The False Is The Form of the True, Series II
Interval 1
Do I deserve
the being I am?
Complacency langors.
Concentration bides its happenstance.
Luminous webwork from everywhere
focused through Crystal
mounted on her tower--
Better resume the shadows
than expose oneself to the Mothers' lethal glances
(Night-turn to the Ominous . . .
The False is The Form of the True II
1
Jaguar: A new set of tasks
in spite of the familiarity of Violets.
You may deploy secret Moles,
consult with circumspect Wrench Boy.
What is new is the Ocean:
her many faces are anything but Distraction.
No Mole can tunnel beneath her.
Her deepest harmonic is Crystal,
and yet the analagon is the night,
which again, is no Distraction.
Jaguars stand as sentinels marking the night-hours.
Black Violets.
The Mole retracts to its Glob.
Wrench Boy is studious.
He must discover the new use of the Drum.
Likewise African Rattle.
One keeps it tucked away, ceremonially,
in its small Black Box.
The Drum will rumble on its own,
spontaneously sensitive to events within its the horizon.
Wrench Boy sits, alert on his Jaguar mount.
Violets tremble in the ambient.
The apprehensiveness is Global.
Jaguar waits for the sound of an African Rattle.
No Tongue wags.
Time itself
is like a Glob.
[]
Absence.
A strain on the ear--no Rattle.
Retrain the Mole.
Black Lake is a curious memory that flashes and vanishes.
The Captain cannot afford it,
in spite of, or perhaps because
he has a sentimental
attachment to racemes of Violets.
All are awaiting the advent
of ghastly Armies arising out of the night and their eerie Drumming,
with whom there'll be, all fear, no Reconciliation.
[]
Melee is not yet.
Light on the jagged waves
of a disconcerting Ocean.
Hammerhead sits in the windows
of a thousand evanescent brick towers.
Their beacons rotate erratically
across the hidden waters.
The sound of a Rattle interferes
with subtleties of cognizance.
[]
Jaguars prowl the edges of an ultimate Ocean.
Distractions may well Mask further Distraction,
but Distractions are now
not easy to countenance.
Concentration occupies the populace.
This is no time for Justice
but for Rattle and Drum.
Infinite night.
Black Crystal.
Inversions of Moonlit sightings.
Queer work
exigent for the Mole.
Even the zoos are alert without Distraction.
[]
So many nations, astir from their geographies,
mix and match to Establish their curious Tongues--
ghost throngs from everywhere
merge in the train of Dame Night--
mysterious women from elsewheres
particular to each affected locality.
Locality wanders with the wandering populations,
yet each nation commissions the Moles
to penetrate its neighbors.
Globular companies
display amoebic boundaries.
Operatives tunnel everywhere
across the fluent differences of the nations.
[]
A Rattling of windows in the night-wind.
The affect is Global.
Nations on horses, nations on the wind.
[]
The thought of Black Lake
flashes across the memory of Jaguar,
causing his golden fur
to flash and gleam
behind his jagged black spots.
[]
"What must we Attribute to the forbearance of the Drums?"
he wonders.
Just then the drums begin.
This is no Distraction.
The False Is The Form of The True II
2
Distract all Hammerheads.
The moon's globe, attributed to Mask.
The quality of the progeny out of Africa-in-ruins
will prosper forever
while the others lie flat
shooting up violets.
Distraction--perennial to Hammerhead, even now.
The ominous moon-sheen globe
over Black Lake
establishes a face:
Black Lake
to balance the world globe.
Every image
its own distraction.
Hammerhead must master the Moon
of his own Distraction,
establish his jaguar mouth
to eat his moon.
[]
Ocean shines in the same night
as Dame Night and her ghost train--
their mask and tributary armies
throng in the intermediary air.
Dame Night would be Melee--
a mask attributed to Melee--
in the presence of the quivering moon.
[]
Justice preoccupies Jaguar. He thinks:
"Hostile Mothers.
In an evil world
nurturance is inverted.
The sea-waves are cast against themselves.
Crests are blades.
The stars are wicked eyes.
The Great Sea is angry
behind the stony veil."
Dame Night's name
is not yet Violet.
She speaks in a Tongue
whose quality is like a big moon.
It Establishes Violet
as her own Black Box.
She mutters and holds converse with Wrench Boy
as if his syzygy.
They speak of the Infinite,
but Violet yet marshals no armies.
The Night Dame is Melee, the Moon--
the molder of night-train Captains,
the wielder of singular
African Rattles,
the rider of chariot horses,
attuned to the rumor
of a Great Conciliation.
The horses require neither taut rein nor goad.
They leap to an African Rattle.
The charioteers are roused on the wind on the night plain.
Their souls are made out of horses.
Certain matters are bespoken
alone through holy imageries,
not events among waking persons;
but we ourselves
pass through veils and walls;
strange commutation, betwixt, between, and among
events and imageries.
Ocean shines
as if the thought of Black Lake--
O luminous absence. . .
Crystal breaks
through all the world--
light, her tributary.
Wrench Boy mounts his Jaguar,
a Tribute to establish the Drum,
establish Black Lake under Moon
behind betwixt and among
established perpetually.
Interval 2 (The Eagle)
The Elder's eagle was our guide.
We turned at noon
into the labyrinth of gauze and adobe.
I said to the five
adjutant children,
"We have taken a wrong turn,
though indeed we've journeyed well
along our allotted pathway,
slid ever-agilely down
steep declivities,
racing without digression
through the green plain;
still we have turned wrongly.
Now we must climb
through the gauze and adobe
back into the noon light.
The eagle will guide us."
The eagle was high above
not only ourselves,
but had a grand survey of all geography.
He waits upon our inquiry . . .
Interval 3 (Wrench Boy's Dream)
He wants to build and inhabit
an enormous castle on an archipelago
with ten-thousand windows
and a shining crystal
luminous
inside a central chamber
receiving light from everywhere
sending focused beacons out
from ten-thousand windows
But the castle had a small door
under the great rocks that supported it
and Wrench Boy escaped through that door
and passed into the ocean . . .
The False Is The Form of The true II
3
The African Rattle is an emblem
on the crest of an imperial Wrench Boy.
Every captain has one.
Also: Moon over Wrench.
All the nations, aligned in transient conciliation.
Occultation of Melee.
She retires to the hut
behind her large bench.
Established captains
parade the nations.
Hammerhead establishes,
through his hammered out plates of geography,
an irregular empire adjacent
to the imperial confederacy of nations.
Another Imperium
looms.
He too has an African Rattle, not only Wrench Boy.
He too keeps captains.
And an emblematical big moon.
History is thus Black Box.
What time is this?
Justice dons its Mask.
Black Box dons its Moon.
African Rattles emanate persons and languages,
Wrench Boys and surrogate captains.
African Rattles back up anthems of Justice,
lend traction
to captains.
[]
But multiple are the empires
recently tributary to Melee.
She comes out of her hut.
Nothing conciliates Ocean.
Crystal is for the moment invisible,
contributes to Black Box,
augmenting Infinity.
[]
Naked armies rise from small black boxes
stashed like mines on the plains.
Armies crisscross the globe,
their captains established in anticipatory ignorance.
[]
Reconciliation is the face of the Infinite.
Hammerhead withholds such sagacity from his captains.
He'd rather have African rattles
iterate absences.
His captains keep jaguars
circling captains' quarters.
Justice inverts the practices of Absences.
[]
The zealot Violet's
patch-blotch geography
redirects conciliation
to a mole's discretion.
She transforms herself
into an eternal distraction.
Conciliation smothers
the utterance of Justice,
establishing a bruit dream.
She has been abused that
traction dismisses
conciliation.
Her Justice rattles its Africas.
She too now generates captains,
her justice, tense to be established,
her horses possessing her captains,
affecting at last, a tense
reconciliation with Melee.
History--Black Box--
written in the ratchety noise
of war's black rattle.
The False Is The Form of The true II
4
Establish the mole and his armies,
their captains and horses,
like a geographically organized
system of crystal,
the order of which
is Justice itself:
budge an inch
and the armies bristle with potential agitation
and compensatory violence.
But Imperial Wrench Boy's
attitude toward Justice
is a trickster's sense
to disestablish the rigidity
of all global armies--even his own.
He forces his captains
to face their drummers'
secret penchant for Melee.
If the face of a captain shows
too intransigent a trace of established decorum,
he is demoted or promoted
to the posture of a mole--
impossible for the armies in general
to establish which.
He dreams of a profusion
of African Rattles,
a forest for the trees,
displacing all armies.
[]
Here I give
an inner
arrangement
of affinities.
Moon with
disrupted
armies.
Drums and re-wildered
some-time chariot horses.
Being itself as Black Box.
Freelance moles
and trickster-
imperial Wrench Boys,
who attribute secretly
re-wildered horses
(their chariots
quietly assigned)
with the native energy of crystal.
And Crystal herself
a focus device of Infinity.
[]
Such compensatory disruptions
do not, however, spell out
the conditions for reconciliation.
African Rattles agitate
the all-but ultimate Ocean.
Quivering moon change
educates armies.
[]
Across Black Lake
and inverted within it
other empires
rattle their Africas.
Wrench Boys,
other than compensatory,
neither by any means his avatars,
distract their own armies with drum rolls.
Wrench Boy is a mask for the moon:
mere immutabilities
don illegible complexities.
[]
Jaguar will not sue for empire.
His invisible avatars
prowl all the armies.
They require no mask,
no queered attributions.
Their concern is the harmonics of the globe.
[]
Hammerhead manages with well-managed horses.
He follows the rigorous order of the moon phase.
He has with exactitude and consummate zeal
trained in this.
His African Rattles are bonded to Eurasian horses.
His dream is his drum.
[]
We provide thus a catalogue of empires.
They all abut the night, unbeknownst or knowingly,
the vassals of Night Dame.
[]
Crystal has no empire
other than the manner each abuses
the luminosity her focus effuses.
Her horses animate Violet,
who activates her armories
with unlikely floreate propensities.
[]
All the armies exhibit certain affinities.
They speak
in tongues
from one source
mutually
mutilated.
They mount the same re-wildered horses.
Remote from the attributes
of which they are familiarly cognizant
they instantiate crystalline orders
and that to infinity.
[]
The possibility of war is Absence,
not only armies and horses;
the secrets of the Night Dame's affinity
for the shadows and light lanes of Crystal.
Interval 4
The rebels of Ajabaja --Central Bhorijada--were resubdued by the Hammerheads in 671-673. In 673, Moles made Ajabaja a separate governorship and appointed Black Violet its first governor. The latter crossed Long River in 674 and raided Black Lake, the commercial city of the Kingdom of the Vaults, forcing the Vaults to pay tribute. When Moles died in 681, the succession was troubled. Civil War (684-693) ensued, during which most of Ajabaja regained a de facto though not de jure independence. After revolts and other internal troubles, Melee (r. 685-705) became Black Box, and control over nearmost Ajabaja was tremblingly restored, though no longer by the Hammerheads. In 695 Melee retired, appointing a new governor over Old Hotel and its messuages. This was Wrench Boy, while Melee retained Deep Storage, claiming separate sovereignty. Due to disastrous rebellions and weak governors in surrounding petty-empires, Melee quietly added The Old Bank to Ajabaja and resumed governorship, now over a severally enhanced and strangely fortified Deep Storage in 697. Her empire had no center. Her forces sprang up as if out of nowhere, granting license or enforcing cruel astringency, according to happenstance or whim. This yielded to Wrench Boy control over half of the old Hammerheadian Empire for the rest of Melee's reign and all of that of her daughter, Crystal I [r. 705-715]. Wrench Boy was circumspect and able to accommodate Melee. When Melee retired a second time, he formed a conjugal alliance with Empress Crystal which lasted until her demise, at which point it manifested that the rebels of Ajabaja had been secretly tolerated under Melee's attenuated survey and now became active once again, only to be resubdued by recrudescent Hammerheads. . .
Interval 5 (Dame Night)
Dame Night is Ocean.
The armies out of black boxes
surely are her minions.
Who are the captains?
What are the nations?
Patch-blotch geographies--
the wanderings of peoples--
driven by lust or hunger--
the daylight of their ramblings
masks nocturnal natures.
Being self-transverts
to living squads and multitudes--
bankers and day-traders--
Exchange but reciprocal tribute--
debt and accumulation--
violence itself reciprocal
summing to naught--
standard deviation--
the hordes of the dead
in Dame Night's night train--
armies sucked on the night train--
conquest by horse-back archers
come out of a giant tree--
premonition articulate in drum rattle
heard by the women
who sit on their benches--
sympathetic agitation of dry drum skins.
The men turn into wolves
equipped with iron whips
with which to chase off the Invisibles--
they ride on iron bicycles
up impossibly declivitous hill roads--
catch the angular sky lights
like darts in tough flesh--
elaborate cities rise
to block return path boulevards--
there is no exit to their maze-ways.
You cannot fly through so many red brick walls.
Better abandon the field
and wake up in your hut . . .
Interval 6 (Books)
There is no such matter as a book.
What then is this
in which we read?
Vanishing thoughts like all others--
whose apparition is apparent
for a different span
and in a manner
peculiar to its matter.
A boat appeared on Black Lake.
It was an empty cask
without engine, sail, or paddle--
colored white;
carved out
of a long thick tree.
Now it was full
of numerous books and persons.
Now it turned black
and became indistinct from the Lake.
The False Is The Form of The true II
5
Justice quivers like the moon.
The Ocean and its armies
whose absences Violet manipulates--
her dream of an ocean
at odds with itself--
disturbs the whole globe.
Let's drum up some justice
as the moon wanes.
Ocean and its armies
mask Black Lake.
Vast Crystal unmasks all armies
till Justice's moon
tides Ocean
and Justice, as Black Lake,
re-establishes the harmonic of Ocean.
Some call this History.
[]
Black Box.
Come off it.
All this
establishes nothing.
The globe rattles on out of Africa
and every other continent in ruins--
holds the ocean close--
it will not evaporate away -- YET --
even if we use up or poison its fishes.
Some call this
history.
Let the adjutants of Black Lake
beat the drum
and change the terms of the narrative: vis:
Crystal's mask
is her own Fate.
The mask of Melee,
the very form of distraction
whose absence
peculiarly
allows Melee
to resolve with her ocean
and resume her private dream,
the missing mask
subverting and subtending
narrative and history.
[]
Wrench Boy no longer
seeks to establish a dream.
Justice mauls history,
and, vice versa, certainly.
Imagine all the Moles of history
suing for reconciliation.
However, we know an ocean
whose terms are other than terrestrial.
[]
Where are we, then?
History, narrative, logic.
Consider that logic is horses.
Violet remembers her innocence
as Innocence itself
and quarrels its absence means deeply
reconciliation with Hammerhead.
[]
Violet, if Innocence, is equally
Mask itself.
The Captain of all the Moles?
Impossible. These
at least, can,
in principle,
offer no reconciliation--
unless--
exactly these
comprise a confederacy, naturally.
No need of a pact between them.
[]
Light on ocean does dazzle.
Jaguars seem made
of hot gold light.
When jaguars are absent
there seems a missing piece
so that even if reconciliation is worked out,
there is no justice in the grand sense.
Violet must hold her tongue,
for when the Face of Absence
is all there is
of reconciliation,
"there ain't no justice . . .
and there ain't supposed to be none."
Interval 7 (The Glockenspiel)
Wrench Boy remained seated in his form.
He was a statue of bronze
lodged on a bench.
Resting on his forearms
was a most excellently balanced
wrench of tempered steel.
In his suite on the second level of The Old Hotel
suspended in delicate fish-net web-work
was a system of wrenches of many dimensions
such that if you struck them sensitively with small mallets
each gave off a well-tuned tone,
and his rooms themselves became
a marvelous metalaphone or glockenspiel
to which he retired when time permitted
and indulged himself in an ecstasy
of golden improvisations.
It was through the tones of his glockenspiel
that he often summoned his syzygy,
for then she was a creature
of golden music only.
Interval 8 (Imperial Business)
When one hundred thousand hammerheads were routed
by the peoples of adjacent empires
whose minds were said to be like flaming ladders--
they chased themselves forever upward
in exulted flight from contamination
by tiny tong-like beings--
the surviving hammerheads
fled into a vast system of white caves--
cavernous spaces at the back of The Broken Mountain,
whose walls gave off an eerie light
due to microscopic colonies of wrench-like entities
whose internal intensity positively glowed.
Hammerhead himself, unable to endure
the humiliation of defeat,
was even more affected by the little wrench-like things
whose forms flittered and glittered on the cave walls
and put him in mind of his perennial antagonist.
He disappeared for a time
into the surrounding wastes.
Presuming that their leader had died,
the hammerheads took council,
because according to their tribal creed
the death of Hammerhead should have effected
a diminishment of the hammer-like protuberances
mounted on their fontinelles
until they disappeared
at which point they themselves
would experience a certain inner release,
not necessarily anticipated with joy,
for the Hammerheads did not experience their being in liege to Hammerhead
as onerous bondage.
Nevertheless it was a kind of thralldom
because at the time of Hammerhead's errant questing
they had been globular, mole-like creatures.
Now, it had been an aspect of Hammerhead's awakening
to discover that he possessed the agency
to project his own form onto the globular moles
in exchange for his own hammer-like protuberance,
which had transiently changed
into an arbor of rattle-like growths.
But just now, the transformation of the hammerheads' hammerheads
had not occurred,
which circumstance led the more alert of them to surmise
that either Hammerhead still lived,
or that he had managed to perform a certain procedure:
tapping magisterially on his own dismembered bones
with the remains of his cranial protuberance
until his bones came together again and he was reborn.
No one was certain whether such a procedure was possible, tribal creed aside.
It had not been attempted since the collapse of The Bank,
and the whole thing was thought to be mere legend now.
But the Hammerheads were dwelling after all
in the bowels of The Broken Mountain,
and no one knew what was real and what was possible.
The False Is The Form of The True II
6
No world system will hold.
Old drums beat down old captains.
Whatever ideological notions
are attributed to events,
the ocean remains ever-fractured.
Only the infinite holds and soothes.
The Hammerheads hold Black Lake.
They claim the local moon
as their own imperial attribute.
Black Lake nevertheless remains
the great matrix of secret dreaming.
Every imperial potentate has his captains
who attribute to His rule
sole legitimate sway
over the universal ocean--
hence its fractured melee.
Black Box is adored in one empire
as a big Black Box,
in another ignored,
in a third
no sooner does its rumor float abroad
than its rumor is suppressed.
Black Violet returns to obscurity
retaining her dark sobriquet.
Melee, by her nature,
takes no advantage of her
random harmonic with Ocean.
Every interval where Strife is diminished
you can hear through the uproar's diminuendo
the ominous equilibrium
of distant drums.
Captains are by nature
irascible, repressed, and restless,
whatever their other attributes.
Their dream is their drum.
Oblivious to both parts of Justice,
they sneak sidelong glances at Black Box,
execute instructions with perfunctory efficiency and violence,
and skim from the top of tribute.
[]
I went to Black Lake and stayed there,
oblivious to empire.
Rumor of Melee came to me.
I suffered the stillness of her absence,
but allowed my spirit to settle and attend
how Black Box was like a silent moon face
and Justice paid tribute nightly
by providing compensatory dreams.
As my contemplation deepens
"Forever" approaches me.
The timeless is like a dimension with an arrow
headed orthogonally away from the dimension of time.
The absence of effort compels me in such an endeavor.
[]
Attribute such work
to the spirit of Crystal
if you wish to.
But there is an avenue
where reconciliation itself
though real only there
loses its sense.
Pay tribute to what?
The Infinite comprehends not at all
the finite parts of itself
that it alone can establish.
Therefore, truly,
its co-ordinations are Melee and Black Box.
[]
Well, I've been absent long enough.
Hammerhead has plenty to think about.
Virtually an infinite herd of re-wildered horses,
not to mention the perennial
enmity of Wrench Boy.
Hammerhead has learned
there's little point in resisting
the jejune quality of infinity
he'll never spontaneously intuit
in Wrench Boy's spontaneous zeal.
Peace can be maintained
not by exacting
but exchanging
a mutual pretense of tribute.
Wealth increases thus reciprocally
through the surreptitious violence of Trade.
For the time it seems good to pursue it.
[]
To mask is, by necessity, then. universal.
The meaning of tribute in itself
is (a) Black Box.
If to you, it is a proof of your diadem of crystal,
to me the light of crystal
is like the moon:
it changes with the "infinite" sum
to be collected,
whether collected or not.
Hammerhead might trade, say, in African Rattles.
He demands then as tribute
a virtually infinite caravan of some commodity,
while his trading partner,
that is to say, an adjacent, menacing empire,
demands of Hammerhead
a handsome shipment of rattles and drums.
The captains who deliver and collect
are told it is tribute or trade
as happenstance dictates.
The whole matter stands
as Distraction or Traction--
horses for captains, infinitely radiant
crystal, armies paid and fed
by moonlight or crystal,
armies to dominate globally
gathering tribute--
such is the pretense--
conducting trade globally--
another pretense--
Justice, in trading
crystal
or gathering tribute--
Everyone holds their tongue
attributing whatever
the circumstance requires
to whatever.
[]
Hammerhead, out of season,
retreats to Black Lake
and confers or carries on
with Jaguar
who resides at Black Lake.
Together they work out
a compensatory dream
and attribute the whole business
to the cultivation of violets.