Ashley
Van Doorn
Feverish
Remedial
Dear Doctor, you too would devour this peach if not for aversion to
velvet (you vomit the moment you touch it). You would pass out at sundown
if moonset did not enfeeble, and find either meat or honey indigestible,
and you’re killable by at least one berry or egg or fig or pea
or wheat. Examine your exaggerated tremors such as those at orgasm and
also seen sometimes in birds.
—As I address this I imagine you at the bedside of a boy alive
a long time ago, at least flanked like sun-tinged storm-clouds by a
barely possible brilliance within which to enjoy suffering, and you
live until you replace him: a violent inspiration drawing deep into
your lungs the fourpenny nail the boy placed inside a spool to make
a whistle. I realize and then I realize and then I realize I do and
do not love glittery dust disguising upturned ground and ashes of the
past.
Trying to make that
picture less effortless, you say a spot of it is vaster, but not which
spot. For that matter you are the witch doctor who spent a season in
the woods to be struck with a vision and thus understood you must construct
a vision. You learn to manipulate the little things and select the correct
big things that (not lest) you might reinvent the wheel: a stone rolled
back reveals a type of crypt where countless niches like multiple crosshairs
rotate the sun cut in lean leaves in wind. “Don’t give away
the thing you can’t live without,” sang the lead singer
with an angry voice trying to sound kind. Thing One and Thing Two are
not Jeckyll and Hyde but Jeckyll and Jeckyll according to Hyde.
Dear Patient, which
ancient way do you want me to advise you? For headache tie around your
temples a rope with which someone has been hanged. For seizures eat
the flesh of a wild beast which has been killed with the same weapon
a man has been killed with. For loss of voice spit into the mouth of
a red frog and free it right away. What we can explain will disappear.
To demonstrate = to de-monstrate. Remember the bishop of two minds wears
a cone-hat cut in half, and the dunce cap is one pointed mind. While
dusk darkens in the pale center of cherry blossoms, collect your upcoming
keep, and in the invisible after-fruit you’ll catch your recovery.
—Signal: a completely white bird that turns its head away from
a sick person who will die will look at a sick person destined to live
and draw the illness to itself.
You price my interest
in between listening and shut up noisemakers, so I’ll praise you
things leading to deafness: an infectious kiss on the lobe, the entrance
of a cricket in the canal, lodgment of a living spider, glass bell or
ball of paper introduced through the ear as a cure for madness. If you
don’t stop sucking your tongue (it’s audible in all parts
of the room!) you’ll dislocate your jaw. Have you heard of fish
occluding air-passages? Do not swim in a tank of fish with your mouth
open. Do not hold a mullet in your teeth before baiting it. Do not attempt
to kill an eel by biting off its head. I don’t mean to prize formulaic,
but the story of a species = someone survived. Survived because we migrated.
Survived because we operated. Precipice is no Romance, though rain clouds
can hang overhead until the sun dries them out. Certain views bolt thunder
to its summary rift-stitch, and in that boom a boon is born: if your
most private thoughts are what you think of others, most visible is
what you want others to think you think.
Doctor, esteemed—wasn’t
it a weapon that first showed physicians exactly which path to the stomach
could be habituated to pierced metallic tubes filled with meat, disgorged
later to observe digestion? I don’t know if I love the foreign
articles swallowed or their replaceability, the arbitrary-come-necessity
or sensation to the extent of pestering (that is: the action or the
objects, which may or may not include items dissections and purges have
revealed: snails, knives, buckles, pipes, suspenders, mice, mass of
straw, forks, button-hooks, compasses, keys, hairpins, crockery, earth
and holy medals, money (probably due to fear of robbery), false teeth,
hair and string, egg-cups, bullets, rabbit bones) but I prefer you to
the following phobias: 1. The sight of sharp-pointed instruments, including
fish-spines, naked swords, and knitting-needles which can penetrate
the brain a lead-pencil perforates. 2. The view of immense uninterrupted
expanses, such as afflicted the Emperor who could not surmount the picture
of the sea, so while he crossed the Bosporus on a bridge of boats garnished
on both sides with trees, he sketched indigo-caped kids creeping across
the shore. 3. The fear of the fear of water, which assumes the symptoms
of the major disease. 4. Not the ledge, nor its lofty height, not the
feeling of falling nor the familiar impact, but dread of the practice
of humming just to hush the slow erosion.
Abduction Aphrodisiac
An expert of expensive antennae arrangements proposes the difference
between science and myth-making is science encourages you to verify:
“anyone can dial coordinates to record alien frequencies.”
But all I receive from space are birds shipping across sky and its fogs,
their song tsk-tsk, always a bystander, never a believer. Why crack
the crystal of isolation only to correct it? Why these crystalline arrangements?
Perhaps bound round the globe the aliens watch our volcanoes wrapped
in eruption, rapt in earth’s rupture, the rapture, trapped, redhot
and unable to rot as every other savage center, so-called source by
which we tame where the living bury the dead. Taken up in the down coming
up, we dig in and defend and beg to be forgiven, rule nothing can be
created or destroyed.
In the expert’s
sketch, their larger brains and smaller mouths fascinate my doubt so
that I don’t doubt “feeling safe and afraid when wind-chimes
signal night moving” may lead to “under the comforter waits
an extraordial twin and that is where I hide?” But I’m twisted
up in today’s heady atmosphere and its imposition of several cloud-shaped
hearts. With permission I’ll call them shapeless, or the first
in a series of mysterious creams—slippery and evasive you say
to you “would you put on something planetary,” and that’s
how all of you get started.
The announcer delivers
to a picture of a puckered and serene red rash snuggled and shadowed
in something snowy: “On the 11:00 news this Valentine’s
night find out how cupid struck this newborn!” The blanket fails
to be a bomb blanket. Nor is it sterile, but also it is not infected,
in spite of the death-like sleep of the infant. The picture is of a
soldier. He claims the galaxy is paper staring into beyond’s beholder’s
eye. I catch a glimpse of his inbreaking look and want nothing of it.
Arrows render me aquiver like the baby barely breathing—when cupid
flicked her she unwithered.
An evolutionary
craft is a machine of off-world material inhabited by things animal-like
having human-like desires. The picture is a faceless cloud back-lit
thick, effortlessly effaced. Or it is the face of a man in his basement
listening to stars through the broadcasts he transmits. Of course there’s
an answering pulse—I verify fashioning anything believable. Level
with what won’t rise, we’re lava-tongued and ash-lapped,
but imagine how earthly flights possess our airways and our lenses.
Is my smoking stick a steaming jet yet? The picture is of a saucer,
cupped.
If I can visit in
its liquid the next spacecrossing, I’ll replace loudspeaker greeting
with introduction: Welcome to where affections afflict like infection,
equal parts spike and pit, ilk and avatar, a spell not a hell or its
reverse, a curse just a blur, a forever-memorized remembrance. Here
you’ll likely land where were-sharks and were-octopuses relish
flesh extra-mundane and thus capable of malice that smacks of turning
a back-engineered disc into the all-purpose vehicle of the future, then
finding it only departs the scene by chasing distortions. Rarely, as
it spins and bobs suspended, you can watch a corona discharge shrink
and twin its bent perimeter, similar to our famous wavering appetite
for fuzzy film framed by stunning claims, with captions that capture
the picture as proof: Captain Capsizes Vessel as Transport, Operator’s
Exhilaration Its Acceleration.
Ghosts and Long-Lived Persons
On a transparent screen of silk and beeswax hung in a doorway, phantasmagoria
seem suspended, increased or diminished by the manager of the magic
lantern fastened to his middle when slowly he approaches and recedes
from the audience.
The audience, treading
past the guest room, by candlelight sees the girl, dimly of this world,
flash in the brass hinge of the door opened to near-darkness, and then
sees the girl, opaquely not of this world, with the guest in the guest
room, though the guest doesn’t know the girl is a ghost. Already
the guest loves the girl for her extreme insecurity, the way she bleeds
where nothing bit her, the fact that nothing bites her. Some essential
pieces will always be excluded. She has not been long in the grave.
The guest has obviously not observed the other grieving ghosts.
Ghosts one should
not disbelieve, and one should also trust the foregoing narrative, since
humans have always been greatly inferior in size, according to a report
of creatures I once heard them compared to. Proof history is shrinking
us: Wondrus of Sphere says on a certain island they were digging foundations
and found a hundred-cubit coffin in which lay a withered body of the
same length. One should not disbelieve bones. On the coffin was the
following inscription:
After outliving
all the eternal others
my size I am buried on a small isle
a million times longer than this line
by those who take pleasure in dissolving.
Those who take pleasure
in dissolving views will soon be able to produce most ghostly effects:
Bleeding Nun, Harlequin Falling to Pieces, Lame Man Asking Alms (Takes
Off His Head), Lamp Black (Sweep in a Cask), Monster with Broad Axe,
Stuck Fast (Lad in a Tree), Woman Beating Husband with Pint-Pot, Wizard’s
Luck-Bag, Smuggler’s Cave, Keg and Powder and Hot Poker, Nightmare
(Spooks and Pudding), Performance on Two Chairs, Pair of Pears, Basket
of Game, Direct and Retrograde Motion, Brimstone and Molasses, Long
Pull and Strong Pull, Close Embrace (Man, Serpent, and Tree), Effects
of Guano (Tulips turned to Cabbage), Ditto (Two Lips Kissing), Good
Night, How Do You Do, Icebergs and Fields of Ice, Striking for an Advance,
Portion of the Milky Way, Parson and Punch Bowl, Root of All Evil, Taste
and Feeling, Artificial Fireworks, Strait-Jacket, Troubled for a Line,
Trying to Get Through the World…
