Vertices

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New Mexico

1873

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Take me back there, yes? Take me back there. 

Give me a few lines, dear man, charlie-noble—Barley, there like a bassoon, give me some lines, please.

And I am dearly inclined to give him some for his eyes are innumerable and mesophilic, and spreading around pure citrus as to ingulf in rot. His there face is ovular—I give him grace.

All are ambiguities, Barley, and I can see you walking in and sitting down just by me, the closest, in that smoke-hanging, mephitic place. Little leaves of gold light flit through bars and the unminding gaps between planks, flying off your round-yet-cadaverous face, cheek bones like antlers, right here. I am seeing you, and most of all feeling you. Your sinews are my garden, my reason for being. And being so, I release thee, slough thee off, and gazing to the old acres and swales of green, depart thee hence. What am I saying? Perhaps that I adore thee, that you are my favorite (a great favorite), that all of this really was for you, Barley, so unabating, so unashamed. 

I place a glass in front of you, atop a little plain of piñon, and you gather it to yourself and there is very little light and you are thumbing around the rim of the glass absentmindedly. So many ways to describe it, so many ways to write you down, and even then I let you do it for me. What ambiguities surround you, flitting like that departing sun, soon to be swallowed up in shame by night, and you to die, to be sent off from that fever, that sickness, imparted to you by your father—his arrival impending.

Things are creaking and adjusting and with little patters, and I see the boy, all on wagon from Corrales, Ysidro. From that foreign swamp he has risen and come to me. 

If you wish, please, a few lines from you—there, Ysidro, like a small-voiced cuckoo, a few lines.

And what does the river do for me now? So many odds of centipedes adorning the floor, black slender obsidian things. O! My god, they’re here too, and you, and you, and you! Golden, golden sun, at last let me bathe.

What pining for the unthunder’d sleep you went in, boy, and all for mother, none for fear. Braver than any man-o’-blue or anything else, yes, look around! The stools stacked higher than the pitiless mulberries that looked down on you, the kurnamescent blood of the oozing and failing sun, flying moths and dust-bringers around—not for you, but because of you they exist. In all the jagged flat-top mesas and low desert patch-plains and rock-teeth mountains, there you are, there you are. All’s in you, and you in all, and lasting, and feeling, and longing for better, that eternal longing of history, there you are, in it, atop it, knowing it. Your final consequence: peace.

A lasting peace, peace along the river, atop the mounts, throughout the hills of Paradise here on Earth, perfection here on earth, delivered and waiting for you, carried from the far-fingered Ashland, a place even you would recognize and equivocate to here.

And now, slightly older, walk, and sit. A glass for you. You inspect the lees and starch. You let it spin around and stop, and stop, and go again.

And with no sound at all, Marisol, untimely, you too enter all alone, for no human being could ever constrain you—not your brother, not your doomed husband, not any Santa Fe liar and man-charmer, none of them matched you. Have confidence, and sit, please. Your son, the only being alive containing you in body and in love, waits.

A pack of shining, illustrious, mad kings of old alien ruins, adorned in fitted royal rags and chinks and iron collars linked to one, some dead, others better off the joining, slam open the cheap, unfitting doors, and shamble in. Amongst the rabble there is Leocadio, entirely unheard and unseen amongst the commotion. Look at me. Look at me. There he is.

He is so small for his form, his spheres, beyond his imagination but entirely within his articulation. Give me a few lines, sir, my sir, some little songs, a grace of your fleeting presence upon the earth, stolen from us in such a quest.

And seeing such a place like a nightmare, sister, I felt I had to go to you. Where am I? It evades description, the effusive walls obscured in fog and clots of virid tobacco-odor and the dying day and its fear of the coming night. Americans here too, what have I done? New Mexico, God protect you from the vesting fingers of power.

Yes, revolutionize me, please, for this was your purpose to attain life even after death, so you are reanimated. Marisol, your sister, Ysidro, your nephew, find truth in them, as was found and extinguished in yourself. There is so much mercy in the light, Leocadio, and unobscured by the malignant smoke of cannons, you will find, in death—perhaps—that it kisses you more gently than the scroll; in light, yes, is the revolution. 

Obadiah. You must understand, a few lines is all I need. Just a few more, a paltry, unasking, genial more.

O! The heat on this day. A red fine adobe-masked carpet lies under my feet. So sudden is my appreciation of its curved flourishes, its effortless vertices, that

In your shame you were born, lived, and died, not unlike the country to which you gave your life as it killed you for that crime in which you were steeped. So dread snowcapped your locks, so ringéd your hair, your eyes dark and huge and watering in the face of the world, obsidian pools like the arrows that tormented you. You may share with Barley in his sickness, sick with money and gold and California. But this is not all to you, for man is in multitudes, and in spite of your inhuman sorrows, you remain sapien, you remain in my eye, my vocal harpsichord, ancient stone tablet, forever wanting man. Remain unfinished.

Let me be overcome in looking at you, Polly, the him sir, perhaps the original, the progenitor, not the best, but the first. Everybody is waiting for you and they don’t know it, and if only they knew it, if they just could, they would understand the meaning of the transaction of our times, the trade. Where have you been? Why do you walk so, as if on a stump, and in such mirth. In you is the answer, perhaps most, to that question of innocence, not lunacy or idiocy or any other manner of names, but innocence, and in that answer lies the cure to all plagues and evils, if you could only speak it. Gone dumb, yes, but you are a man, goddamnit, a human god damned being. And nobody can ever shoot you off that. Nothing. No God, no America; no Mexico, nobody in any revolution or upheaval can overthrow ye. Obadiah will find ye a balanced churchseat, low bench.

Things elongate and stretch in space and shrink in time, as is custom, and Estefina is not far behind, nearly at the steeltoes of the others in stature. Rise, Estefina, please, and indulge me in the scattered line, for in you there is no sign of my creation, no trace of my being, so separated you are.

Upon the back of a sickly savage mule I make walking to this place where Teresina may be, estranged, I don’t know where kit took her. men like these took daddy, too, took him and hung his hair out to dry by the skin.

Please, on the settee where Polly lay, right there, yes, away from the cups and the madness and the chattering of odors mixed with the silence of words.

And Barley, Ysidro, Marisol,  Leocadio, Obadiah, Polly, Estefina, and a revolutionary force of Puebloans, and a pack of green-faced arm-thumbing soldiers from Maine and Missouri and South Carolina and everywhere else, Palmettos and Doniphans alike. Everybody a carnival of patches and engrafted mixtures, each the more silent, awaiting the call to action, alas, not yet the coming.

The wind of springs finally ceased, as was incessant amongst the deserted plains, into the faint, droning whistles of night, drawing those out into the blue and silver dark, each cacti and pear a city. There is no history to this place, erected just for now, right for now, each board to collapse upon the forgetting.

Enter Montrose, Sr.

His back is wet on a middle stream, a tiny ford broken by pebbles from the Borrego Pass, for he has been sitting upon it like a great dam of flesh, his audience and receiver himself, his dialogue all alone. A great hunk of arrowed Obsidian has destroyed his heart but there is not blood escaping from the gorge it has furrowed in the shooting—it’s all been gone already, a long time, yes, very long. Unlike his son his face is round and perhaps at one point it was anything but a hoarse sack of blinking marbles and marrowless leaf-vein patches of flesh, patches of men in that unguided way—scalps, too. There are peaches in his eyes and the burning trees, as ordered, and he cradled with him a jammed useless staff of a once-flintlock.

My God, dead-man, sicker than the son, a few words from ye, all I want is just a few, a few lines.

And the sky was so pretty then, in its death, and in its next morning there I was. Do you know, man, how often my wonderings turned to my stuff-of-makings, my inquisitions, fruitless as the Spaniards? Where is my spine, my lowly backbone? If you’ve not the answer, I fear I shall be in wanting for the rest of eternity, walking.

Enter Ivan

You too, right behind him. Two arrows in the heart and lungs, right and left, double-breasted, and eyes plucked out like grapes off the string, his oculars hanging out still, the hemp-nerved things. The worthless counterpart, the mirrorlight, the unaccounted for, the nameless bodies defiled. These are you. I have no want of words from you, gun-jammer, lie-teller, secret-spiller. And yet you lag behind, dead and stumpy, and perhaps you sing of pollen a little, that sand of Georgia. I don’t understand you, and I don’t wish to.

Oh, but you will, you will. I laugh at ye, spit at ye, for what else shall I do—crazy-eye you? Some man you are. Some man…I’ll tell you, that Quincy Adams, that was the biggest idiot there ever was. 

His jaw and its flapping lips were not shot off, I see. I didn’t miss you. 

The first makes contact with his son from afar, and averts his eyes. He sees the dead in him, sees himself in him, and thus finds a tall stool in the far off reaches and places himself alone, watching a crack in the ordered wall to the flats. Ivan lingers at the door like mist o’er the river. Directions fulfilled.

Things darken again, and the heaving mutant breaths are making the vision hotter, and it is naked and ragged and made of white shirts and attempts at civility in the mire of death and blood. There is evil in this room adequately presented. Two languages, a third impending. Bare feet treacherously cross from the fine sand onto the hard floor, two pairs, one the heavier, the other light with deer-tracks. 

O! Inés, Inés, full of that swelling desire to the bursting, the flooded Chama reflected entirely in that azure which marked your gaze. Only do not stop breathing, do not stop thinking, for your every second alive promises all of the myriad beauties of nature to be exhaled again and again, contrivance upon contrivance, free in the air, that joinéd carbon. Your love of all things on earth, never vaunted, but kept close to your heart, and what else could it possibly be?

Only a line or two from you, only a line, for it is your exalted lines that bring you closer to that future, blank and endless as the Rio Grande, the yawning abyss of “will be.”

And so many apostates in one place, one sweltering and shrinking and collapsing room, and yet in that warmth there is love and I am liking to love now, for there is a small phlox emerging between the cracks from below, and that is motivated to grow taller and so am I. Nobody moves.

Yes, all I needed. Do sit, do sit, in the naked heat, beyond all description, and trailing behind you: Saúl, your brother, your only one, hulking and massive and yet starving, filled perhaps only with a bulbous hate—no, not hate, betrayal, for upon realizing his condition, what other emotion at those other human beings could be possible? Please, let your sister think, if only for a second, and be the apparatus of liberation unto all: this is your destiny. And from you, a few lines, please.

And you looked at me, and you told me no. And thus I am forsaken, forgotten, and allowed to rest myself against a harpsichord creaking kind of thing jutting outside of the wall, a real genuine support.

I’m getting my bearings still, finding my commas still, reading the words off the page and repeating them still, and forming them into bodies and minds still, and giving those minds the utterances of life’s constants, whatever they may be that day, still, for this is what must be done to telegraph the yesterdays and tomorrows, and the guns, and the firing, and the tightening of flesh around the bone of a hand that embraces the heads of the dying, their leakings, and looks at them—is this because of me? Hold their heads, and watch the eyes flutter in chaos trying to patch the blood, and this is all.

And to perturb all sane men and women in the world is Arthur Mendington, that lunatic with perhaps all the more place and joy upon these green United States than any one person before or after his little patch of life upon the tapestry, doomed and knew it, and knowing it, celebrated, and expanded at his own behest, and for this he was loved by his own people, and hated by the others, so far from God and yet so close to him. The ultimate embodiment of those myriad insanities of murder, somehow sensible in practice and entirely intolerable in theory, glorious institutions manifest! Death dealer, real death dealer, that repugnant, odious, fusty-haired medieval idiot, a few lines from thee, only, a scattering bit of words! Knight me!

Ah! My friend, where have we been flown to? Is this heaven? I do not believe so, far too much blood here! O! Distasteful blood, how much I dread to shed ye…but it is necessary, many times necessary, for the evil-doing—unfortunately, and an object to which many tears are dedidcated—is orders more augmented than the good-doing. Enter me, then!

Ah, well. Rapturing indeed, Mendington. Please, hand me your shotgun, and proceed to the stools. There are other involuntary death-dealers perched upon them, which you may wish to meet. 

And behind him, entirely unremarkable, a scribe, short and stout and obscured by some intentional darkness, shadows of shadows, with eyes like jewels shaking between pages. 

How long has it been. The stools are nearly full, now, and the night has at last consumed the incarnadine desert. Some hold glasses and some do not, and I fear that everyone is here, everyone, everyone amongst the world, breathing the same with me, all in gyrated symphony, all together.

Is this all? Is this history, an untrue, sullen canvas of my own creation—is this all? I do not know. And not knowing, I find peace in the keeping of the steps, in the continuing of the consciousness. All accounted for, for now. Things are moaning and everything is alive and the Earth is so beautiful in the leaving incandescence of the scorched sun, moving in pools, leaving the black orb, crossing the sphere, and at last finding me. Find me there. Take me back there. Take me back there; all is the was, the predicator of everything.

Lovingly departed,

Leon Atweh