A Magazine of Many Arts

On every stair and fence and wall
icons and idols remind us of the fleshy
seed-stuffed bounty of our Goddess
during this her yearly festival
and sacred celebration.

Even in the chrome and marble foyer
see the altar loaded
with black and orange offerings
to Our Lady of the Winter Squash.
Our golden goddess feeds the world.

Give Her bones and blood
the best foods for the soil.
Please Her with images
of her sacred animals: crawly spiders
in massed grey webs

scattered with dry-sucked corpses,
flapping bats that feed on flowers, fruit
and blood,
and arch-backed cats
as fecund as the night.

When Tarot cards fail—
and the High Priestess
is brought low,
blue robes swelling like waves,
tumbling from her throne
that teeters atop the Tower’s edge,

While the Magician sinks, flailing his sword,
as he drowns in the Moon’s dark sea
amid his floating cup and white lilies
beneath nightmare wolves’ howls
and psychotic crabs clawing ashore—

When the brave lady tames the fierce lion—
but cannot save the Hanged Man from himself,
and the Star’s light is dimmed, restrained
by shadows cast from the Devil’s chains,

Then the gypsies close up their shabby shops,
and turn off the red neon signs.
Now bewildered by their clients’ fate lines
they return the $10 reading fee—
explaining they can no longer see;
even their crystal balls are now cloudy.

When the runes are a ruin, and
prognostication by stars, entrails,
clouds, leaves, and birds all fail:

Then we must reconstitute the storm
for the homeless last fay—
confer with them to restore the lost chaos,

Invite the young sibyls from their caves
listen to what they say,
ask them to show their unburned prophetic books to us.

Turn off all cellphones and electronic devices.
Light candles for all dead and future goddesses.

Coax the silenced waters of Delphi’s mountain
to flow with cryptic answers again.

-1-

She veils the eyes of the prophets
and coalesces from the night
profound, meaningful

the flames of her pupils
cool to auburn and seductive
— whirl — in a desert of her making
and they move her closer to that goal
though she cannot say her master’s name

or point him out to us
with the certainty of a stargazing priest
in the city, which has so many names,
masters and minarets, so many priests,
so many calls to prayer
vying for the souls of the faithful.

She slips past the guards
in silence; they smile
and do not search her —
her naked body. What does she have
to conceal? Some flaw, perhaps

a voice like breaking glass? thoughts
inane and childish? a deluge of chatter
to extinguish love’s torpid cinders
after the fact? No matter.

They laugh and speak of their master
wishing they were him, to have

what he has: the power
to draw such beauties to his bed
and shut them up, night after night

-2-

Their qareen shriek a warning, nails
piercing into — through — the souls
of the watchful guards, those wardens
unable to hear the whispers given in sleep
when so wide awake.

-3-

The tent is a palace inside
heaped with bolts of silk and satin, a box
of gold filigree with billowing clouds of platinum,
a heaven of gemstones sequestered within.

Their master smokes hashish from a hookah
and speaks of the prophets — men and women —
who come to him every night as he sleeps
on the same bed that he’d love to share
with her. “Are they always right?” she asks,
drawing a shebriya from her mouth. He thinks
this a wonderful trick, and tells her so.

“Are the prophets not at times silent?” she
whispers, revealing another trick
of the blade.

The guards outside fail to hear him,
or they mistake his dying gasp
for one of pleasure. She, enticing Sila,
leaves in the dawn as she arrived;
they only smile as she walks away,
naked and unashamed.

-4-

Qareen stand over him
and disturb his mirroring pool
with tears of corundum and of jade

illustration is Salome by Manuel Orazi, 1930

My patron impresses paramours
with moon shards dappled in 24-karat gold
and fashioned into pendants
for fawn-colored necks, diadems to adorn
black brows smooth as glass.
But for his favorite fucks
celestial jewelry is not enough—
my patron demands poetry of me,
sinuous verses that ensnare emotion,
binding his beauties to him better
than any promise ring or
diamond-crusted chastity belt.
A disgusting seduction
but one I’m obligated to perform
or end up fighting
alley cats for scraps.
Only, my patron’s mining operations
harrow the source of my lyrics.
Poetry is a refraction,
a transmutation of moonlight
(itself a reflection of sunlight).
The moon he’s wrought, hanging like
a chipped saucer in the night,
conjures no more magic than
the broken crockery on my kitchen shelf.
Though I’ve explained the effects
of his brutal lunar harvest,
the scales of his eyes aren’t calibrated
for the subtle calculus
of art and heart.
Accused of disloyalty, sloth, and
breach of contract, I stalk
his moon-embellished lovers,
struggling to distill the secondhand light
to pen a last, paltry sonnet and escape
into the plundered night.

Illustration is View of Constantinople by Ivan Constantinovich Aivazovsky, 1876

You stitched your clothes with feathers.
Hitched your unwinged self
over the cliff-side dripping with guano
for the harvest of birds.

Gannets and guillemots and gulls,
fulmars, snipe, bonxies, plovers and puffins
and the pterodactyl skuas
fastening you to the stony ground

to the gray bounds of sea and sky.
Trusting your life not to slip.
Invaded by good mainland intentions
that undermined everything.

What need for windows in stone houses
when the view was not rare—
you lived your life in and out of it.
Tamp out the peat fire and hobble

away. A thousand hard and airborne years
broken by the world that is not this place.
Not peat, not stone, not the track
made by sheep. Abandon the tight Cs

of the cleits, the storehouses
dotting the slopes cairn-like,
planted obsessively against the travails
of sea and sky and starvation,

vented to let the wind
keep the contents dry
so the constant rain wouldn’t rot
everything that kept you breathing.

The walls thicker than the space
they contain. Part nature, part culture
both parts alive. The mystery now
inside the clinging, vacant Cs,

always in sight of the sea
sometime shelter for the wild-now sheep
often their last. This is the world
your ancients built and time muddles

to tumbles of eroding stones erasing
the marks of human hands till no one
can read how it dies and is dead. Clouds
wool-heavy on the hills so empty of you.

photo is “Cleit for storing fuel or hay on St Kilda” by Richard Keaton, Dec. 31, 1897.