New York American Spell, 2001

I / omen

What was going on in the New York American

Black/red/green helmeted neon night?

The elevator door was closing behind us, we were the ones

Plunging floor after floor after floor after floor

To the abyss—but it was someone else’s face

Staring from the screen out at us, someone else’s face

Saying something flashing from the teleprompter:

Though what the face said was meant to reassure,

Down in the abyss the footage kept playing,

All of it looping back like children chanting

The answers to nonsensical riddles, taunting

A classmate who doesn’t know the question:

“Because it’s too far to walk” “Time to get a new fence”

“A big red rock eater.” And as the images rewound

And the face kept talking, the clear night sky

Filled up with smoke and the smoke kept pouring

Itself out into the air like a voice saying something

It can’t stop saying, some murky omen

Like schoolkids asking: “Why do birds fly south?”

“What time is it when an elephant sits on the fence?”

“What’s big, red and eats rocks?”

2 / in front of st. vincent’s

A woman hugging another woman

Who was weeping blocked the sidewalk.

Nobody moved for a moment.

They were an island caught at the tide turning:

Such misery in two human bodies.

Then the wearing away of the crowd

Moving flowed over them and they

Were pulled swiftly along down the sidewalk.

3 / joke

Faces powdered with dust and ash, there they were

In the fast food place, raucous and wild, splitting

The seams of their work clothes, weary to hysteria

As they hunched in their booth next to the buffet

Under heat lamps reflecting incarnadine

Off pastas and vegetable slag. Then the joke

Ignited, they quivered on the launch pad,

Laughter closed around them, they couldn’t

Breathe, it was as if they were staring out

From a space capsule porthole and were asking

The void an imponderable riddle

While orbiting so high up in space

That the earth was less than the least hint

Of light piercing the smoke-filled, cloudless night.

(What was the joke about? Nobody knew.)

And then they stopped laughing and stared into their plates,

Ash smearing down their faces as they chewed.

4 / spell spoken by suppliant to helios for knowledge

from the Greek Magical Papyri

Under my tongue is the mud of the Nile,

I wear the baboon hide of sacred Keph.

Dressed in the god’s power, I am the god,

I am Thouth, discoverer of healing drugs,

Founder of letters. As god calls on god

I summon you to come to me, you

Under the earth; arouse yourself for me,

Great daimon, you the subterranean,

You of the primordial abyss.

Unless you tell me what I want to know,

What is in the minds of everyone, Egyptians,

Greeks, Syrians, Ethiopians, of every race

And people, unless I know what has been

And what shall be, unless I know their skills

And practices and works and lives and names

Of them and their fathers and mothers

And brothers and friends, even of those now dead,

I will pour the blood of the black-faced jackal

As an offering in a new-made jar and put it

In the fire and burn beneath it what’s left

Of the bones of all-praised Osiris,

And I will shout in the port of Busiris

The secrets of his mysteries, that his body,

Drowned, remained in the river three days

And three nights, that he, the praised one,

Was carried by the river into the sea

And surrounded by wave on wave on wave

And by mist rising off water through the air.

To keep your belly from being eaten by fish,

To keep the fish from chewing your flesh with their mouths,

To make the fish close their hungry jaws, to keep

The fatherless child from being taken

From his mother, to keep the pole of the sky

From being brought down and the twin towering

Mountains from toppling into one, to keep Anoixis

From running amok and doing just what she wants,

Not god or goddess will give oracles

Until I know through and through

Just what is in the minds of all human beings,

Egyptians, Syrians, Greeks, Ethyopians, of every race

And people, so that those who come to me,

Their eyes and mine can meet in a level gaze,

Neither one or the other higher or lower,

And whether they speak or keep silent,

I can tell them whatever has happened

And is happening and is going to happen

To them, and I can tell them their skills

And their works and their names and those of their dead,

And of every human being who comes to me

I will read them as I read a sealed letter

And tell them everything truthfully.

5 / from brooklyn bridge

Sun shines on the third bridge tower:

A garbage scow ploughs the water,

Maternal hull pushing is all out beyond

The city, pushing it all out so patiently—

All you could hear out there this flawless afternoon

Is the sound of sand pulverizing newsprint

To tatters, paper-pulp ripping crosswise

Or lengthwise, shearing off some photo

Of maybe a head or maybe an arm.

Ridiculous flimsy noble newspaper,

Leaping in wind, fluttering, collapsing,

Its columns sway and topple into babble:

All you’d see if you were out there

Is air vanishing into clearer air.

6 / from the plane

Pressed against our seats, then released to air,

From the little plane windows we peered four thousand feet

Down to the ground desert-gray and still,

Nothing seeming to be moving on that perfect afternoon,

No reminder of why it was we were all looking,

Remembering maybe the oh so flimsy

Wooden sawhorse police barricades, as the woman

In front of me twisted her head back to see

It all again, but up there there was nothing to see,

Only the reef water feel of transparency

Deepening down to a depth where everything

Goes dark and nothing moves unless it belongs

To that dark, darting in and out or undulating

Slowly or cruising unblinking, jaws open or closed.

7 / spell broken by suppliant to helios for protection

from the Greek Magical Papyri

This is the charm that will protect you, the charm

That you must wear: Onto lime wood write

With vermilion the secret name, name of

The fifty magic letters. Then say the words:

“Guard me from every daimon of the air,

On the earth and under the earth, guard me

From every angel and phantom, every

Ghostly visitation and enchantment,

Me, your suppliant.” Enclose it in a skin

Dyed purple, hang it round your neck and wear it.

8 / roll of film: photographer missing

Vines of smoke through latticework of steel

Weave the air into a garden of smoke.

And in the garden people came and went,

People of smoke and people of flesh, the air dressed

In ash. What the pictures couldn’t say

Was spoken by the smoke: A common language

In a tongue of smoke that murmured in every ear

Something about what it was they’d been forced

To endure: Words spoken in duress,

Inconsolable words, words spoken under the earth

That rooted in smoke and breathed in the smoke

And put forth shoots that twined through the steel,

Words plunged through the roof of the garages’

Voids, I-beams twisted; the eye that saw all this

Tells and tells again one part of the story

Of that day of wandering through the fatal garden,

The camera’s eye open and acutely

Recording in the foul-smelling air.

9 / lamentation on ur

from a Sumerian spell, 2000 B.C.

Like molten bronze and iron shed blood

pools. Our country’s dead

melt into the earth

as grease melts in the sun, men whose

helmets now lie scattered, men annihilated

by the double-bladed axe. Heavy, beyond

help, they lie still as a gazelle

exhausted in a trap,

muzzle in the dust. In home

after home, empty doorways frame the absence

of mothers and fathers who vanished

in the flames remorselessly

spreading claiming even

frightened children who lay quiet

in their mother’s arms, now borne into

oblivion, like swimmers swept out to sea

by the surging current.

May the great barred gate

of blackest night again swing shut

on silent hinges. Destroyed in its turn,

may this disaster too be torn out of mind.

Source: Far Side of the Earth (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003)