Mappamundi of Henry III
“Go into the whole world and report back to the Senate on each continent.” Augustus
Let me make mistakes. I’ll mislabel Africa,
call it Europe, for instance. It can’t matter
in a thousand years. I’ll make some animals
to straddle the continents, some with fantastic horns,
some with hellsmouths to bracket Eden and the coast
of Ireland, to swallow the sailors who dare to test
these boundaries. I’ll assume this ocean filled
with blood. I will never bathe there. I will not taste
its salt on my lips or run my hand along the jagged rocks
at its shore. I have taken a handful of chalk and crumbled
it in a fist. A puff of white smoke slipped from my palm.
I was frightened of it, how easy it came apart, how
my hands were coated in white dust. It is not so firm
as I had thought, so I’ll put Crete in this sea of black paint,
Jerusalem, the axis of it all.
Let me know
when you get there if I was right, if I need to add a little something,
change, maybe, the shape of half a continent, add, maybe,
an ocean, a passage, a race of people, with mouths
that open an arm’s length or eyes in their hands. There is plenty
of paint left and room enough on this calfskin to paint all the details
of the world and some of the next, past the river that encircles us all.
When you return, keep knocking until I come to the door.
Listen for my voice. I may ask you to come inside yourself.
Bring some sketches of what you find there.
Dismal Swamp
for Max Roach
We’ll rely on rumors now, what someone said
you said, what someone wrote down to prove it.
The woods were dense and filled with smoke
and waters moving with rot, the smells that rose
like heated yeast, and every tree makes its own noise.
The forgotten put on clothes so they can be seen.
This one wears a shirt of old moss the color of tarnished
brass dusted with flour. Inside it hang the hands
of the strongest man, and they are too quick to see,
move when the mind moves and the mind moves
fast. They build a landscape that a bird flies through
and then take it down, and the moss shakes like
the nest of the first bird, petrified in grains of salt.
Who in the room is not a window? I can see the street
and the cars driving past. Freedom shakes every name
from its thing, and the silverware drawer resounds
with lost meaning. The history book grows soggy
in the dog’s mouth. I’ll buy a record and run my finger
along the vinyl grooves, and little dust from the cymbal
crash, a puncture wound from the snare hit. The bead of a stick
hit the high tom once, and that hit is worth a dime,
is worth a half inch of sky, and a string of notes is worth
a whole breath and the front consonant of a single heart beat.
This is a puppet show of jazz history, the Charlie Parker doll
is stuffed with saw dust and raw beef, the realistic fingers
move up and down his paper saxophone. his eyes are slow
so he can’t see, even if he were real, when the puppet of Max
behind the Tupperware drums slumps down like a glove
without a hand, forgetting to keep upright, forgetting the key
to the black door. Keep count now. This is the last note to count,
this wooden stick on the ride that rings like an open mouth.
