Marsyas Back in the Day

Pines had been singing but fell silent having been felled, now

           droop lacking impulse as do wires, satellites hang over—

unseasonable insects too

stop their stridulating: did voluntary children leave

                     who’d rubbed sticks, unsheathing

grassblades in their fists to squeal amidst squeals of delight;

or when lipping at a double reed,

           mocked-up deer

frisking aslant of slats of light and dark, were

taunting the gods, majestic throngs leapt despite themselves:

                     Then it was your voice

           stripped bare, Marsyas, even when

acoustically dead in the skin peeled off and calcified as

           if a shell,

shell stolen by the dissimulating birds that cracked it open,

                     so vengeful!

groaning when tender life within its spiral doubled up,

phantom squeezing by its warm wall,

           when plumped on a pillow stuffed with their journeys,

bolstered by the trees’ sighing reminiscence,

you cast round conspiring to take back their songs:

                     had their repertoire come to seem

too predictable, were the strange poking beaks heard to goad

you as you wrestled on your back your needle robe:

else flat twang of gut strings stretched across a hollow gourd,

was that so to speak sonorous enough? Here at

           the far limit, pulsing? Where I am all ears?

                                                                              As was.

           Slats fix up a stroboscope, deer flicker

bounding through attendant pines, dream machine heats up,

                     but the fledged will have requital

instantly in tumbling scuppered onto earth,

the dying song inaudible to one who hears his own cries only,

ear cupped to ear.

                     Come over to this part.

The lens you train is frazzling its specimen. A wall of silence

behind the panorama,

                                             tongues of fire, taunts you.

This I saw, and my seeing holds the scene in its amber varnish.

            Now.

           His ears quite pulled was his skinful.

           His skin zoomed to his middle ear.

           He was happening on their thought-things

           He was happening on their myth-things/

                      on those sigils

           porch denote, a tended herbal plot,

           mare loitering beside a zinc trough,

           a worship’s cloud shape-shifting to perplex

           the upright set to rob him of his

           dead spectrum heart,

                      pierced with pings and probes,

           O it hurts me so, that it does not hurt,

           the lack of hurt discountenances.

                      It screws me up that as I mount

                      I go under.

           Sands of time trickle and their fragile

           cone heaps high,

                      bonding in its own cement

           happiness of objects it had made fond and

           oft engulfed, greased with blood

           keeping them in play,

           dodging in between bracts.

                      Lackaday. I take forever for my time.

           “In lofty mood I mount the reeking box,”

           the centrifuge sequence grinds,

           flicker box revs up,

                      lees consolidate,

           this heart’s plug feels impermeable.

           Feel it? Feel the thumb-rest?

                      Lights along a distant rim flicker.

           A waterspout

           smacks down from a thundercloud,

           tornadoes score papery soil,

                      crushing keepsakes in cones,

           a clay hexagon from Palmyra

           ten centuries BCE.

           He bindeth up waters in his thick clouds,

           hourglass trembles in his hands

                      for now is time pitching over,

           time inverts,

           now’s time, past time, time it must be,

           hourglass mills mace and conch,

                                 his residence

           offs from under, no iota escapes.

Now if the secret relative, the disjointed hero turned inside out

as certainly bound to do,

           once woken to say his piece,

once mixing it

amid the crackle of aluminium cans, those canceled trains

starting forward, joining up with people in the room,

                     he must be touched, really—

           if where a finger stops he shrinks and squeals,

where the finger flutters, helplessly squalls,

thoughts not his own disseminate like needles all haphazard:

touched he can only sing, touched he pitches out

           endless longing in a macaronic of Greek and slang,

listening for his noble voice, hearing only cries of the dying—

pick them up, the shell-like lobes

                     throb as they squeal on deck,

that slippery, sustainable deck,

                                                        such remnants

shall the creaturely world animate, their pipes sound in unity?

           Breathe a zephyr over ice floes,

           sight-read their scattering before a hushed hive.

2

May my transmission throw unstinted nimbus, fracture a cell

to leak its thinking-through,

                     conforming to already-strewn scores:

           those brilliant Aztec shafts,

the shattered painted dome, soon their splinters recede,

           and in their place a faint lemon-yellow blur,

                     a new sun

back-projects onto the outshone day,

sigils of the birds insecticides had killed, feathers plucked,

cockaded on pennants

flapping slit along the path to the Museum of Natural History.

Touch Here dissects their songs, touch dawn and sunset flight

plotted in real-time on-screen,

                     hear, see, kill out of prevision.

Are all put to death?

Elusive yet a zigzag insect scribbles, self-erases,

                                     neither here nor there,

one thing or the other lives in consciousness of scalp or ankle,

skin sending signals in advance,

           did you hear their fuss?

Dying within hearing, dying past hearing, dying to be heard.

May my transmission glorify each wandering, singular flight.

                     Release came before its time.

Rupturing the screen, predictive codes bounce in plastic tots,

set out rows of analgesic,

           recapitulate hiss of gas in unison with what

sounds alive in trees, red dust sifting between bare branches

                     Neither here nor there.

           Eyebright, you too, reticent against the path.

                                   Aperture. Crosshairs.

Quit the session, pack up, and feel your flesh prickle,

feel advances when called in:

           It is the score they know, they cannot help but respond.

No mosquito is where we think it is where its mote dissolved

           in full sight, consciously in skin between my fingers,

misidentified as in a dormitory,

nor lit upon a boy jackknifed in a closet, unmissed.

                       Imagine dangling like some flap—

           a penis or false nose, a glove

flies buzz inside, vibrating like foam memory,

the master stroke a wasp nest keeps time with,

           mastery a snake strips in sequence to:

its bandages of yellow skin keep a barber’s pole in their twist,

                                     must mast for all to see.

Marsyas’s trunk too. His mouth filled with insects.

The forest slumps lumber, horizontal in its poles and sleepers.

May this transmission taste sweet if on the palate metal fizzes.

                       He wore his heart on his sleeve,

one more political factory—

his kidney was that four-stage filter a horde

funneled through—

           you recognize for what, this multitude, this army—

           he sprawls in his termite couvade,

tumulus to a gang of target cells, switched on to assemble

SQL and Python columns, file home to their

                       forest compound—

           depositing a trail of crumpled faces, the mask

of surveillance stripped and stripped, a bare-faced

hide hangs and resonates out loud, he’s got to respond to that—

           stretch his scalp for a great drum, thump the ground

riddled by the thought of maggots going about their business.

Larvae that never will be flies.

          Parchment where the worm glyphs burrow

silently, as it has been written.

Swipe now. Its yellow glaze intensifies.

                     Swipe again. Just try once more. Soft

instruction squirms beneath a screen protector.

Think you can compete? As birds take flight before the archer,

one flies down a fire break dodging scorching breeze:

                     and the auguries that fall

in our circle, that deflated orb each holds to their face

           like to a mirror’s mockery,

scatter needles in unread scores across the sterile O-horizon.

The misbegetting Gods fuck in beach-huts of a cement Lethe,

deaf to insects, by a reedless, unwaded pool:

           they ring the pool,

darkness so intense dazzles, light thick as Chinese white,

a glaze smothering light even in emitting it,

hisses at high frequency. Sheer extinction.

                     Sheer

magnetic force, its field a basalt slab:

                                   they turn toward their sacrifice,

hand in hand, hand in the concept of a hand, hand in his idea,

           they have a hand in his hand. Therefore

gloved, if once his thigh is touched it will explode with child.

Or so it ought. All falls quiet.

In their defeated circle wind cannot rouse or steer to so much

as a faltered gust, nor stops squeal against breath.

Birds drop lumped on needle stooks.

                     Advance, hero, play your part.

His canopic vessel sounds. Letter A the impress of his voice

           burnt out.

Ruined cities melt to glass in intense heat, theaters

bake to bricks in an earth kiln, flutes thicken,

sinuses of mortar,

           only lost blood hisses from a severed ear.

Stars have been expressed, but he will lie still akimbo,

                     ungloved, dispersing in swarms.

He kicks the shew-stones and little universes break up.

Clay hexagons bide the pool whose ripple will translate them.