotiations

detailing your burden as five dollars a week

and all her algebra assignments.

When I crashed the old red Buick

just a week after mother gave it to us.

Well, my part of the contract fell to you.

That was truly heartless of her.

I was quite awake

going through the windshield. The Coca-Cola sign

growing imminent . . .

We had outrageously good fun. When I was asked

about the Ffee, they also wondered

about your black arts. I said, that's forbidden to him!

I said, "The fleur-de-lis is no flower,

it's just a conventionalized bee

with its legs pulled off. Muses can assume

the form of bees." I explained that's what

you said to me when I asked their very question.

They didn't seem interested.

Then I insisted the Mazda-ffee, that evil Cleat,

was well dead. I guessed

that he'd rather be in New Philadelphia

with the brillo of a mundane egg

and great distillations of violets and hyssop (purple absinthe

acquired from your father with Hank Olmo's charcoal.)

I explained how once your mother returned from the Gobi

with a watercolor of a horse's testicles

being baked in a double oven

of camel brick or dung. Wrapped in large leaves

they looked like fossilized dinosaur eggs — white

peeling to white.

Your family was so kind to me. I send my love.

(Beware.) Smythe.

P.S.:

Thank god for small towns in New Hampshire

still burning moss and bituminous sticks. Thank god

they did have a witch or two. Thank god

it isn't all just water nukes and water nymphs. I miss you.

V.

it is simply a cable from 'the Smythe' in paradise?

Furthermore, the Khandro's signature

is nowhere, anymore?

Well, Gregory St. Vith is in bonded exile here.

It will last six years and he is unbelievably

under the registry of the state of New Jersey.

We laugh about this 'til it hurts. Alfred once, in Gloucester phrasing,

wet himself over it.

St. Vith is a roller of big cigars. And

a former teacher of our little satan, Ffee:

after the Missouri quake, Ffee's mother —

a 'Born-again' police sergeant and instructor

in water sports — relocates her family

in Denver.

St. Vith is already there with tuberculosis.

The former Harvard professor was now teaching

in a community college licensed under the umbrella

of a ghetto's shopping mall. He says

he was never happier.

He ended up in New Jersey trying

to fix the five state Masonic lottery

while of course escaping — who else? —

the then Justin Ffee, Esquire.

St. Vith insists that our Ffee was a lotus birth,

his mother, once an Olympic swimmer, was addicted

to Guatemalan Pituitrin in an 11% solution.

This was grim

even in the eyes of St. Vith. (They killed

babies to create this drug, mostly in China, Mexico

and Bangladesh.) Urze-la,

Fee begins life

with an enlarged pituitary body and the great flaccid eyes,

all of him more involved with our moon

than an elephant's menses or the tides.

Urze, I'm trying to be kind here. But St. Vith confirmed it.

Ffee cut the young Galbraith's throat!

In eleven years that excellent man would have been our President.

The crash of the Spec Airliner 800 was his work also.

In his next life he'll be standing in a silk suit,

his hair silver at forty, a dark green

Mercedes-touring, in Rome. This photograph

will appear on the front page of the New York Times. Exactly twenty-

five years later he'll die, at dinner, while visiting the Algonquin.

The great Manhattan champagne fire of '24.

Some will call him Magus-ur.

There's an alarming aside here:

I did dream one winter night,

not long ago, that I was on a yellow pebble breach,

in Montana, wrestling with Alfred,

who looked like Einstein, who became suddenly

an Irish patrolman in a blue vest

named Michael Clare Purseheart. Then, well,

he turned into Ffee.

In the dream, I did strangle the poor bastard.

There was a lovely stand of aspen

in an easterly wind. Later, a very blue night!

It was one of those very clear dreams. I saw his next death.

Did I tell you

he massacred friends of mine at a wedding in Greece?

Ffee's next birth is not lotus — it's gonna hurt.

The site will be the old city of Philippi.

If this dream had some substance

then the Khandro has given our little company

illusory bodies.

Universal law forbids it.

(Unless we are unconscious

members of the Karma Pakshi Shint.) Your mother

had this idea once. She turned green and forgot it.

Oh, hell, it was probably just the noble 'tin-pageant'

doing what he does best.

I detest myself for actually missing

the Khandro's letters to us.

Alfred says I must be a masochist.

And his cookies are still shit. My love, emaho! uncle.

Post Script:

I've been thinking about Eta Carinae's homunculus.

Yes, the two heads of cauliflower. And Balick's rogue comet sailing

out of NGC7606. Those stellar 'wind fossils'

have always held our galaxy's darkest secret.

The bi-polar dorje nebulae, that's it, I think? More about this tomorrow . . .

If you intend sharing this with your cadet friend

who is a physicist, tell him

to forget it. It's a lightning bolt for us —

just glamorous barbells for him. Grunt . . .

Well, I'm sorry. 'the Ekajati.'

                       VI.

(.4/.13 nibes.)

O CLEARDY SHUN' PEX CLAVIL PHET/

SAGATTA REX EN OWEN CLUNT.

That's it. I do blush.

I might as well tell you also — the cable

of your shameless adventures with the Smythe . . . well,

it arrived here Wednesday. Which explains Aunt Laura's silence.

I think she might even be a little jealous. Of the dead?

What a thing for me to say.

Mother thought that humility was your wild card;

that your temper, when young, was terrifying.

She thought there was no one

more generous on the planet. (She added,

that's not saying much.) She once believed you would have six wives?

She guessed you had an addiction. Or two?

But this was good for you, she surmised.

She insisted I would come to trust you with my life.

Enjoy my little prayer; ha, translate its galactic-celtic, please!

Marie said you spoke it in your sleep

when heavily attended by muses. She teased

that it was probably just some poetic psycho-dialect.

What are these 'wind-fossils'?

EMAHO, yourself. The niece.

P.S.:

John, my friend who studies particles,

must know everything about your bi-polar

nebulae. Gasons, batons and quarks?

And frail larks?

VII.

Dear Urze: you do know that the slow-wind is further frustrated

with the opposite spin at a star's interior hydrogen-shellac,

but mostly there's just exceptional mass leaving the star's

equator — this leads to the dorje, lightning-bolt, nebulae. They are

all fossils really. Brodde Bleterum did the classical

description of all this while dying of a gangrenous foot.

He was in a tent near Ulaan-baatar, Mongolia. His two companions

had gone mad in the first storm.

The event was an eclipse — they were

in the Path of Totality.

Now a comet was collateral to all this — that fucking

accursed Hale-Bopp was glowing,

zero magnitude, 40 degrees straight above our sun.

So Brodde

broke his leg getting there. He had two cowards from Princeton

for companions. The younger was named Kush.

They died of thirst there in all that snow.

Bleterum's sister loved the behemoth, Charles Olson, and

actually died of thirst, in Tunis. An alcoholic,

she wrote about the human orgasm, rivaling

all texts including my beloveds, Hildegard of Bingen

and Alice B. Toklas. I knew a great baritone named Toklas.

Georg X. Toklas.

The secret about those wind fossils

is in the electromagnetic folds of these obese solar giants.

Think of them for shamata practice. The X-rays

alone at the second and fifth cakras. Corn mush at the third.

Georg X. Toklas was a member of the Pakshi Shint. Those Fascisti —

who died of nosebleeds up in the grandstand

with the most evil

of the last three flower-Popes? That was Georg X. — he was doing

some phurba speech while forgetting the exact location

for the Kro'die syllables. He faked it

and killed them all in twenty minutes. It was an accident.

He had saved History itself, for our planet,

but wouldn't be consoled. He was a vegetarian, etc.

The lovely man spent the balance of his life

with lepers in Old Florida. He finally hung himself,

which, again, is distressingly poor form

for an enlightened being. The Bodhisattvas, the great ones,

come to assist us, never knowing who they are . . .

This way they climb the bhumis faster. You will know them

by their petty acts of self-recrimination. The genius of this path is the

great inversion of silent mother-Talmud:

the 'dajjal' or local anti-christ

in New Havana hated Georg X. Georg had turned the dajjal's sister

into a laundromat. Again it was an accident, but as the X. liked

to say, 'it's a very successful laundromat to this day.'

(Ici-ffee would have a fit over these failed quatrains.)

I would love some of that Thousand Flowers honey from Provence —

across whole lifetimes I have sheltered this addiction. It's great

on hot muffins.

Buffalo Bill Cody was right, "If there is no god, then I am his

prophet." Love to my niece and the timid aunt. Ekajati.

P.S.:

I think Georg X. is now a coracle in the deepest assembly of sleep.

I'd feel him if he was here with us. (The Guru just laughs

and says, "He's the purse, the 'X' and the wat?")

It's a loss.

Did I tell you that yesterday the Hopi

made their annual offering trek of salt, water

and flour. At the Colorado River, by traditional agreement

the local warden

was to present them with two eagle chicks.

He didn't. It was some sign of the sacred

lunar calendar, perhaps jibes or ibis.

Furthermore, he insulted three female elders.

They said to him four times, this is the completion

of a prophecy. Greatly saddened, they then turned

and walked away. The Blue Star Kachina

is secretly a woman now.

She has already begun dancing before europeans

in the central plaza.

My love to you, Urze-la. Sad uncle.

                     VIII.

— space station WGYN.

Urze: it is just awful. Alfred went into a diabetic shock

and has died. He was supposed to jettison my ashes

in the Khandro's jewel-harp, Star field 1nec707. Now,

I'm coming to Earth with his remains.

There's a cave

in north central Tibet and it's mine for the taking.

It's in a desperate wilderness. The last

cable to Tring wa ka', to our guru, was returned.

I feel he is dead also. I'm leaving Mars for good. That last dza

I opened is the Dza Obum. I will present it

to the old Arak Tulku.

I'll be in Lhasa by the full moon. I'll be in Virginia

the following Tuesday. Love. Your uncle.

                      IX.

— intelligramme, (WGYN). Urze Ei' Ekajati.

Dear Cadet: I regret to inform you that your esteemed uncle,

Paul Ekajati, is the victim

of a very focused scripting of this space station.

Your uncle must have been an important gentleman

for they want him immediately out of quarantine

and returned to Earth. To Geneva.

He is technically dead to us.

He was smoking cigarettes in front of a large office watercooler

just as the script hooked into his brain.

This is an unprecedented strike.

He calls the cooler, 'the Smythe,'

and must be restrained when in the same room with it.

Under instructions from local-cluster doctors we are told

to annihilate 'the Smythe' with your uncle present.

Then massive doses of sodium amyutaol x — for 72 hours.

When we reach your farm in Virginia, he'll seem much older,

depressed, but perhaps oriented in his Ego.

I should report that when your uncle appears less agitated

he is always conversing in Greek

with 'a black mother' who he once insisted

was the goddess of all projected space.

Madame, on the slim chance that he's right about this,

I've shown them both complete respect.

And with reference to the invisible goddess,

this is difficult!

I just pretend that she is the night and about the size

of a watercooler. Is she a loose thread

from his lost life? If yes, he may be the first recorded salvage

from a Snakedeath Wreath. We Marines have

pulled straws to see who would annihilate 'the Smythe.'

I got the shortest of them. There's something

in your uncle's eyes that hastens me to beg for your prayers.

Lieutenant Peter Schofelt, Jr.

X.

Lieutenant Schofelt: do not annihilate the water entity — it may support,

at the very least, the Smythe's psyche. Tell the physicians

attending my uncle that if they kill the watercooler

they may well end up berry-crepes hurtling in the direction

of the nearest collapsing sun. Uncle is an advisor

to a distant, beneficent sleep assembly. Harm nothing!

He's experiencing first love and he had a terrible temper as a child.

Repeat. Do not harm 'the Smythe.'

This is my third cable to you in ten minutes? Will you respond?

By the way, an Ekajati is a Khandro. Yes, lieutenant,

think of the night and then withdraw into your prayers. Urze Ei' Ekajati.

                      XI.

— in empty lading.

Broadband 3: we regret a confirmation 'in aspurtive arc'

that the catastrophic script in wreath

has vanished. First having

destroyed the Universe Plaget. It has yielded lotus births

for 111 deities — all other life was lost. This zone is now called

The Cloud of Hayagriva. It is off limits to all Marcelots, weavers

and salvages. Om mani padme hung. Om mani. . . . .