CM Clark

Desert Odyssey:
A Song of Distance

Prologue
I am a thief of words.
I secretly hide in the dusty folds of caravans
(Between the silks and cloth of gold)
As they move trance-like through unmapped country,
Pushing on towards new grasslands
And salvageable wells of sweet waters.
Here the lurching chaos of forward movement
Halts to replenish dwindling flasks,
Trading worm-eaten weavings for sweet local mead.
These nomads rest only to sacrifice the flock’s best
To a kingdom of insatiable gods,
And at night, filling bushels with new-mowed grain
(And new images for me while their attention is diverted).

I incarnate here, your best disciple.
I steal their souls with each encoded line.
No wonder their dreams summon headless wanderers
Tilling sterile soil where no plants grow.
But the breadcrumb trail of words
Laid furtively behind the slowest wagon
Is my only lifeline back
And my only plumb-line into those wild depths
Where you drift
Waiting for me.

Lost somewhere in central Asia,
You have departed.
And now, seasons later,
The distance stretches sky-deep
With the desert’s bloody sunset.
Black night and shocking stars,
Unrecognizable constellations thick with allure
Entice me to follow their languid glide.
And by dawn, the promise of our mango tree grove
Becomes all appetite,
Impossible to envision here, though,
In this morning world of whirling white.

The Mango Tree Grove Episode
I remember the acres of mangoes
Shading the baked ground in our territory.
Despite the dense heat and the cloying headache
Of ripened fruit already fallen,
The trees hung heavy with grateful shade
And burgeoning fullness.
There we reveled and played
An athletics of enchantment
To see whose magic scored more deeply,
More memorably inscribing
A logarithm of touch
And translucent seduction.
Unacknowledged by the onlooking naked eye,
And recognized only in passion’s twenty-four-hour atelier,
We thrived in the homeland of the midnight sun.

In those days, the hermit kept to himself,
And the sacred grove displayed its favors to us alone.
Impossible tapestries we fashioned
Laying each line in nimble gesture.
Our silent partners, the blushing mangoes,
Offered themselves freely, no pleasure forbidden.
Some still maturing in violet and plum,
Some already full-term magenta,
A gratifying burst concealed within each tightly drawn skin.
Each a jeweled pendant of savored sweet.
Another detail for the work.
Another balm for the hunger,
And succulence for our appetite.

The hermit’s cave ran west along the rising river.
We loitered east, here where there was abundance,
And reclined tree by tree, hidden,
Our lazy intentions germinating in the dappled light.
And somewhere inside those thick-set branches
You disappeared.
I am a thief of words.
But you are a thief of souls.

The Episode of the Oasis and the Water
Now the tribe convenes.
A nameless oasis where clusters of date palms
Reflect shadowless in mirages of illusory pools
On the windward side of the salt mountain.
Refugees from the onslaught of the barbarian conqueror,
The slow-moving trains configure safe circles
For roasting meats
And for anonymous women with braided hair.

I infiltrate their reveries,
And secretly scan each dusty face for signs of your presence.
Any recollection behind their sunstruck eyes –
Some retinal memory –
That you had somewhere along the way
Insinuated their field of view.
I have no pity, though. No hope.
A vagabond by persuasion,
Like them, another orphaned exile
Living on the margins of the world’s desert roof.
Once fleeing what I loved,
Now dizzy with thirst,
And rushing with the flying desperate dust
Towards it.

In the center of this far-reaching plain on the road to Cathay
Where a high wind erases all traces of movement,
The tribe trades for sandalwood oil,
And by night, invokes spirits to make their idols sing.
To the tune of a twelve-tone scale,
They invent a language of their own,
As thick darkness descends
And the gudderi musk perfumes their fires.

With the dusk on the last day of the holy moon’s waning,
They disperse.
At the desert’s threshold again,
A beckoning inland sea tempts drowners
With the sibilant hiss of sand and wave,
Whispering psalms of redemption to the faint of heart.
Into these ancestral waters the source Euphrates empties
(The source of the silk called ghilan),
The liquid pulse of wind and tide calling
The mad, the despairing,
Those wrung naked from their lives
Defenseless. Merciless assassins,
And apprentice hangmen,
Accomplished soothsayers and crooked cloth dealers.
I am at home amid these devil’s henchmen.
My story is silent. I am a stranger, too.
I can lie with the best of them.

The Sand Storm Episode
All the next day, the sand storm rages,
And between the heaving bouts of blinding dust
I choke down any air unthickened
With pulverized rock and deconstructing bones.
In that atomic swirl
Where delineations of horse and human and horizon melt,
The violent assemblage of silica assumes shapes of its own,
Geared to the nightmare rush of everything desired,
Everything most dreaded.

The barbarian’s form looms grandiloquent.
Ten thousand years of cave paintings at Lascaux,
Petroglyphs in the painted desert
Belie his subhuman growlings.
Violent and magnificent, he poisons the wine,
Infects the traipsing beasts of burden,
Burns the sand beneath our feet.
I am in league with his destruction, though,
And offer my tainted, criminal flesh
To mitigate his vengeance.
He will have none of it.
My humiliation is complete.
Sucking the will to go on
With the marrow from my bones,
He reverts back to the shadows of whirlwind sand
Trailing blood words in his wake.
In the ebb of such fury, I collect these fragments,
Shards of granite and glass,
Broken chips of dreams and history.
If this storm ever ends,
If I ever enter its eye,
I will reassemble with imperfect grace
The rose window at Chartres
Commemorating my survival.

Pressing blindly toward Khan-balik, the wagons limp forward.
But fractured wheels and cracked axles
Dull all hope of eastward progress.
Spice jars overturned,
Crushed south-sea pearls and shattered carnelian,
A disaster of pepper and curry staining the hard-won silks,
All now worthless, ensures our suffering.
Neither water nor wine can cure my thirst.
My throat slashed, silence speaks
The futility of ever finding you alive.

In the murderous residual glare of the storm subsiding,
I’ve gone blind.
The dust has swallowed my eyes,
And the wind has fractured the sun.
Parabolas and trapezoidal darts cavort
In geometric death-dance,
A pulsating frenzy of migraine apocalypse.
But within the shattered, collapsing helixes
A parallel dimension of line and space opens in bas relief.
Signposts in an alphabet unknown and unfamiliar landmarks
Awake the premonition of a world beyond
All that insufferable light,
The tender dream of a new country.

The Episode of the White Flowers
The sky fades to grey,
And the wake of blunt wind and sand’s blast
Retreats westerly back to the desert’s dead core.
Without one merciful glimpse of you now –
My passion and poison equally purged –
This odyssey must inscribe its final line
Here in the desolate sand,
Laid to earth in sheer exhaustion,
And all my words, stolen and contrived,
Will find their erasure
When the breezes pick up again
At sunset.

In the liminal edge between sleep and waking
Upon entering the first frontiers of Kinsai,
A maze of storm-stripped limbs quickens with secret life,
As in fair April in my world of trees
When lilacs first sweeten the air.
The moment coheres in time and space
With indefinable coordinates, mesmerizing contours,
And brave daylight brings an impossible fruition
To my age-old longing.

In the opening of a thousand ghostly flowers
You take shape disassembled, holographically,
Elementally here among these miraculous plants.
Such stunning relief,
Such bittersweet food for my long fast,
Your collection of fragments embodying randomly
In the dewy heat of blooming translucence.
In one sharp bouquet,
Your eyes like Burmese teak warmed by the desert winds,
Edged with a dangerous profusion of lash,
A million minute sparks of punctuation and emphatic assurance,
Accenting an alchemical mystery I remember so well.
You.
The one of my empowered dreams.
The curator of my work.
My custodian and gatekeeper.
Collector and protector
Of the wild ravings of my wild heart.

In yet another, your hands,
Beautifully drawn in each elegant stem,
Sculpted marble articulating primal shapes in the air --
Delicious sorcery --
Phosphorescent arcs of light trailing your gestures,
Ultraviolets of sensation,
Infrareds of touch, an ethereal eroticism,
Imagined and intuited,
A bounty of heat and impossible closeness,
A sublime eradication of the much-suffered distance.
Now,
You are here.

And then like white rustlings from the lily-white petals,
Your words whisper in my enamored innermost ear,
Bringing spring-green riot to my desert life.
Bewitching and enchanting, you charm my reluctance,
And like a sleepwalking angel, I decompose
Invisibly into your invisible, intangible arms.

By midday, when shadows become bleached again
By the sun grown sky-wide,
The white flowers wither
Among their mint-laced singing leaves,
Taking with them the mirage delights I have cherished
All along the delicate morning’s delicate dreams.
The fragrance of this fineness lingers,
Remembered beyond impossible odds,
And linked forever to me metabolically.
The foundational surety of my phoenix life,
My ash-ascending words
That live to journey unceasingly
Seeking their true subject.

Epilogue
A trader from Ceylon reports strange tidings
Carried on the wings of his peregrine falcons.
He has seen you at the window of your hermit’s tower,
With spiraling incense trails accompanying your midnight wanderings,
And the longings you bury inside.
Now I am the one lost.
And you nourish neither the will
Nor the inclination
To follow me.

In my recurring dream of the angry sand,
I am here in the desert still,
The tribe’s initiate now
And self-appointed scribe.
And in the incurable fevers that precede dawn,
I am wrestling an army of luminous angels
To surrender to my hands
(Hands that would as soon caress you
As write another word)
The words I now need.
If they are given to me, I will accept them.
If not, I will steal them if I must.
I am a thief of words.
I appropriate signs and wonders.
You are the muse of my songs.
But you are the thief of my soul,
Caretaker of that ever-deepening distance
That lives on only to separate
The one I am
From the one you might become.

In Principio Erat Verbum

(“As do certain kabbahlistic meditations, so Sufism knows of a ‘sadness’ at the secret source of creation, that of the unrevealed Maker experiencing His own hiddenness.”
– George Steiner, Grammars of Creation)

The mounting virus, the ascending panic,
The sinking swallowed words dead in the throat.
My illness has become lethal now,
A terminal blight, and the small voice I hear
Whispers, “Six months left,”
As if months were minutes
And the pyre’s flames already greedy
With their hunger for this human husk.
The time for cure is past,
And seeking the alleyways of the desperate,
In a musty tent one moonless midnight,
I dared to summon the medicine woman
From her shelves of smoke and ash,
To paliate the death-rattle.
Her prognosis was unflinching.

“Holy language is the body cleansed and simplified.
The sanctified relic of restless material stilled.
When applied with patience and reverence, gentle-handed,
Your mind’s high-wire choreographies
Will be nailed in high ceremony
To the crossbars of the letter,
Your ludicrous antics then stripped
Of their peeling toxic paint,
The residual scar tissue
That clutters the scaffolding of vision clarified,
Suffering recollected,
A deadening limp that survives the fall,
Pain that returns with the damp weather.
When ingested twice nightly
With sacramental doses of starlight and sky-washed indigo,
Brave language will polish the rough ropings
Of overstretched heart,
Soothing the inflammations that chronically persist,
Swollen abortive dreams, sighing lungs,
Wounds that heal, and re-open on cue
In the stasis between lines.
When disappointment becomes the law of the hard fatherland,
The economy of a cruel justice
Practiced for the privileged and the smug,
Only sweet language, the mother tongue,
Will neutralize the snake-bite’s venom.
Strong medicine
Willing the ineffable into being.”

But where within the dull symmetries
Of my anesthetized cuneiform
Can inspired tracings rise,
When raw matter sprawls in riot?
The saddening tenor of vacant, cloudless day,
Empty stairways drained like pools of your departed presence,
Demographics of liminal spirits and walking phantoms.
When day is a slick narrative in real-time
That slides through the cracks of closed doors,
Down clogged storm grates littered with leaves,
Crowds of ghosts drifting within the painted parameters
Of some ill-drawn crosswalk.
In what shadow-world will my words swell to prayer
When vague shapes enter and exit
With your profile, another overheard conversation
With your voice, the met glance of a stranger
With your eyes
Who is never you.

You arise from the blotted remnants of deleted old lines,
An enigmatic aggregate of images incognito
Stated and implied.
On any given day, when wisps of remembered phrases
Join to collate
The passing remarks of three friends out to lunch,
A solitary girl whispering love-words on a cellphone,
Two co-workers churning homeward on a commuter train,
Heady with the relief that comes
With five o’clock on a Friday.

Relief comes to see you coalesce
In the nouns and verbs that crystallize
On the page.
A quick flip of pen peels back the code
That reveals and conceals
Layer by layer to unveil the quicksilver flesh
Lying dormant beneath the scrawling scratches.
An unseen hand guides mine, and each just phrase
Pushes on, igniting dead hope
That just one more apt trick of tongue
Will catalyze the cells of inert language
And galvanize you to life.
In the dulled solitude marked by starless night,
You materialize
And the words that pulse through my blood
And pour out in blue profusion
Carry your heart’s inflections,
The subtle cadences of your idiom,
Your peerless poetics.

Yet to touch you in that fine old wordless way
Will not be mine,
Nor intoning the timeless chant of flesh,
The rhyming accents of sweet brush
Of skin on skin.
The soundless melodies of loving fingertips
Tracing the miraculous shape
Of one human hand,
One curved shoulder,
One defined line of body and bone.
To reach you with that simple unlearned gesture
Will never make its way to my list of splendors.
To meet you in the park on a weekday afternoon
After the scavengers of hungry experience
Have abandoned their play-yard and head home,
Leaving us alone with the sky and the setting sun.
These humble human mysteries
Will never be included in my scrapbook of glories.
In words only will you come to life for me
Three-dimensionally,
Sitting here sharing my blanket on the sand
Now,
Or in the rain here under this lilac trellis.
Only in words will we hold hands and be silent
Everything implicit and understood.
Only in words will stillness reverberate,
Our wordless song of perfect music,
Our perfect heaven of perfect sympathy,
Where no words are necessary.

Here in this unfinished Eden
Of inarticulate disorder,
With broken garden gates and barren trees,
The words are most needed
To re-tune the faulty instruments
Designed for lyrics of praise.
To fertilize the struggling plantlife,
And to remove the unsightly weeds
That mar the overgrown flowerbeds.
Though often inadequate and tragically incomplete,
Words only can conjure the hidden footpath
That leads me home to you again,
My Paradise regained.

The flesh inscribed is language realized,
As when Van Gogh separated his ear from his body
To mark the exponentially expanding chasm
That broke between the high cliffs of his love
And the insidious caves where love hid.
A cartilaginous testament to the power of symbolism,
An eloquent inscription that spoke louder than weeping,
More potently than paint knifed in great wedges
Onto a canvas not nearly wide enough
To swallow his pain.

When I loved them,
I scored lines with no words on my arm
With the hand that writes,
One for each death,
For each melted dream,
To bring the external body world into brutal symmetry
With the interior destruction.
The collapse of fragile young towers
Of bone and paper mache.

When I loved him,
Scars engraved both legs
From sailing too far out on the jetty,
The coral’s blood lust sucking my life dry
To the bone.
I was left with a flesh and blood rose
That blooms every winter,
A souvenir on my left ankle,
The beauty of the truth,
Full-flesh encoding of a fool’s failure.

When I loved them,
Each line on my face,
The corners of my eyes,
A tearful tantrum, a cold back turned,
The deeper scars lining my arteries and veins
And ventricles, and the warm home
Under my heart where they lived
For nine months, the birth canal
That released them from my grasp.

When I loved you,
Each starburst of epistemological disappointment,
The ferocious impossibility laser-sharp
Inscribes me with each progressing line,
Imprinting hieroglyphics of the longed-for link
To the mysterious core
In a shadow alphabet which can only be read backwards,
A moonlight mirror-writing reflecting in my eyes,
Illegible under the sun,
The perfect sadness,
Whenever your words travel
Leaving the warmth of your hand
And build their nest next to mine
On the page.

The muted sadness completes the sentence.
Written in the flesh
Spoken with the breath,
A linguistic conjunction
Mediating between matter and spirit,
Mother earth and father sky,
The infinite potential of language
To close the circle.
Sweet language,
The holy, hidden epiphany.

All creation issues from the same ritual darkness.
The one-time, first-heard voice shattering the rock silence,
The restless, vigilant void
That rumbles before the beginning
And after the hypothetical end.
It is from that turbulent dungeon-world
I uproot subterranean images,
Petrifying tools of patience and torture,
Draughts of cure.
Ghostly gestures barely born of conscious thought,
More of gore and marrow, illusion and potential,
Brought to surface reckoning
Into sweet language, sweet light.

Even God wrung life from a primordial dark well,
His breath roaming the deep
Until spirit coalesced as word
And that word was light.
The unfinished Paradise, God incomplete,
Dwelling in the image of creatures forthcoming
In the syntactical arrangement of seasonal uprising
And year-end expiring.
In the grammar of plant-life
The seeds of an untold future
Lying dormant with the dead stalks,
The crushed exhilaration of flowering,
The genius of night sky,
And an orbiting twin to wax and wane.
The economy of heedless youth,
The longing heart, the desirous flesh,
The lexicon of age, the devolution of fading appetite.
A poetics of seduction, a rhetoric of surrender.
All willed within the breath spoken at last,
To complete the deific desire for company,
In the simple joy of day unfolding,
The wordless wonder in my heart’s darkness,
Breaking the surface into the dialect of my creation:
The incarnation of you.
Your name’s tattoo autographed in my flesh,
A flash of heat lightning in the night sky of summer,
The apocalypse of my long silence,
The genesis of my voice,
Your music on my page.

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© 2004 by CM Clark