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Michael Shorb
Autobiography of a Doorway
Molten horserace of history
Moss & skull transparency.
I've been there, felt
My bones
groaning into lumps of coal
Beneath the weight of people
Running, empires guttering
Cities descending into the granite
Abacus of earth.
Where's the payoff anyway?
I remember 1690 B.C. like yesterday.
Some entrepeneur brought the horse to Egypt.
A Mr. Hyksos. Later elected Pharoah.
Immortal.
We all stood around, sizing it up.
"Is it good to eat?"
"To ride."
"To war?"
"Wherever we choose."
"Shall we bow to it?"
"No, to me."
I walked through the heat of my cotton fields.
Twilight came. Clouds billowed.
"I'll go the the cafe tonight, see
The dancers. What's for supper?
Amorite pottery's going to the dogs.
We must deal with the Kush menace.
Need a new giraffe tail fly whisk.
Inflation is ruining this country."
Later that night I was hypnotized
By a bloodstream of coins
flowing from the dancers bellies
Years passed
lost my fields to locusts, got a job
Deciphering tides, smuggling
Algebras & spices to the barbarian
West, named wheelmaker & pimp
To the charioteers.
The big new act was Jezebel in Babylon:
Breasts to kill for,
Sawdust & a wine tasting of blackbirds.
She packed them in until dawn
Invading Persians planted
Yellow flax in her thighs
Hangers on invented
dice games & astrolabes.
Ah Babylon,
never was there such a city.
I am speechless in the terraced
Spectrum of your hanging gardens
Enflamed by the amber grace of your
Strolling women, I cross
Your teeming market square when
The first stars are visible
When the vegetal moan of peace
Pours forth in a profusion
Of pipes & strings
When the straw moviescreens of the priests
Of Baal
catch fire.
And far off, bitter as blood, the Elamite
Pretenders move in a bristle of spears.
Someone knocks me down in the rush
To escape by cart & water bead.
I am left behind in the sheeting, captive rain,
Enslaved by laughing, heavily-armored men.
They say its 650.
Elam
pierced & the fabled Susan arbors
Burning. They say the fierce faces
Of the Assyrian armies are enough
To make a person shit.
But life itself is ineffable to all this slashing.
Life is not fear but warm evenings
Light flowing over water, darkness
Carrying laughter and the smell
Of cooking, snakes & grapes & clay
Gods rising from their woven baskets.
550 B.C. was a time for contemplation.
Young Buddha in a grove at dusk, not overweight
Then, admiring the breasts of women
Leaning at the washing river, touched
By the cries of children, dazzled
By the speckled throats
of marsh larks and cranes.
We kept devising hungers & equations
Mounting our sails & horses on
Winds of myth
to beat back time & poverty
& the smell of our clothing.
We kept inventing:
variagated crops & geometries
Of hammered silver, grades
Of leather & gold, planets & stars
Moving faster & farther in
skies of our speculation.
And each ruler's got his own black dance.
Each king & gouger vomits back
His father's strutting fictions.
About 200 B.C.
This new one in China's
Building a wall longer than a mountain range, burning
The scrolls of knowledge previous.
Us he calls a term meaning
'Foreign ones,' or 'the dogs.'
I can bear up under your insults
Rich man, silk man, harem slaver.
I see through your erased parchments of assignation.
190. I sign on with Antiochus The Great
To invade India
during the spring thaw.
We clatter & burn fields & temples as we descend,
Storks & plowmen
stagger from fire-slashed
Flatland tapestries
old monks & toothless
Women clog the swollen rivers.
And all the while rain & death are the true kings.
When drought engineered a desert
From the bounty of the flood
We were driven west, drinking blood
Drawn from the veins of our ponies,
Fighting like cornered bears,
Ropemakers at the tongue of Jesus,
Blacksmiths forging
spears for the Roman Winter
Thieves & three-headed men
Hacking & stabbing our way into
The Age of the Great Collectors:
Followers of Charles the Fat, Charles the Hammer,
Charles the Bald.
Break out the wine & meat, we stopped
Atilla at Choulons,
danced & fucked & prayed
Tamerlane on the run,
bodies scorched, hung upside down
Dried heads on a stick, pressed
Pale olives for the mother of the world.
From Moscow to Baghdad we are the same fools,
Plundered & plunderers, grey men weeping
Over burnt scrolls, slave armies
Asleep
under crow-infested trees,
Bakers & hunters,
Judges & queens,
Singers on the dead run.
And they tell me that a man died in prison
Or a man laughed.
At a village wedding in
In village Greece or Luxembourg
The people wore white, resembling clouds
That a leg of lamb was roasted.
I am not amazed,
Will not move until they bring
The diamonds of life for everyone:
for you, pale blue
Father of collapsing stars,
For the Kurds in their refuge of stone
& the harp seal's children.
I am as involved, too, in the death grip
Of the isms as this child's shoe
Caught in the smoky currents of the Volga-
Potomac, as wind or light at play there.
Phylum brothers at Pentagon & Kremlin,
Old before you fade, hungry before you sleep,
I will you one of Caesar's eyeballs each,
The breastplate of Alexander, all the
Power in the world.
And please, try not to obliterate my will to sing
When you descend, great human sun.
You're only a crumpled picture of snow
Leopards at play, a density of smoggy concrete,
Last salmon or elephant
pigment splotch from my molten
Book of hoofprints, charming
For all your mines & smokestacks.
There is no love like mine for you.
We understand each other
Perfectly.
Copyright (c) Michael Shorb, 2005. All rights reserved.
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