Issue 1, Winter 2007

Twilight Vision ¹
by Stephen David Engel

[1]

Follow the exit to the end of the road² and take the crooked stairwell until you find a flush-faced hustler and pea-brained peddler plucking grapes from the rooftops of Gethsemane,³ cocks⁴ who swallowed counterfeit clocks singing hope at noon, soap-boxers in drab cells gripping socks and waving them wildly, or the house of lonely souls yowling down the sun, because the tenants have no chickens, because twilight excites madmen,⁵ or beacon-keepers, yellow raincoats adrift in the rain, pacing and smiling, counting and coughing, looking for the key to an unlocked attic, burying pelicans in the yard, the yard where father died, where mother shot him, or discarded heirs basking under the saturnine skies of who-knows-how-the-hell-we’ve-come-or-where-we-belong. Take the exit to the end of the road until you can no longer bear the burden of your own shell, so you strip your covers to face a woven cage of penumbras, a boy sucking at the core of eve’s apple,⁶ shucking oysters but finding no pearls, muttering an absurd, deplorable euphemism. So be it.

They build their walls with oyster shells here. No wonder they are so brittle, and my feet so fickle about which alley to take. I went diving for pearls once but there were none, no pearls to be found, not down there—only sand, sand and wind,⁷ sand and wind and a blind adolescent chopping coconuts, spilling half the milk to swallow a drop, wondering by what ludicrous mathematics he’d sprung, and when, at what hour, he’ll die.

The fall could have been expected, not the cross-eyed idiot that resulted. Chalk it up to the throes of spring. It ain’t no devil. I lost three moons where the road curves to end in a gully, where Venus⁸ misplaced her rings, where the stars are onyx and the fields asphodels⁹, where the rebel summoned blast after blast, lash after lash, clap after clap with his fiery imprecations.¹⁰ Chalk it up to the throes of spring, the winter light, the evening tide, the rose on the thornbush.¹¹ The devil’s got nothing on me.

[2]

Kneeling between clay-flats and archetypical heavens,¹² between keystones and cracks, between circles and spheres and three-headed dogs,¹³ between a horoscopic notebook smelling of incense and the ill-starred orchestra producing its note, between smoke and smoke crystallized, between a velvet curtain set fire and an operating table hosting a querulous patient. Between alterity, analogy and a landscape of wind, my brother sucks his thumb.

Several agonies later ,¹⁴ by the water well, a tormented author calculates the anatomy of the angel, a mantis¹⁵ stitched to his finger. The promethean surgeon died of frostbite. The would-be beast bows its cloud crowned figure. The man manqué nurses his sour wounds, clenching a green rose between his teeth. O my soul, purple petals spilled over tile. Tomorrow the door will be knocked by a stranger’s knuckles and it will swing open upon a ghostly body in from the dry night with a solitary raindrop on the wrist¹⁶. The raindrop will contain a man like myself several agonies later, by the water well, tormented and calculating the anatomy of the angel, gripping a top-heavy chalice, stalking the window of a has-been priest and plotting his execution. The priest will be rolling a rosary that my son, good carpenter, reified at daybreak. The priest will be praying for the spirit of Judas Iscariot, gripping the ankle of a two-legged table on its side. He’ll claw at his chest, fussing at the lock on the liquor cabinet, giving up to find his revolver. Tomorrow there will be black sails and prophecies of armageddon printed neatly on a napkin. Tomorrow a tortured cartographer slices paper, stunned by the liquid preoccupying his thought¹⁷, adjusting his spectacles and smoothing out that precise, honest mirror, the works of his hands. There are no replicas, he’ll say tomorrow, when the meticulous clockmaker winds his cuckoos and bangs out a jovial tune on the upright piano before bed, when an old ailing woman drinks from the red bottle at her bedside, the one with her name on its label, the first name last and the last name first, the one with the yellow syrup, from a white plastic spoon. She’ll watch leeches soak in a jar under the sterile light of a sterile lamp, drifting into reveries of two-legged tables on their sides. Tomorrow I’ll have a fever dream, a two-legged table on its side. Tomorrow you sister will be raped in a room with a two-legged table on its side and you will be too weak to prevent it. O my soul, she will say tomorrow, two-legged tables on their sides. Tra-la-la, yup-yup, two legged-tables on their sides. Down the hall, between despoiled salt and swarms of bees,¹⁸ in an impossible room, entranced, tuning my obstreperous lyre—Tantalus¹⁹ drowned in honey.²⁰ You are who you are you are who you are you are who you are a tragedian for all fucking time.

Between being and death there is a distal doorway. Between death and resurrection there was rain and forgetting and marrow on pavement, where bulbous lights dangle above the promenade, wending crooked paths through the trees, where the restaurants fill with bodies, chatter and laughter, where the stars refract into unaddressed, untwinkling points, where barristers howl like pistol shots and pinwheels, where the simple cleric removes his cap to wipe his tears. The analogue spins rapidly. You are who you are, I am as I’m not,²¹ and zero is nowhere to be found. It must be under the table, or in the sock drawer. The automated peasant and masked prince lowered from the ceiling by who knows and spat upon by the chorus and the victim, on the table whining, next to a tray of knives wet with hot saliva, his vermilion blood, and the oil running from his joints. Did you hear my funny voice? O my soul, purple petals spilled over tile.

The siren drones, the judges scowl, the guillotine drops. Angels blow whistles until blushing with exhaustion. Killers feast on the chosen one, smacking their lips, picking their teeth, wiping fingers on their shirtsleeves. A god-awful massacre, horrified prophets lined up on the temple steps, marched to the outer gates and wiped out one by one as their loved ones sob entreatingly for the butchers to cease. O my soul, purple petals spilled over tile. Peel your eyes, children. Did you see my dark complexion? Did you hear my funny voice? I murdered the jailer and roasted his bones, and my incarcerated spirit paddled its fists against the metaliferous bars and they bled, purple petals spilled over tile.

Time has made me murder my sons. The present has wedded. It cries to the bone. I’m punished for impiety, the high-hollering captain sickle-slashing my mattress, scouring the springs for a sunken crown,²² the angel, that perfidious trickster who painted my face, pounding down the gates of Dis, busting hinges with my heels, knowing once and for all the throes of succession. We’ll forget about it tomorrow, they used to say, but my brother sucked his thumb.

[3]

Polluted by curfew light, by sick green and sicker blue bled together, a quiet room with clean floors and a porcelain basin, fine sheets and a threadbare mattress. The room takes an inmate, a bespectacled stranger with a dull brown suitcase, a barefoot cripple with delicate features, thin petticoat and penchant for logic, whetting the tip of his quill with his tongue—pencils are hard to come by, we use what we have—beginning in the margin and jotting between scriptures, “We sailed across the world until we found it inexact, and even then we couldn’t bring ourselves to admit it. Half missing, we crept on all fours. We took the elevator to every level, every other level, every third level, and so on. We poked our heads into every hall, checking all the numbers on all the doors, every other number, every other door, every third number, every third door, and so on. The numbers are irrelevant. Don’t ask me. Don’t ask me. Don’t ask me why. We walked looted avenues, immersed in the ether no longer sound, nor sanitary. That was after the firmament crashed, after the chains tightened, after the bubble burst, after atlas dropped the ball the banister broke and the house came down. We suffer by identity. That’s why I answered neither. I’m a child of the age.²³ Nothing more. Nothing less. There will be no second coming. The first was a sham.”

Several cockcrows later he lifts his head.²⁴ Twilight hasn’t budged. Roth hangs blinds to view the world through their recesses, to catch a few winks here and there, because too much gloaming makes mad, because none means his absence. But a letter under the door orders him to desist. He complies without delay. “Nausea. Nausea is come again.²⁵ There’s no lock on the door but I can’t leave. I wouldn’t. The stairwell’s broken and there’s no way to the street. I’m sentenced to a disoriented window. Morning or evening—take your pick. It shows moons, only moons—flat, unsophisticated, static moons. There must be another way to the stars.”

The floorboards creak. A drawer opens. Nothing, nothing of great import, just a blank calendar and some scraps of butcher paper, a handful of receipts and some sheet music made illegible by time. “What else?” writes Roth, remembering music, the quartet²⁶ that played in the garden at the fin de siecle,²⁷ after a bomb went off in the subway and the people fled into the streets, evacuating down the alleys, climbing fire escapes and jumping from tenement houses, crashing into the pavement, waking up and saying how dreadful, how weird, how fortunate to have fallen,²⁸ building altars and refusing them, opening dictionaries to look up dictionary, slaughtering innocents²⁹ in search of a messiah but snubbing him at the party, likening themselves to angels and meteors, beasts and machines, worms and diseases, insects and mushroom clouds, “everything they’re not, everything they’ll never be.³⁰ One gets lost in so many similes, shorthand for world, serious but laughable, laughable but serious world, depending on the hour, or the agony. One gets lost in this ensemble of cauliflowers, garbage cans,³¹ spent atoms and fireflies, this under-clothed meridian of pastels and bare breasts and anesthetized whores recumbent on sofas. The world’s made of lists, and I don’t know who I am. I’m no Gabriel or Lucifer. I’m no Virgil or Dante.³² But I’ve lots of feathers. There must be another way to the stars.”

The floorboards creak. A drawer opens. A correspondence or twelve in a language he can’t decipher. Roth tosses back the bundle and slams it in, wipes his glasses and replaces them, remembering “an incredulous youth holed up in gray quarters, a saturnalian by-blow of the ninth order,³³ mind on fire and soiled with chlorophyll. The frowning inkfish jots in a notebook, swapping bread for stones,³⁴ wine for marbles, changing dust to slag and ashes to ink, betraying the word that fed him, the fiend who mocked him, listening to the ghost of god play the viola. He’s losing his hair. It’s all over the page. Artificial, obese birds eclipse his favorite star. That’s irony for you. That’s verse for you. That’s unrequited love. Her body convulsing on the washroom floor at the fin de siecle, after we copulated on the counter. After we fucked. After I bit her shoulder and she my nipple. We broke down the door, too, and flooded the street. I kissed six women at the fin de siecle. While she, or a nymphet resembling her, fell into the arms of a jerk who defiled her. I watched from across the checkered floor, through the confetti, beneath a heaven of fireworks, amidst the smoke and chatter. The fin de siecle opened its eyes on a too-bright circle of lights and a too-loud band of buglers. A son was born at the piacular strokes of midnight.³⁵ It drowned by morning.”

The floorboards creak. A drawer opens. An orange ticket ripped in half beside a light bulb with a black smudge, Nazareth’s fingerprint, wrapped in the handkerchief of a portly comedian laughed to death by a cadre of ruthless practitioners and their jolly, fat wives squawking over his perspiring brow and the ugly carnation³⁶ in his lapel, a good-luck present from his petite, unfunny sweetheart—the last to see Peniel³⁷ before he fled and a remarkable seamstress—fished from the river³⁸ and buried yesterday, taken with child and a white comb in her tousled hair.³⁹ Hearing the news, the comedian dialed the operator and asked her to love him. When she refused, he called up the local matador to ask if he could stand in for a match, because he’d always wanted to go down heroically. “Sorry chap, you’d rip my pants,” to which the comedian replied, “I like those pants, I really do,” and hung up.⁴⁰

[4]

Myself and two fisherman stuck on a rock, but as soon as my pen starts counting, the inimical picture takes on all the aspects of a havoc house, where a sinister couple pounds nails into the closet, while the other makes a slouching figure⁴¹ on the concrete slab they call the porch, gobbling yellow fruit. The mango, for this creature, contains more majesty than any abstraction, a bitterness trumping all idols. I love it, because mango is manna enough. Entering to bathe, Peniel finds gaunt objects crowding a barren house and wiry choristers shrieking overtures to black horizons and a mummer swinging from the ceiling. In the smallest room, a buzzard clad in a black shawl hops on one foot, spinning thread, calling scriptures of death. Departs Peniel—alone, fixing his eyes before his feet,⁴² fleeing murmurous sounds and horrific sights—darting through the garden to the side of the house where, on the cellar door, he fixes blood and a branch of hyssop.⁴³ Peniel goes under.

[5]

Don’t slip on the ice,⁴⁴ yells the guide, from up the circuitous shaft. You’re only vapor,⁴⁵ vapor and parchment, parchment and proems, a stranger⁴⁶ come by syllogism⁴⁷ from island to island, chamber to chamber, pelted by hail, by limp but emblazoned fireflies falling headlong from the beclouded levels of heaven,⁴⁸ from firmament to firmament and finally cascading into these gray, confused quarters, leaving bright entrails but plummeting with brighter figureheads—exiled angels, dismembered harpies, screeching valkyries and moths—issued forth by the blow of his hand.⁴⁹ Black birds are drinking from the river. The cities are burning. Your beauty, it melts like a moth.⁵⁰

On the banks,⁵¹ a spat of laurelled toddlers rolls in the muck, sighing prisoners expecting the chair, gathering marcesant flowers with their grubby hands, biting ankles and throwing stones.⁵² The narrator chuckles. No monuments here, only suitcases, empty suitcases, chalk-lined faces and empty suitcases. Grief with a plow. Your destruction everywhere. Your death-signs without death. Your slaughtered lambs and doorsteps, and the angel of death, everybody’s favorite angel. Your impressive buglers, doubled over, blowing with all their might without achieving a peep. Your genesis thunder,⁵³ and birth’s a sausage grinder for those who weren’t there to witness the origin of stars, the newlywed fires singing and blazing in apartment complexes or nuthouses or chalets. Shake the piano until the keys fall off, and bless the smirking blacksmith who forged all these masks and molds and labyrinthine grids of mawkish delights, his throat swallowing down the twilight, gulping green salt water, a drowning musician wrapped up in the chords of his instruments bubbling and bursting with bloodcurdling screams for oxygen.

Shine the light on us. We know our calling. Shine the light on us. Our seeds are sown. The gallery is open, and packs of wolves are calling at the gate, circling the walls, killing goats in the yard, the yard where father died, where, charged for treason, they shot him. The noose is lowered from the hangman’s starry sky and tallow villains tip toe down hallways, gripping wrists of startled progeny abducted from their beds as their guardians snore upon their thrones, maculate with cum. The universe is weak in the ankles, and puckering girls are kissing the neon wings of moths. The universe is weak in the ankles, a frozen light bulb glued to the ceiling. And the man cried to the light, you always fucking do this, turning off on me. And to the darkness, festering in this rude chapter of imbeciles and creeps, to the darkness, the gallery is open but I can’t find the keys. They tossed me into a padded cell because they couldn’t stand the sight of our shade-drawn but awe-filled terrors of creation. With each step taken towards the light the further it recedes. You shoot better in the dark.

There’s nothing left to say but goodnight, harping at his shadow on the bluest night the world has ever seen, casting lots on the sand, ransacking hallways and smashing knobs locking doors to the stars with his head. Goodnight. Goodnight. Sweet, unapologetic goodnight. When you’re after me, when you’ve come looking, ask the poet, ask the messenger, ask the draftsman where I’ve gone. They’ll point with broken fingers towards the lion’s den. They’ll point with broken fingers towards the promised land. They’ll point with broken fingers towards dented doorways covered with blood, and the coat check closet behind the masquerade ball, and the carpet stalls filled with cool breezes, towards frozen lakes,⁵⁴ smashed mirrors and icicles. Towards the stone walls of Byzantium,⁵⁵ and if we’re lucky, Nineveh.⁵⁶ Bless this handiwork,⁵⁷ this copper miracle, this rusty fire that knows future without past, rampaging without regret through the mud huts of Egypt.⁵⁸ Bless that sweet, unapologetic fire.

Ink filled houses are all I’ve known, wax tablets and sealed envelopes whose contents told time with letters of alphabets. Time has made me arrange my riddles, wildfires and calyxes, mittens and a son of man,⁵⁹ one irretrievable outsider straining his voice so his voice will be heard, going among the rubble, the rubble of the temple, the temple the blind man tackled,⁶⁰ his bag of tricks slung over his shoulder, his weathered face hung with anger, as candid and naked and dangerous as the split bowl that bred him. Dis, dis, dis, dis my world. This my world. You will do what I say. You will do what I say. You will do what I say. Throwing back his head to take another sip from an aluminum can—his throat is too dry to be absolvent. If I’m wicked, I’ll wash myself with snow, if righteous, with water.⁶¹ Almonds are peeling in the sun. Pandemonium sips my being.

A signature of mercury, and blood, marks a curtain. Where the viola, hammered to bits, plays as it fragments, stuffed puppets sag from the bellies of black clouds, from heaven’s basement, and we watch them, and we assign them names. Roll back the stone.⁶² It’s morning. Signposts are gallows. The hero laments, tangled up in hallways, strung up with barbed wire, mustering his might, lifting his head like an avatar crucified, like the utmost sovereign from streams of ashes. The way out is shut. We know our calling. Shine the light on us. We know our calling. Our seeds are sown. And there were star-filled suitcases kicked over on black horizons. And there were mirrors suffused with crepuscular dye. And there were ornaments of death raised by passing shadows. And there were caskets uplifted to the sky. The angel of night descendeth.

What’s left is the strange and wordy image of the author, abandoned by the fountain, twitching against the doorway, salvaged from a wreck.⁶³ What’s left is the child sworn to secrecy shrilling his voice to imitate picture-thunder—where a jawbone⁶⁴ breaks and dissolves into pettiness, where a solitary bell jingles, the toll of the angel summoning his kin, where language and intellect and outrage, chaos and logic and fate are subsumed by a dark purple dahlia.