A Thousand Years in the Body

Part I Chapter 1 The Conjuring If I trusted Poetry completely, I would ignite. I would sweep down into the witch-riding dreams I fly through during the night’s sleep. I would rise, before breakfast, into the vibrating echo of scenes, always weaving into the bright speech of birds reeling through the red-membrane light of the morning. Never have I sought to sing the day into me beyond this or imagine what else it might bring in voice or color or the thronging, swirling within me and other throats I see pulsing, trying to emerge into the word and light. Yet still I have trusted death and the limits of my flesh far too long. I will stop doubting the wisdom beyond my bones, wander off naked, alone, into the river of memory and imagination among swans, the blackbirds of my youth, the coming snow of my old age. I would see what towers, what sergeants hold sway over my dreams, what dogs and laughing moons hold open their burdens, their promises for me. Come, meander with me, and we will moo like drunken cows at the edge of sorrow and forgiveness, under the tiny umbrella of the leaves we hold sacred and quiet, walk, tell each other secrets in the rain and sleet of days. I have never looked back at what has been faithless, what has been angry in me. Nor have I inherited or held tight to what is solemn, sequestered, or forbidden by my blood. Poetry, if I trusted you completely, there will be no effort or mouth or long-escaping breath coming forth from the everyday mortuary of life. No, I would fetch, carry myself with pride, bear witness to the bloodless shadow of the moon like a hungry wolf with my future grandchildren in its belly. I would carry myself off in a foreign dream of espionage, traveling over pyramids on the Giza plateau, looking down, seeing my ancestors, dark and vestigial, mooring and moving, lost and disconsolate in the African deserts and air. I would hold myself hostage until the silver of my age, coalesced and drunken itself silly before a court in time, pleads guilty to the offence of still believing in destiny. Hold me tight. I swear not to deliver myself to lakes, to twisting caravans of anyone else’s memory. Like you, I am singular yet empty into more than this, more than muscles, more than cathedrals, more than the religions of sorrow know. There are roots deeper than grief, deeper than any individual’s intention burning, working themselves out through this furnace of my life. I am captive to it. I am finger, flux, and footpath to it. I am a gathering inward, knowing no distance, yet bottomless, coiling, and dark in its delivery and dance. Would you save me from this caravan, Poetry, if you could or believed me worth it? Save me from the mistrials. Come, let me be in the mystery of your arms, and I will flip over and cave into you completely with all the abundance that awakens the hawks to rise in focus, anger, and abandon, known far beyond the walls of war and sacrifice. There is a horrible bounty on my head. There are warrants for my arrest for one of those trials to begin before the angels and crows. In the courtrooms, there will be wine and vision; there will be corpses, roses, and enough smoke to cover the valleys and off-trails in the mountains seen in the pathways through hell. I sense a crisis in values, in the way our tongues collapse when the truth is unwilling to undress before us. I write and sweat out these days in the lingering shadow of the crazy emperor, airplanes spreading contagion and plague, the rotting out of democracies, the era of the two popes. I repent only to leaves that have fallen, I do; before the mirages of light swollen in our dreams, I do; before we discover, in mass again, that we are celestial bodies, resonate lines flowing through the dark liquid crystals of our brains, stretching out, paralleling the lanes between the planets and the stars. I ask you, before the pope declares us all hopeless sinners, weeping at the altar of a failing God, that you come to me, Poetry; materialize to me, Poetry; bless me with your fatal accent, your puberty, your gothic breath and insistence on flesh and courage. I am alive in the fire. I am without fixed beliefs, time or the mercy found dreaming in a vase of withering flowers. I am forever on the verge of becoming flammable and reoccurring. I, a psycho-cosmic wordsmith of the coming solar age, call you forth. I, dreamer of lust in the seawater, the quantum breathing through me as I walk the earth. I awaken you in the blood of my blood that lives in incantation. I go to bed with a dark tongue in my throat. I, celestial hallucinator, addict of hope. They say if I had trusted you completely, Judas would have been forgiven, honored, and overpaid. I say this without remorse because I know I am loud, boisterous, ungovernable, and immortal. I say this because, Poetry, in my dreams, you promised me a thousand years in the body if I would dance with you, propagate with you, and reveal the African blood of everyone. My gonads vibrate with the hum of the oceans. My teeth hold the same calcium that was once with the ancients. I hear the wind fornicating in trees, feel their love tricks rubbing against the side of my house. At night, a wild strawberry stalks my imagination, and I am seduced by the scent of you, Poetry, from a thousand feet away. In the name of Om, of Oz, of Amen, of Amenta, of all the tiny gods embedded in crystals and the salt at the bottom of the sea. I ask you to come forth. I will wait a long while. I will sit beside a dark oak tree. I will hear the inner coil of my ear calling me and fall into death or sleep or a tunnel of some kind between memory, science, and sorcery. Then, when the jackals under the full moon begin to follow me, I will descend into the underworld, remembering you, holding your image as you fade, a searing white pigeon flying into the sun. Then you will reemerge, obsidian and alabaster, a star’s resonance in a grain of sand. O Poetry, I know you do not remember me, but in our last lives together, near the Aegean, where I left you and sailed back to Egypt on a leaking barge, you promised to marry me again when hope reascended into the world, and there would be faith and beauty enough for everyone to rise. I have not forgotten. I have not forgotten. There is a dark wine that still draws us to each other. There is a mortgage on your heartbeat still mooring itself to the center of the earth. It does not matter. Swing out anyway. I will not interpret the way your hair moves in the wind or limit your eyes from their infinite seeing. We are a basket, a calyx of our own meaning and dust, borrowing each day on the principle. We are the music our bodies give off and give into as we move and contour into the earth for the benefit of experience. In these dense regions of the flesh we have learned to walk, talk, and discipline ourselves as we move through the thick turbulence of this endless fluid of life. There is a female animal like you who stalks my dreams. I know her. I follow her like smoke follows the fire-flushed-out ruins of buildings, caving in from time to time when the ash breaks, collapses, and the foot soles of previous owners sink into the dust. For many, many years I have gambled my eyes for the sight of the bird who flies beyond death. Years ago, I arranged to be dismembered after I die; have my organs passed around for use by the bold, the new, the intoxicated. This is why, Poetry, you must be trusted completely. Yes, come, come, you too are immortal, waves in the ocean, wavelets of time, a coiling in the flux and propagation of matter through space that is always reaching back to its source.