Chris Glomski
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VELA (THE AMANUENSIS)
Concerning
the disappearance
one spring of Vela, the amanuensis, I was
meditating
on these verses, which apparently she’d left
behind
in her Selectric on
the desk:
“Thunder of sprung
weather!
Rolling like one fallen
down campanile
stairs, or like a moonlash across
that column where
heaves Abundance by Pierino
da Vinci, season of
lessons
in lightning the
palace walls
remember. Now, these many
years later, this
window-
fan whirls as of a
domain
in those nights, as
if
a little rain still
dried
on your mosquito
netting. Recalling a piano’s
way of enthralling
you,
eating fragrant jambon
and melon, your eyes
fluttered like send help
scrawled on bedsheets, which my
fright stowed then in a
basket
of unbelievable
indifference.
That tramonto seemed
determined to scoop
out all the
others. A pane’s
spontaneous combustion,
an effigy of
ourselves on fire,
and the later appraisals
descried in cooler stares.
Wriggling perfumes, the
avenues of taxis. Shall innocence
invent a vandal
to unplank the undertaker’s
fence, the one he
erected one soft October?
A way to exist, our part
in distance, though
of a piece
with feelers, deranged
by strophes…”
At
this point the curtains
beside me began a violent writhing, and
something electric
tore out the text and sucked it into the
weather. Only on
closer inspection did I find, still stuck
in the carriage, this bottom-scrap of paper:
“for half of night’s a gale,” it said, “and you are sailing.”
Once I thought I heard a hollow thump,
a stair being climbed inside me
and a sea-serpent
broke, in slaps
of waves as in a sacrament, over me—
It arose and it ended. Freely feeling
rumors bound the brusque chapel
in calligraphic
speech,
scratching a deep channel bridged only
occasionally by a slovenly
moonlight
and what the willows were thinking
A room the color of
a sore throat. Very
cold. Chirping birds,
intermittent thuds, as of falling bodies.
2 shades, Spider & Ivy.
Spider: Three, three, one,
eight, zero.
Ivy: It
had been uncaged.
Alone in the ranch house. Remembering the wall blackened around a
phone.
Spider: What’s it thinking?
Ivy: Behind
bushes.
Spider: Little ones calling
from carpets?
Ivy: That
is the poverty of its imagination.
Spider: A
rock behind some garbage cans.
Ivy: We
had lights that could be seen from our sickbeds.
Spider: Seven,
as I remember. Do you see wings trembling
in a web?
Ivy: We
do.
They
are covered with dust.