History’s Middens

“Fiction is history…or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground…whereas history is based…on second-hand impression.”
     —Joseph Conrad

Deep in the catacombs, under the Vatican,
beneath the pomp and velvet circumstance,
the hearts of saints are preserved.
Sybils suspended in reliquary jars
turn shriveled faces to the wall,
eyes refumed with laurel smoke,
burning flesh of rank goat,
the living god of Pythias,
his voice from their lips to my ear—
This place is not for you, they whisper.
Careful with the holy middens.
There’s fire in the hole, the brooding hollows,
all that plundered beauty hoarded
in the smoking name of love.

Teak and mahogany, petrified bodies,
of dark skinned, desert fathers,
maps of Lemuria, Atlantis and Mu,
the dust-covered chariots of the Gods,
the real spear of Longinus,
the flayed skins of Druids,
a hundred scalps of a hundred Ishis,
Montezuma’s headdress, his foreskin inscribed
in formulas for the female circumcision of the moon,
the street names and census of the city of God,
records of communications across the species,
treasures of the Knights Templar raked
from the burning ruins of their castle,
death rolls of the Cathars, and the Albigensians,
The Solitary Bird of No Significant Color,
sketched by St John of the Cross.
Sor Juana’s De La Cruz’s unpublished heresies.

I found your theorems there, Hypatia,
on an Alexandrian scroll mapping
the zones of your geometry,
the pleasure of the numbers and the Mix Lydian mode,
before the history of your final passion was rewritten
in the brittle chronicles of John, Bishop of Nikiu—
… her Satanic wiles …
                   …beguiled the people…
     …even the governor…
                   …her heresy…dark magic…
… the people brought her through the streets until she died.
No annals of retelling can accommodate
The extinction of a species.

In March of the holiday they call Lent,
in the fourth year of Cyril’s episcopate,
under the tenth consulate of Honorius
and the sixth of Herodosius,
while the Cedars of Lebanon burn and smolder,
the Nitrian Guards, sweating in their armor
beat Isodurus, your husband
with the flat sides of their swords,
then pull down the curtain to your study—
an astrolabe, an escritorium, your scrolls,
defiled revelation, in a barren room,
the rattle and echo of weapons,
suspended sunbeams in the haze of light.
No jeweled eyes to pry out of beatific faces,
no silver chalices or gold vessels, not even
a tremor of a magic spell made flesh.
Then vulgar Latin mixed with Greek,
Those stiff necked pagans, just like the Jews,
up to their tricks again.

All the sibyls have been hunted one by one,
smoked out of their temples and groves,
the Cumaen, the Delphic, Erithean,
All the ten sisters, run to ground,
in the bedlam of extinction.
Flatiron shadows and Latin prayers,
are pressed into their mouths,
where thick fingers pry out the hexameters,
when the temples of revelation are shut down
by those who must redeem themselves in blood,
flay contritions hung before the portals to the sun.

the Patriarch Cyril’s Nitrian Monks,
stork-legged, and hooded
wearing masks of beaked birds,
pull you from your carriage,
drag you to their church called Caesareum
where they spread you like a star
on their auto da fe,
to search you for the burning words,
abominations under your tongue, an incantation,
the first song of the Sibyl,
the name of the ash grove where
What—? you meet their Beelzebub,
dance with the Lord of the Flies,
commune and couple with incubi,
Eat babies? None of those things,
No contraband in the darkness but ignorance.

They will scrape the flesh from your living bone
with ostrakois, pottery shards, oyster shells.
You must hide in the zones of your geometry
between the infinite points of a straight line
that you imagine extending into space.
Become some fugitive star in the Milky Way
where their hot eyes and fingers can't find you.

How far beyond the common word
can a pain stretch, Hypatia?
You spin out like a top,
and the stars are running—
all those heavenly bodies in the constellations’ drift.
a star for each heart burning up,
burning out, a perpetually dissolving fellowship,
a heart for every sun.

They crack open your chest,
rip out your heart, to hold up to the altar,
their crucified god, still beating.
They burn your body at Cinaron, the charnel farm,
where the keepers of the bone yard.
rake the coals and your charred remains
looking for melted gold in the ashes.

I look for you in the brooding hollows,
the shards of second hand experience.
I rake through middens and the rumors of middens,

puzzling the fragments and conflictions
as I try to imagine your face,

to retrieve the fragments of that star
whose interior gravities imploded
with all your futures past
into the stuff that this poem is made of,
the ten thousand things that make up
this temporary and perishable world.

Ed Frankel
_________________
“The ten thousand things”: From The Tao Te Ching
“This temporary and perishable world”: Rilke
“How far can a fear stretch?”: Jack Spicer