I. There Is No Good Place for Paper in a Storm

Time’s saxifragous cloudburst is a woodsplitter too, ruining
writing. Evolution
— weirdly — is a microscope, a focuser even
in its grandeur. Its light comes to me from many stars.

Nicked with a knife on treerinds, angular early alphabets
were cranes in flight. Mercury determined letterforms from
watching the chevron’s formations of time’s
hyperborean messengers trumpeting
into the uppermost airs.

With his tooth the god divined the future. Teeth — time-denying
bones — he kept in a purse made from
the skin of a crane. His typographic generator
is dice.

Cranes are the soul’s mirror-image, even
a god’s. Their this-worldly otherworldliness holds a glass
to our otherworldly fact (that cranes,
in belongong — anciently — to this world, look
always ready to leave it, like Tolkien’s elves; humans,
in belonging to another world, inhabit
this one as aliens).


II. An Herodotan History of Jos. Smith

The visionary makes the leap into vision through the pinhole
in a seer-stone.
New language peeps from beyond, recorded,
angelic. Worried into King James intonations. An urim & thummin
reconceived as American onyx, passed over golden tablets like a jeweller’s
magnifying orb.

The stone must be a fragment of Kolob, meteoric. If not, what
is it worth to have been made of stars? “Our original home, on which
God-the-Father & the Goddess Mother dwell
was a brilliant, crystalline sphere where shone the pure light of the greatest of stars
Kolob (& yet does & forever will).”

What Jos. Smith saw was a vision of God
the Father & Jesus the Son — seperate, distinct, physical
beings of human form. Blasphemy
to any believer but American utterly. 1835, four mummies
in Kirtland, Ohio attracted Smith’s eye. Purchasing them with church funds,
he unwrapped their linens & set to translating
papyri tucked within, a process of study & inspiration revealing
that these were the writings of Abraham & Joseph.
Thus creation came to be rightly known.
Study & inspiration.

As long as there are prophets on earth, the Lord
will continue to reveal his mind and will unto them,
& they will write what they have heard down.


III. The Dream My Wife Had

In your dream, the Arab hid poetry in his nostril, a contraband
smuggled from his opressive homeland into
a badlands of freedom, crossing that border. All of poetry. An
illegal trafficking. Unaffordable.

How did he hide it, poetry? In a tiny scroll, tightly wound, minutely
dilated when unpinched, slackening its coils as they tensed against his
septum? No. No scroll. The scroll I made up. When I wrote your dream down. Three
red-shafted flickers — a family — drill into suet-feeders
suspended in the infertile pear tree. The man
was a poet. A savior. He spared
poetry its supression by inserting it
into his nostril. Abstractly.

Abstract how? This parable illustrates a life, fabulous in its
intent. Not a fable, parabolic in its axiom, shapely
in its form. A life in its instant.

But you never saw the Arab poet. Not in your dream, not ever. You merely
learned of him. The dream was a painting, an abstract, a green landscape, an Oriental
Rothko you were looking at, in a gallery, representing
the fate of poetry, painted by a young Muslim
painter dressed in djellabah, who told you
he was prohibited from looking at representations
of naked women, commemorator of your congruent
but perplexed & oneiric involvement
with poetry.