1. The Fool
If you want to play the fool in the most anthropological manner, so the
singers never call you back, using an Airstream on the final legs of Paris,
simply make your way to the forensic palace just before heading out of town, and
drop the poem about a fading airplane into a mailbox whose name is written in
blood, the price for making it bottomless, and whose sides are lined with ticks
who have all read John Donne. And you have no choice because though the leather
facades have all been returned, the new ones are somber and transparent as well.
The fool always has two faces, which can make him the darling of crossroads
press conferences, angering the town that tears him in half like each poem ever
written, and even if you never wrote back to your double in Vermont and
concerted your efforts into watching the water make its decisions, this city
bridges outwards as well, and all the residents, if you overhear them muttering,
tell how “Jannus is landing” and “Charon is our darling.” So because
ghosts are more pungent than strangers, drop the poem off and understand there
is no literary postmaster.
2. The World
The World, which was ostensibly so reasonable, can surprise us in the
strangest places. Yesterday, thinking I had escaped my fellow evaluators, I
began sleepwalking where only the US mail once possessed hegemony, only
momentarily, where now a simmering if illusory anarchy reigns. In truth, I was
kidnapped, and though the world was much too naked to conceal anything, I know I
was enthralled by some kind of weapon, escorted to a church parking lot to be
lectured on hurricanes. It seems they actually come from the Clergy In America,
and are conjured by passages from Joyce and the molecular structures of tumors,
which explains, according to the World’s servant Louise Erdrich, not only why
John Wayne died of colonial cells, but why hurricanes have always filled me with
the desire to endanger myself with mimetic dance.
But this lesson was only the first move in Marcel Duchamp’s endless chess
retirement. Stuffed in a trunk and taken to the lawless mountains, I was
required to sleepclimb even though I had no history, except the once I chased
the finger weaver, an army ranger who loosened all the plants the mountains
offered for handholds. There were two giants in this world, each grabbing my
blind hands and reminding me to ask the dolls what they think. One made me stare
at a cup of coffee for hours and consider the many lives lost to digital
identity theft. Another surprised me by making an entire day of psychiatric
appointments disappear. Then they left me alone to tremble oh Poor Tom’s a
cold. They mocked me in the middle of the night with distant cries, a beautiful,
lost geometry.
3. Judgment
Blind in the night, I keep hoping that one of the cries will fall like a halo
of silence above me, turning the world into the word, as if I were a zoetrope
version of the apostle Paul. That’s what originally gave these cards wing,
right, to fall in such a way as to make each step and turn seem like an escape
from pain that never quite materialized, never quite made me feel any fear
besides not taking the next step? The cards lack texture, weight, the ability to
raise the dead, crash a window out of the sleepwalking world, write letters of
recommendation for one another, understand mechanization and nostalgia, grant a
fanatical restraint to love, balance September or find lost October; they are
not sharp enough to cut my frozen clothes away. I choose to live here, I think,
hoping that someone will come to investigate me.
4. The Sun
In our bicycle fables, substitute for garish priests, we find many needle
eyes to tightrope, but never quite crash. That brilliant orange fiddler over
there is the sunset, not us. Tuesday I was hiding out, as you prepared tortures
that would be worth telling about. Catalyst, I’m always amazed how your scar
tissue becomes more and more beautiful, like plastic being peeled away from the
haunted hollow windows we can pick and crush in blackberry season. There, just
by looking at the torn nerve endings of the clouds, I cut someone’s fingers
two hours away. The orange briars are growing out everywhere each new night.
They won’t send us where I left the insects to make love with a window, but on
Tuesday I followed the thorns up a stairway, and believe me: they blew the roof
off an entire building. So I sat there on the top floor, listening to painful
cries issue from holes in the broken teeth. They were virtuosos on the piano,
the horn, and the caterpillar—in utter discord. That doesn’t prevent me from
falling asleep in the excuses of stardust.
5. The Moon
I could sense crabs forming on the moon, ready to drop from the sky when it
grew fully pregnant with them. I would find one, especially chosen by the
atmosphere, sleeping under my window. After cutting it open and adding wings, I
could sneak in through your mailbox once again, surprise you in the bathtub. The
singing of my flight would mesmerize you into lucidity, explaining the movements
within a Beardsley drawing, the very words inside the books he used as props.
Instead, you refused to move until your cat swatted me away, but I had pierced
it with crystals that gave me the secrets of your nipples and the labyrinths
they led to.
Your breasts were miles long, as I had fully expected, but their iron
construction was unforeseen. “I keep forgetting you are not a fireman,” you
trembled, “and that cold winds do not keep you from seething. Nor do you soak
yourself under pretense of feeding sex organs to the fish. There is a devil who
buries us, and your only hope is to allow the moon to seep inside your nipples
and reverberate off these miles of shimmering walls, for these shells that drop
by chance are worthless. Otherwise, you only fight lost battles for your brother’s
misnomers.” Strangely enough, this advice did not seem completely foreign. I
think I had started on this project years ago, even going so far as to place my
card into the iron provider’s slot to request materials. But, anything I place
inside a machine is immediately lost, just as your labyrinth was lost in the the
awkward snow, just as I was immediately lost in your starving body.
6. The Star
Tierney, who when he whispers is a dead giveaway for the devil, sometimes
fades out in a blush but comes back with the most beautiful drawings of you
moving across a dance floor with string coming out of your abdomen, trapping
everyone who doesn’t know how to reassemble horses. Each time I’m forced to
wonder how I get caught up in all this—which one of my scabs covered a mys
en abyme—singing to you when even my inmost noms de plume are not
exotic. I think they chose me because my voice doesn’t project into the
microphone, so when the band is finished and all the animals are peeled from my
skin, everyone’s left with the sense of having heard a voice but remembering
none of the words. Even though I can’t jimmy our stars apart anymore, it doesn’t
keep me awake for the Geiger counting, and the only joy I have anymore is in
planning a famous escape—the one act I can’t perform.
7. Tower
Few people realize how easily the tower is turned inside out into a giant
whose entrails are better than most suburbs (standing across from the brilliant
ocean) where boys and girls wander with the cure. So bring your illnesses here,
the blue stitches of your parents, the lost portraits, days that should be
night, lizard bites, cauldrons along your hairline, a nest of spiders in your
armpit. Three fish wander in a pocket of vapor, sucking life through the giant’s
arm until it tumbles down endless stairs without a sound. I can’t even
remember when I didn’t irritate the coral until it rose in towers toward the
surface of my skin.
8. The Black Magician
I built a city from photographs you had tripwired, biting a knife, pretending
to play an instrument, surprised by the desert. I deliberately sent coyotes out
to wander confused, longing for the sturdy rest of rusted out cars. I once
searched for devices that would quickly move uphill but as my limbs grew more
and more webbed, as I missed more and more dwindling birthday parties and our
lips failed to drift together into the past, I realized that the only thing I
was good at was placing labyrinths in the path of migratory animals such as
yourself. I lured them in with signs promising a glimpse of their birthplace,
and when they finally dropped in mysterious exhaustion, all blood tests
negative, I tormented them with the following message: “I bet you thought
these thin stones held children’s drawings, but they are the work of cobras.
When I first saw them under the hanging rock, I had taken shelter from the
suburban rainstorm. There were, however, children all over the floor with pads
and crayons. They played along with the paintings while cigarette ads aimed at
children howled outside, fingers moving as if they drifted through a canal. I
was suddenly glad we were trapped inside, and I hope that all your days are like
that one was for me—a constellation of youth and maturity. Do you feel
anything?” That is usually enough to make their depleted limbs rise up from
the slime, curse me once more, and turn on the Geiger counters. But all they
encounter are more slivery monoliths, the bloody outlines of the butterfly
priest, tear shadows in the naked world of frames, perverse sexual judgments,
baby sun crutches that pierce the lion, something besides the moon feeding these
cities the snakes in your glass, violins stacked to open up the sky, a telescope
made of poisonous thorns.
9. Temperance
How odd that I would get such similar advice in one day. One told me it didn’t
matter what instruments I brought to the experiment, as long as I wove a
dangerous and obscure legend around each one. The second stylist told me my
vision was fine, but that I should join her in searching out our old enemies to
statistically determine if karma worked in noisy environments. Both told me what
I didn’t want to hear, that I should go into the desert and lie down face
first, until someone came along and built a small fire on my back. Instead, you
threw keys at my window for hours. Some of them made me skip meals, deliver
messages about the painkillers you left behind in dark lakes, and fall asleep in
the middle of nowhere—rather minor events really. But what about stolen
Michelle, or the broken apartment with the untrained animals I’m supposed to
use for gift delivery? I’ve been having dreams about department stores
breaking apart like insecure wharfs, then drifting around more clandestinely,
whispering to purchase restraints, and you’ve been listening. The last two
days you’ve bought necklaces that look like blood, which filter everything you
need to say to me. A screen door opens, letting in strangers, echoes, the
official names of all previous days, ocean views that only a hotel could afford.
I was drifting in the armed forces, selling my body for a story I could tell
twenty years later. And I think that despite these precautions, all the relevant
dreams will have been torn from the DSM I took with me on a deserted isle, while
the circus will inevitably be held in the mall parking lot this year.
Now isn’t that a plate full of question marks?
10. The Reaper
Birds sail towards me like torpedoes. It’s not good that I place these
cards over your image when you lick knives the way you do. There are no frames
left for the volcano. Each moment is a serpent, the only beast I could ever
address. Since there are nothing but fragments in my blood, I’ll hope for a
random meeting with my psychologist and his family—it’s a Thanksgiving
invite I’ve always wanted, where his emaciated daughter will have plenty of
leftovers. The robins were not impressive but for a moment, your fingers were
the silver blades of the yucca that powers the hospital. The hospital just
called but can’t call me away from the levels of retreat. I once could feel
the world drift just by sitting still with a book but blood kept coming to play
with me, telling me to lie still with my eyes closed, only then could I hear the
whispering of blood as I abandoned you.
11. Hanging
So you’re more worried about my shadows? They’re waiting on a corner
somewhere below Brooklyn mausoleum parks, slowly drifting into the street like
an optometrist’s trick. One is vomiting unsolicited confessions, the other
keeps turning its blank eyes to imprisoned lakes. My retina turns them upside
down, sends them to a mirror that turns them on their feet again. My shadows
cost approximately 200 dollars and are made of lizard skin, black teeth, and
dying make-up. I find them in a desert hotel, and know I need new ones when they
begin to drift away from warming me, into the frozen mountains, no longer able
to read my fortune in a properly cramped environment. So you’re more worried
about my shadows; well, I want to dance as the new barbarian. My shadows linger
far too long in the cold. My shadows are gridlocked.
12. Enchantress
Lover and Breeder of Chinatown’s distractions that are sold to place near
graves we can’t identify, hold the jaws of the city open for me. Make sure my
frozen body makes it inside the rental car. Send periodic shocks of static to
make sure I’m not falling asleep or catching pneumonia from sound effects.
Call me early and send my swine to their doom. Show me 800 wonders in the
shortening day. You’re the one who taught me to be helpless, to wait by the
river for icy stars to come. I reckon driving through the mountains is like
watching a movie from the insides. Help me tear the lilies from Portugal. These
are modest improvements.
13. The Wheel
I try everything to get the wheel started at a different rate, driving out of
your arms at 5 am or hiding out in bed until 2 pm. But it seems immune to
spontaneity and furthermore, the wheel is so small that I can’t make out its
minutes or even its hours—one of those nonrepresentational timepieces of the
digital age. I have comforting dreams that the weather is too unpredictable to
go outside, or conversely, that there is always a window someone can see
through. Dressed in a 300 dollar jacket and tie, dragging a suitcase on wheels
like it’s my first day on the Supreme Court of the Ecological Homeless, I
plunge into Central Park at full speed only to be spit out an hour later at the
same place I began. I didn’t see the sheep grazing or the black squirrels
flying on tiny cigarettes, just false cholesterol and a feeling that I should
increase the milligrams of whatever medicines I’ve been taking. It’s 4:30 pm
and I have thirty minutes left to dodge subway pits because I vowed I wouldn’t
let the city swallow me until darkness had swallowed the city, with or without a
conspiracy of purple rocket trails. Uptown, my brother is in the fabritory he
travels the minimum forty-five minutes to each day. He tries to vary this,
sometimes going at noon, sometimes at six in the morning, but either way he
spends the requisite twelve hours there, and the commute is approximately the
same. He says there’s no way to know the long term effects of the drugs we’re
taking these days, whether they create a brain that’s too soft to withstand
even minimal blows in their absence, not to mention spinning in the anti-gravity
vice of capitalism. They have a guillotine at work where he’s probably
decapitated thousands of rats by now, and though he would rightfully deny this,
I think he knows that with each drop of the blade a break in the wheel might
occur. But he never knows until he takes the head and smears it along the miles
of canvas he’s spotted throughout the city. Somewhere, there’s a square the
leaches haven’t found, where the rat’s blood won’t be immediately sucked
away. But to be fair, my strings are always false, and though my instructions
unravel these river monsters, you have to sleep for hours and hours for a dream
to have a chance of coming true.
14. The Hermit
No one would suspect the janitor of stealing from the basement of a building
made of gray sand where everyone is busily lying down to pray for the ocean of
ash to bury them because otherwise the sand will congeal into white letters that
are only good to dive from. The sand gathers into the building’s black sky to
rain suicide notes which fertilize the gray land where the famous graywood trees
tower above the city. No one would suspect the janitor of rummaging amongst the
cave drawings, angry radios, and empty lanterns in the freezer underneath the
gray hospital that hovers so solidly above, because only those responsible for
keeping the bacteria out even know the museum exists. And only you, the heroine
of these Arcana, could wake me up from the petty thefts whenever you see the
hound that can escort me above ground into the darkness. Just place the fetus we
could never carry inside the lantern, you say. That’s the glow of the suburbs,
where you can walk for miles between the hours of three and five, never sensing
a single movement. But if you focus your eyes and follow the lantern’s tricks,
the invisible cords that hold the trees in place, the hills together, will come
into view as if they were connected to a giant circus tent. Look at the nails
coming out from the wood, before the landslide, and look through these brief
holes in the wall surrounding the fumes where the rapes once occurred and now
are studied. Your life is draining from each pore.
15. Justice
Let’s say you could drive to Atlanta and, expecting an act of violence,
encounter something completely different. Naked ghosts walk the street tearing
at chicken bones. You can stop almost anywhere, hand the keys over, and they
will drive the car completely out of your life. It’s the best way to lose a
friend and sample what it’s like to be dead—the long sleeps, the drifting
about without anyone’s knowledge. Now walk along the train tracks until the
ground itself leaves your feet, and how little food we need to eat. A chicken
bone makes the world so brilliant, we can do nothing but decide which storm
looks good around our necks. It nourished me in a time when I had no movies to
see but morning glories and dream interpreters to decapitate with a mirror and a
lighthouse. I needed my time in Atlanta to make sure the gun wasn’t loaded
with sand.
16. The Chariot
Sleepwalking is stranger than you think, barely leaving you time to
masturbate while riding a chariot across the ocean. All the others seem so happy
on the bottom, searching for their presence. The food you were eating was
removed from the room because it burned someone’s skin, and there were people
who never made it to the bottom, but no one remembers their names. To simulate
this death, I can only lie down with the television on. The words bend around my
darkening and form plots that can make the Krebs cycle a mesmerizing Egyptian
merry-go-round. There’s so much oxygen when you cut your skin, the blood
turning black is your desire to be evil, to turn into a coagulated sleep.
Remember the last time I found you at the end of the year, so unwilling to be
photographed? But you were good for getting away from the tongueless seizures,
and you claim to be able to read my body language even when I am barely moving.
17. The Lovers
You’re a butterfly made of uranium, flitting heavy on my various limbs,
breaking up and carrying parts of me with you. You weren’t supposed to be my
lover but as fragments of us move down the street like reusable transparencies,
I hear my enemies gather behind me to discuss forms of reproduction I’d never
imagined, and I realize that though you are often looking at slides of religious
ecstasy, you are also the ingénue who continually reinvents tragedy. And my
wife, in her silence, is afraid I might kill myself. She has sent out fifty love
letters this fall and hasn’t received one request for a dossier, script, or
ghost card. Can you imagine how that must feel? It’s not the silence we must
fear but the echoes, the electronic bonds of love between cold objects. It’s
enough to make us, when we look at the beautiful ashtrays, do no more than
speculate on the value of copper wiring, or follow the flashlight’s map
through replicas of the underworld. This is a lengthy exposure, and we’re
going to have to wait it out as the magician’s dog calls in the waves that
bear the empty rooms where I’m allowed to eat and hint at my health problems.
This is more cumulative than it sounds, a trick elevator that only goes down.
18. The Hierophant
My power lines draw the lightning in spirals, and there are many languages
that require energy. Some come asking for fish, while others merely desire my
presence in the dead rooms, an animal they can’t touch. But you brought me to
the parking lot where the rainbow nativities burn their own shelter in a
highbrow depression. You taught me that mouths can be pried open from behind, no
matter what migraines or unforgivable children may result. The Hierophant is not
supposed to care if we can make a tent of these dissections, he only troubles
over the microscopic coherence of those who dissect cellulose. Enter the
unnumbered Fool, who makes me dissolve in the shadows as I walk down the street.
I didn’t shout loud enough, and I signed autographs for my enemies. Now I’m
a white muscle covered in fur, wriggling on the sidewalk in pain. People think I’m
beautiful, a subject fit for Wurlitzers, an animal to touch and caress as they
proceed to the real estate ballet. They’ve obviously never seen a burning
bush, and can’t begin to understand the price it pays for their loaded oceans.
19. The Emperor
The Emperor commands the birds to plummet away from the sails, into the
heavens, because we want to be falling at every moment, headless babies in cloud
clothes. Castles are as often abandoned before completion as after strange
centuries. Look at the wires that sway even in the silence, cages the birds have
fallen from. I had an idea to track the lost wings, the leaden weights, tear the
shreds of a storm into lines of poetry, into a bird cage. But that is not what I
really want. I’ve always wanted to fall with the cards, spinning from an
arthritic magician’s hands like an unpredictable Satan. The only emperor is
the emperor of this pleasure, the winged cards of this underground where the
islands are gated in moments.
20. The Empress
The empress hasn’t been holding up her end of the bargain either, and is
always losing the lights of the city. No sooner does she slam a box of tools or
photos than they begin to fall away into the beautiful, undrinkable ocean. She
doesn’t know that while she is off attaching her bruise-bitten flesh to
reflective mirrors, I have broken into her house, have taught the animals to run
off to the circus. She has two turntables I set them dancing on. One produces
the jungle music of pain first reported by the India Rubber Company and the
other muffles with a mixture of lubricants, Valium, and hollow iron. Why don’t
you go out and watch them leave, she says, when they’ve already begun to
bleed. Are you getting sleepy from this? she asks. I would only pass out from
the pain of watching you turn them into searchlights. I was probably all wrong
to go skirting the shore for so long, hoping the concrete railing would suddenly
open up. Most likely a cold hotel ceiling would begin to waver, or the side of a
hill open up into an underground pool. I would walk inside, drown because oil
paintings are never really dry, peel away the outer layers and begin rerouting
the maps, or get back to writing the cures. They would do something like tell
you the lights glow in the lips of your hair, behind your ears, send the
chemistry professor wandering amongst the cameras of nighttime. There is one at
the top of the hill trying to take in the ants like Renoir but when I get to the
funnel eye, watch for the death sequence I’ve sketched out.
21. The High Priestess
What a shock it is to learn your clothing is made from someone’s
intestines, to find out you’re a virgin. After every violation the lizards
(30,000 on the black market) come and sew me back together while I’m sleeping,
only in more places so that with each injury I become a bit more paralyzed. So I
look to you in envy, knowing how easily you channel Kafka when someone enters
the house (no matter how valuable) and steals from your newborn. The lizards
enter and eat all the celluloid wiring my house, converting it into the dead
threads of time. The trees come undone, and if you want me to watch your empty
house, prop me in the doorway surrounded by triggers; I don’t know which I’ll
be able to operate, which will not be reminiscent of past apartments. I had my
closet converted to a door so that if I crawled in I’d fall out the other
side. And hence the center of town feels like a god hurtling backwards, an hour
commute from my bed to the front door.
22. The Magician
And yet, the magician has made an art of waiting in these situations, tied so
tightly his eyes bulge, tied by his own arms, by arches and flames, by the
subway schedule, tied by his own hunger yet he can still think. He eats no flesh
but his own, takes no medication for the pain of being tied up. He prays to no
god, and when he has the urge he wraps his tongue in the celluloid wires, right
at the base. He is tied around the neck by the ring of a woman who broke his
heart. He has been tied up so long that time is meaningless, the days blur
together into waves and particles. There are large areas of his soul that do not
breathe, long rivers he slept through entirely. His is a denial that few people
could imagine, one that will most likely lead to his death or disappearance. Yet
he seems to have an audience of some kind, he is waiting for something, is it
for the strings to be so tight his tongues and eye and bad leg and worse leg
suddenly explode in all directions trailing homeless blue roses? If so, there is
no need to forgive him, for he is no longer his own personality and no longer a
will of his own, he is no longer human nor a “case” to be hopeless or on the
verge of completion. And as he had nothing but a perverse desire to create a
gospel of nothingness, there was no reason for him to stay long on this earth.
Does this explosion mean he was freer now than he was? I do not know.
© 2000 Alan Clinton
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