Book of the Jewel Worm, Norman Dubie

NORMAN DUBIE

from The Spirit Tablets at Goa Lake
—a long poem

For George Starbuck

(This futurist poem enjoys the broken narration of its hero, Paul Ekajati, an amateur mathematician who once taught the calculus on our moon. He is now an exhausted buddhist Vajramaster living in a small village at the Bakavi Lake Mining Colony on Mars. The year is 2277. Yeshe Khandro is in her last black ovum. Or, I should say that a raised mischevious voice in the poem belongs to a 'dakini wisdom traveler in space' and that she is the destroyer of the Vega Remnant, LXT. There are eleven spirit tablets that survived the wrathful dakini Khandro. Our hero is on Mars to investigate a lost civilization, Keet Sleet, who are believed to be the source of our galaxy's 108 spirit tablets, the sacred Mk' hagro. The Snakedeath Wreath, that took all life in the Vega II Cluster, killed Ekajati's wife and brother. He has solmenized his anger for the Khandro. And he believes she hunts him—even in the very lovely prayers with which he begins his mornings.)

—September 9, 1999

Book of the Jewel Worm

ONE

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.

(.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:

I am not the black Khandro wiring
a voice back
along some faded logarithmic bubble . . .
this is just your mother, saying
those false plaster waves are
some dead schoolgirl's breasts,

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

religion and then war, war
and then religion, while wondering why
that old magician
didn't want his dukedom back
now that he could have it.

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.

I know you love the Keets. Their verses
written for the backs of mirrors,
the bath-houses and reflecting copper lakes.

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?

You don't want to ask about her, but yes
the wiring-back involves
the no-self vows that came with the southern Nalanda:
an umbrella and then the conscious tiger track:

has your mother
explained any of this? She lived in that village, in Laos!
Once she put a yellow rag in her mouth
and by the end of the sitting
it had become somehow the surprising birth
of her skirts. Your father's 'view' was impeccable.

If you ask permission of your mother,
then I may tell you something of what I know. But it must all
be voiced back on the probability
that you are not my niece
but rather the 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.

Then, just whole generations of neurotic scholar-
bureaucrats. So it was a dampened combustion of first flowers
and, yes, a virtuous bloody
war that made them

virtuosos of a murder, like crows. The absinthe
is going back into the high blue cupboard. I promise.

Salutes and sweet dreams. Paul.

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

real harm in this moon. And now you must convalesce.
Yes, I'm forming a theory about the energy
and your use of time-slaves. And, oh, if you ever
so much as attempt to wire-back
on Urze, I'll kill myself
and you'll be left in your preserve, to brood and pout . . .

My love to you, Mum. Paul.

Post Script:
Yes I did ride that probe that passed like sin itself
through the Egg Nebula in '44.
It was
a wax-cylinder recording, replete Kodira
with solar storms,
my father and I shared this experience: his new flicker-fusion
goggles and horn:
we chewed peyote with a pineapple float,
buttons and bottoms up, he later wrote—

And what a ride it was: a rose bank

of Telle Säide hydrogen plasma
drifts into a raked zen-like field
of frozen pond-green asteroidal chits, igniting them
while I'm remembering a complex birthmark
on the inside thigh of the beautiful Smythe.

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 . . .

TWO

'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 . . .

She weirds-back on me with this Smythe woman
once or twice a month. I do think you have
all of your grandmother's gifts.
And Marie wants me to say something consequently
about the Khandro dakinis of the void?

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.

And no
she's not so much evil as just busy and spontaneous
like a child. She will mature
in several-hundred thousands of years
and take her spirit share
back to the original wisdom mother.

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?

Marie, I think within the week you must begin
to instruct Urze
in the illusory body of the completion stage sleep.

I'll share the responsibilities
if you'll just send me your practice schedule. And in that case
no more absinthe or Gauloises. Love Paul.

Dear Marie: ignore this one, I'm just weirding-back
to Khandro off your station—to tell her
we believe she's mistaken our Urze for the handmaiden
to the Anointed Coracles of Sleep.

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

is dead.
In 'Xiang's fever she prayed to the master of ceremonies
in a neon-bright holographic cabaret
for simple soup and rice.
And ice to the back of the leg.
All of which she got on the next watch
when Crow Woman, the 'spring nurse,' arranged

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.

THREE

XIII.

Dear Urze: the ventriloquism of our Khandro is truly naughty.
And yet you have met my mother,
I regret to submit
to both you and Marie,
including her full polyphony
that was first directed at me while still a boy
of four, thought to be dying of measles. That afternoon

I met the many mother masks of that sickness
and the Khandro of Lux
was, I suspect, their boss.

Pretend this is some orange postcard from Marseilles.

My love to you both.
I'll write more in a few days. I'm tenting on the Plain of Jars
until Thursday. Absolute, sincerest . . . Your uncle.

Post Script:
Remind me to tell you about the mules and kerosene lamps
of the beloved Mother Nairatma. She was the last
of the lotus born carriers of the sleep.
Don't you think
this Khandro of Lux is really quite charming?
I've lost my fear of her. And that
could be dangerous. What does Marie think?
Tell her that I'm back to work
on the rail
and hopefully with no coughing.

XIV.

Dear Urze: there's wind coming, the nine flue-tins
in my chimney are making
their strange applause. And then there are the
red clouds still peppered with glass
from the collapse of the old Travenier Geodesic
some ninety years back. The wind will polish
your eyeballs in a fraction of a second. The 'glass-rough' in it

will leak even into my contaminant-army
tent. It's affected my sight, along with those months
of darkness in Tibet. Every time a blue pearl
lodged in my neck
it was another adjustment
in the prescription for the contacts. The khandro was right

about the chelates, they assist the mother with pain
from the first contraction through delivery
while never reaching the fetus. And there's still the right level
of distress in the birth channel.

That your mother carried you at all
was a miracle. That generation of women
was completely taken up with the Wyndings
on Saturn. The rare woman who carried, aborted in the first term.
It was like a religion.
The number of white mills for both obstetrics and aging
increased a thousand fold on earth alone.
It lasted for ten years. Your mother's Laotion
mendicancy made all the difference. You do realize,

we were all in love with her. It was, she has told you,
Crow Woman's great-grandchild who was mid-wife to you both.

Her name was Ruth Psalter and it puzzled people
that she agreed to visit your birth
for in the past she had attended exclusively the incarnate tulkus.
And even then, mostly the religious ones,
almost never the artistic. The line
that runs from Mozart to Jimi Hendrix to the great Nigerian, Ben Ahlen—
she would not assist that family.

Oslo and I joked

that your father could have been a forest mendicant.
But, of course, you have his DNA tags, all many millions of them.

This is my last night in this fucking tent. I don't dare
to even bring beer out here. I do get thirsty.
Alfred has come along on this trip
and they still pay him to be my research assistant. He
has been asleep for hours, so I dare not take my tiny hammers
to these yellow volcanic coffins
that we gathered off the plain. They're about the size

of ostrich eggs. One in a hundred will contain a script or artifact.
I have one with a pink quartz streak in it
whose specific density is way off. When the Keet Sleet sealed it up again
they used a decorative resin the color of this quartz. I'll wait
till morning and open it with Alfred. My love. Your uncle.

XV.

Dear Urze: these volcanic cinders that I collect
sometimes contain gold ribbon
with indecipherable dakini script. Even though
not a single Keet Sleet man or woman
has lived in the time of our recorded history
I still feel great misgivings when opening these caskets.

They come
in two classifications, Geks and Dzas.
The Gek is just a vapor of elation in the brain
seconds after the cinder is opened.
The Dzas are scary and contain, according to legend,
gold and platinum strips
with cursive glyphs. The Dzas

are physically beautiful: magical
and ossified, there's a worm of movement
still living in its concentric disturbance of agate.

Like the strongest Dzi beads back on earth,
Dzas, it is reported, will escape collection by taking flight
or killing you where you crouch.

The cough that I've suffered since February is linked,
I'm certain, with that momentary insult to the brain
that comes when opening the Geks. Urze-la,

the Dza that Alfred and I opened this morning
had a turquoise worm in it that had eaten half its script.
What remained I translate:

                        the niece was stopped
                        at the last of the cholera checkpoints.
                        They will delay her like the aunt.

                        In the anterior margins of the sea
                        there are the many spheres
                        halved by hairs.
                        One has hazel eyes
                        and the aunt has red hair. Neither cries.

Show this to Marie. Tell her I joked about it
being worthy of André Gide. Don't be alarmed
by the reference to quarantine.

There is some psychic spontaneity to the Dzas—an odd,
self-fulfilling filter to the previous night's sleep. I had
dreamt of your dead aunt.
This probably accounts for the whole script. Don't forget
that the thing least likely to be surmounted, IS!
Your uncle. Ekajati.

XVI.

Dear Marie: it's your mother-in-law here again
and I'm very sorry for that last stockgram.
My husband always said
I was an addict to inflection. I must advise you though

to distance yourself from my son
who drinks and gambles with rough-necks
in the Maximillian Shacks. The son-of-a-bitch, pardon
this first person authority, would tell you
that I am not myself
and that this is another script
originating from the dark throat of Cygnus. Well, if he's so smart

why hasn't he paused to eschew
some obvious news, which is

that I died of a violent pneumonia
a week following
my beloved Samuel's passing. Let's shelter

Paul from this, he'd just mistake it for more of our fictive singing.
And after all we are not cruel. What else
is he confused about?

The cough did not originate with the mines.
It is caused by the ether
he's releasing from the Geks. Further
the last Golden Dza that he split
is sacred to several hundred dakinis in the Assembly. He's lucky

to still be with us.
He thinks Sister Nairatma protects him
there in those molasses and milk dunes.

He believes that he shuffles back to his Underground
following phantom trains of her white mules.
Twice she found him vetched ice

when he was dying of thirst. Urze must see
what a complete jerk her uncle is?

You know, his wife

scripted right into the arms of a Balinese gentleman
and is utterly thankful for the attraction.
What haven't I told you— he is the government,

folded into governments. Twice already in his meager life
he's worked as an agent for Zurich.

The last time he was on Earth
he accepted payments of gold and rice
from Beijing and Nice. And there was an exchange
originating in extant-Canada. A boy
was the payment then . . .

He no longer knows who he is, who he
works for. But it is cerainly not our Urze-la!

He'll be shocked to hear of his mother's death.
Tell him that maybe later
when I'm in a more generous costumery,
I'll hold his hand, play poker with him—

I'll even weed his arboretum. Tell him
I am glad he doesn't fear me any more. I'm the Khandro.

Post Script: Oh,
he will live. The breath of the Geks
is not lethal.
He must not think of the Keet Sleet
as dead. His mother lived, didn't she,

until the page-turner began to rise
from her polished black bench, leaning forward
to 'vetched ice' . . . stunned,
but not dead. What does he think the weirding is?

XVII.

Dear Urze: you shouldn't worry about me.
The last cable to Marie
came here as well. No, any speech she makes
that might reach you will be truthful. So my mother
has been dead since the New Year.
The flares from the sun
were canceling stockgrams then by the hundreds,
but registering
half of them as delivered. Someone must have written?

Those large ellipses of the sun would make an excellent
transport for a Dza's turquoise worm.
It could easily fly
and then plough and bevel
the volcanic sediment. I tend to think though
that they are all Keet Sleet artifacts.

The Khandro sure is touchy about them?

The last thing she said regarding 'the weirding'
is curious. It seems these communications
are a collaboration between the Bardo splendors
of the dead and a transmitting dakini.
This means while we're eating her tripe
on Earth or Mars
she could literally be sampling cucumber sandwiches
and lemonade with my mother in a Paradise.

I do know you shouldn't worry—
she won't harm me
for they won't tolerate anything disturbing you. And
there's a Minyak compact of non-violence
ruling all the assemblies, except the Shö—
(if, in truth, any of them are still vital.)

I dreamt last night
of a late twentieth century barbarian poet.
He was French-Canadian, Monsieur Nedperse,
and he read to me from Milton
while eating a whole chicken. He sat in half-light,

a giant with a white beard—he'd recite,

lick his fingers and then recite some more.
Before leaving, he smiled broadly
and I saw then across his forehead
my mother rowing out on her pond
among greenly collared lilies.

She was wearing a straw hat and canvas shoes.
The giant pronouncing her,
not the daughter of black perpendiculars,
but the watercolorist of fat smacks.
Then I woke up.

Urze-la, don't worry about the dead.
Remember it's a long continuous thread.
And nothing happens. Love. Uncle.

Post Script: Oh,
of course I work for governments. It's romantic
compared to the Corporate Trust, IBM & DEEDS, or
Sears Roebuck. And the boy from Quebec
is just my assistant, Alfred.
This dakini is infuriating. Woe
is me— travail
& blue, boo-hoo. She thinks I'm pinko?

By the way, don't attempt a phaxx & lading
until Tuesday, there are

expanding storms of invisible paraffins
nearing the Jet of Hope—

Oh, I forgot,
yes these postscripts break her concentration—
fiendish, isn't it?

XVIII.
—phaxx without lading.

THE OLD WOMEN CARRY SACKS OF RUE WITH DRIED ORANGES
DOWN FROM THE SNOW MOUNTAIN OF APHU
TO THE BURNING FIELDS
WHERE LIKE THE WHITE ROSARY OF VAIN REPETITIONS
LARKS ARE RISING FROM THE TIMOTHY
OF AN EARLIER LIFE. DRESSED IN A YELLOW RAG

THE COUNTESS OF EXCRÉMARGE
PASSES US STANDING IN A WAGON. HER SHADOW
THOUGH, IS BATHING IN MOONLIGHT ON A ROOFTOP
IN JERUSALEM. THE SAID, SIMPLE METRICS

OF A TIRED SEPTENARY. WE PARADE WITH HER

INTO THE SOFT AND VIOLENT CHAMBERS
OF AN EARLY POLAND. A GREAT WILDERNESS
OF BREAKING SNOW
AND SOFT LIGHTS OF A FRIDAY NIGHT SUPPER
WILL NOT SAVE THEM, THE MAD OZIAS TOLD US SO . . .

IN THE STARVELING WINTER
THEY SHOULD TAKE YOUR BOOK AND BURN IT,
PUTTING THE ASHES ON THEIR CHILDREN'S FACES.
THE SPECTER OF LOS

ZAZAZAZAZAZAZA ∞

IS DREAMING OF THE HORSES IN WHITE WATER AGAIN.
ONE STANDS AND EATS THE SLAMON. THE KALF IS TWENTY.

ELIAKIM AND ELY
ARE THE ONLY COLLEGES, NOT OF WAR.

ABOVE THEM THERE ARE DISPLAYS OF RADIANT WHORES
CLIMBING OUT OF THE TOMBS' BATH-HOUSE
TO THE HOUSE OF BLINDNESS AND A DIMPLED MOON.

HERE AVIGDOR HA-SARFATI AND THE VENERABLE RABBI ISAAC
TAKE THE LOAF OF BREAD THAT WAS SET ASIDE
AND HALVE IT TWICE. SPEAKING IN A COMMON VOICE

THEY TELL US NOT TO FEAR THAT SICKNESS IN THE CHEST
FOR IT IS JUST THIS SICKNESS THAT WILL HEAL US.

STUDY THE MOUTH OF THE TET, THE ANGRY
UNSAYABLES OF THE PE. A THIN LINE OF CAMELS

ACROSS THE PLAIN OF BEZIERS WHERE THE RAGS
OF A GREAT SCARECROW ARE BURNING IN PARALLAX: 4 olin;

'ma' amarot of ten circles;
and a gold beard with fifty-two knots.
SPIRIT TABLETS
LIKE SEWER PLATES IN LOS ANGELES.
IN OUR BRIGHTENING SUN?

A WATER MONSTER WITH HIS BOWL OF LIGHTNING
SHOUTS, SHOUTS FOR THE COUSINS OF LO.

THE WHITE LAMA IS OTRUL CHAK OF THE EASTERN GATE
WHO MOVES CLOCKWISE WITH US
ENTERING THE STARK SUNLIGHT OF ÖPAME. THE LU
OF THE 'A-MOUNTAIN' CRYING
NOT TO HURT THE MOUNTAIN. YET THEY WILL.
IT IS NOW ALL IN BEAUTY THAT THEY ARE DEAD.

AGAVE GROWING AROUND THE RUIN OF A LADDER

AND THE SIMPLE FLOURSACK MASK OF 'TALKING GOD'
ASKS THEM TO BE CALM
FOR THEY WERE TOLD IN A FIELD OF SNOW
THAT THEY MUST NOT HURT
THE STUPAS GREAT SKIRTS OF FELDSPAR.

'ONCE JUST TO WALK ON THE LAND
WAS TO DREAM.'

NOW A RAINBOW APPEARS IN THE SKY
AND THE CHILDREN WHO ARE BORN OF THE HORIZON
ARE BURYING THE RED TOOTH OF GEBURAH.

DZIDZIDZIDZIDZIDZIDZI

THREE INNOCENTS WITH LIME AND SALT BURYING
THE RED TRIANGLE PULLED LIKE A NAIL FROM THE TREE.

TSAK. TSAK. THE WOOD-BIRD YEAR.
AND THE BOATMAN CHATRAL SMILES AT THE TREE
WITH NOW THREE TEETH IN IT.

THERE'S A GIANT BLACK PLUM
TURNING AMONG LARCHES ON A HIGH CLIFF,
AND WE SHALL WORSHIP IT

IN BREEDING FITS OF SILENCE. ∞

FOUR

Star room, lamp room,
The winter comes, a sea hunting . . .

—brother 'Perse

XIX.
—the New Year, an O'odham moon.

Dear Urze: I also got a phaxx with no lading,
without holographic registery. The paraffin storms
can turn these things inside out. Yet,
there's a fearful coherence in it.

When it arrived in my underground
I fell to my knees vomiting—the lights
went out all over the camp.

When the lights returned I saw that
the lading had become two jewel-worms—
one in the eaves of my arboretum
making ice the color of rainbows and the other
lodged mockingly in my monitor's new filter
which has a fat sodium valence:

manatees, late evangelicals, and the mayor of Detroit
were all locked in fornication
there on channel fifty-two; I've always found the
mayor wonderfully distracting, even beautiful.
It was too bestial for words. I tossed
the damn thing into the lake. It depressed
the cat.

This phaxx looks like a full Mk'hagro,
a false Mk'hagro. But I don't know?

It was intended for thee, Urze-la . . .

Its origin was not anywhere in Lux— it comes
from much deeper in the Assemblies.

The surviving worm in the arboretum
must be surrounded with braziers.

I'll talk to you again before morning.
I'll pray to Sang Yum. Uncle.

Post Script: Yes,

this false Mk'hagro like a tax collector
could save all our lives one day. You
and Marie should memorize it in the Pali.

You asked about magic. Our worlds are so tricked up,
illusory and corrupt—
how can you assign any importance to a phurba dance
under these circumstances? But do study
the number values in the Pali alphabet.
I'll do the rest. Ekajati.

XX.

Uncle: I dream now of the Ward of the Septaguant
followed always by the Nitrate Wars of '24.

Wickle Ffee is killed by Septaguant—

wild donkeys are watching while the two kings stand
on the dry riverbed,
sunlight on the mica fabricates water on and around them.

When Ffee's ear falls off—
his sisters, knowing the outcome,
begin their ritual deaths while
tugging at great lengths of intestine—
leaving just a yellow-headed baby
alive in all that blood, rope and linen.

Septaguant stabs Marshal Ffee in the eye with a talc pencil.
There's a storm west of them in the mountains
which sends water down the hardpan washes. I see

there in a dark space Septaguant
and the blond infant riding an emerald wheel-station
beyond Pluto. Straight off M-914
there's a blue starburst. Then I only

hear the water rushing along the river.
I move into the very pitch of it.
My mother's voice is counting breaths like years.
Uncle, there are eleven Chöd strikes in her voice.

My throat is being cut— it is as if the blade
were the best silk, indefatigable volumes of light
drain from our head. It is
the sweetest sensation, the way Marie Proust
describes suckling
as warmth in the stomach.
Truly, it's as if nothing really happens. Think about it,
my sad captain. Lux.

XXI.

La: she's cabled us in your voice
but with the signature of Lux. She doesn't
mean us any harm. She described happily
the death of Marshal Ffee.
He forced labor from starving wild donkeys, lepers
and even the orphans of New Zion. We shan't miss him.
Or his women. He once killed everyone

at a friend's wedding. His mother was a vehicle for Shö Wisdom
and then she crashed to burn
before even achieving her illusory body.
This is where the phurba language
of ill omen will take you.

Even Edith, the Spring Nurse,
used her phurba speech for only the most difficult births.

We have corralled the surviving jewel-worm
with braziers and tents of wet string.
Yes, Alfred builds these wonderful Tara fetishes
to tame the worms.
Both he and my recurring phantom, Nedperse,
do The Twenty-one Praises of the Goddess
every morning. Alfred uses colored yarn to construct these stations.
They resemble the Navajo tradition
of encircling. Half of it is pure calculus. That is:
the one seed, one pebble,

the one string. Descartes was a bore, we think!

Lord Hayagriva was singing away on the dunes last night.
Alfred has always feared the horse deity.
I tell him it's just gauze and smoke . . . refrains
of the dark phlegm. Kisses. Uncle.

Post Script:
These post scripts have become a formal property
in our cables . . .

as in the parlors of Shö, these remnants of words
are the eternalist's preparation for no-thought,
or bliss,
the way stuttering leads to silence, or patricide?

If Marshal Ffee is dead
I suspect the Khandro assisted old 'tin-pageant'
in his victory. I must stop with these judgments!

The buddha descends the hill,
laughingly I climb it. Man's curiosity is shit. And, zing
goes the sling of my heart.
Enough absinthe for one day. Love. Your Vajramaster.

XXII.

Dear Marie: you can tell Urze that we lost the worm.
Alfred's male calico, Boil, liberated
the spirit-houses we'd made of yarn
so the worm fled
into a feldspar ledge beside the arboretum. Boil
is of that lineage of cats
from the first space station. They went into orbit
within twenty-five years of the Hubble. They have
those rhubarb rattlesnake patches that are so beautiful.

When I think of the modified Hubble
and how cocksure they were
that all of the observable solid matter
was flying away from itself and us—that it was all accelerating—
well, it was the chthonic wheezing of the Jovians
that led to that,
that foolish idyll of bloom and gloom.

I'm just delighted that Ffee is dead.

It was confirmed here yesterday.
That drummer on earth, Charlie Parker VI,
paid a million dollars for the ear. He and his friend,
Lyndon Alouyshus Johnson, between them
have a priceless collection of evil body parts.
This is the sort of shameless talk

that Alfred brings back from the Maximillian shacks.
They come up here to try and steal the cat
so Alfred and I heated our Huron blood
and gave the bastards four moons of diarrhea and rashes.

Now that they know Alfred's a witch they don't cheat at cards
and they offer us big dishes of potato salad,
tangerines and nitrogen candles. They say

the 'tin-pageant' wasn't even in the district when Ffee died.
I believe our mother dakini from Lux
was the incomparable assassin. In the end she strangled him.
I am beginning to love this woman.
Alfred and I have been celebrating since Tuesday. I'm certain
the Khandro was trying to find the groove

in the sacred Mk'hagro
and, pardon my French, but I believe
she just back-fired that Snakedeath script
across a whole glorious star cluster. She was immature for the groove.
It was a complete accident. Someday

our Urze-la may snap her fingers once
and lift those poor sons-of-bitches
right out of their tawdry scripts of circumstance. Would
she do the same for us? The blue Nairatma would . . .

I think the dharma
needs this family. Or else, the
Khandro's karma is in the crapper for an eternity.
You know I think the poor damn cat is even drunk. Beloveds,
I send you mud pies of etcetera. Uncle Tweedledee-dum.

P.S.: Alfred has dreamt of the giant Nedperse
with more banqueting and happy speeches
involving Chaucer and the blind Milton—
& Milton's satan. He refers to me as
the landlord come to collect the 'fie-foe-fund'? He
appears like Saint Nick with an armload
of gifts: jars of green tea, mosquito netting
and a rat-trap that is a cross between
a black loaf of bread and a shoebox. I wish
he would leave us!

XXIII.

Dear Urze: when Alfred asked me to sit
and have a cigarette with him, I knew
we were solemnizing a moment. Dammit, La,
I am so sorry. Alfred says your mother just fell from the horse.
That the burial is Thursday. There's a Redouler truck
running to Earth Wednesday. I'll be there for the service.
Let's go to the Maine woods for the weekend.
I'll make you my sautéed moose with plum pudding. Ha.
Damn, girl, I'm sorry for your loss. I just adored her, like my brother.
My love. Paul.

Post Script:
Check your mother's papers, I believe
her request was to be cremated. The ringsels
in the ashes alone would be a great protection
for you and your future children. In the ashes
of Lama Karta I found a long silver
pin which I still wear in my hair.
Have you ever read that strange poem, Anagram Born of Madness,
by Gyurmey Tsultrim? Please, do!
It is an odd gift. I love you, child.

Anagram Born of Madness, at Czernowitz

Do you hear those few songs
left for her
to sing, on the far side
of the river
of a human history . . .

—Paul Celan, trans. Paul Ekajati

They were the strong nudes of a forgotten
Desert outpost, crossing through snow
Through the steam of a hot springs
Where they bathed twice daily against delirium.

It was during the conflict between the Americans
And North Koreans. We realized
They would use atomic weapons.
Our eyes were alive and you could read them.

How out on the glaciers
Angels were burning the large brooms of sunflowers
A back growth without smoke. Each flower's head,
An alchemist's sewer plate of gold.

They were coming down in winter
And whatever they were, Mr. Ancel's ghost
Would meet them,
Saying, "You may go this far and no farther."

Like fountains in winter the heart-jet
Is bundled in shocks of straw. Now, it's cold soldiers
In a swamp cooking a skull.