Bibliomancy
or
The Life-Cycle of the Salamander

I.
An artist has nothing to show
for his forty years of life.
No house, no car, no money.
His hours are brittle pages;
flotsam blown about his feet,
crumpled scraps spilled
from the waste basket.

The artist dreams of a man
nailed to a cross.
The bleary eyes filmed over
with blood and sweat
are the artist's eyes.
The gaping mouth
speechless with salt and sweat
is the artist's mouth.
The burning ears
exchanging human cries
for angel babble
are the artist's ears.

The wood, the nails, the hill;
all seem familiar, almost intimate;
a forgotten grade school diorama.

The father he does not cry out to
is busy reading the paper.
The crowd which has not
come to mourn him
is busy changing channels.

What, then, is there to give?
Who is there to give to?

The artist wakes and lights
the flame under the flask.
This will be the last phase
of the great work.
Forty years bubble in the tubes;
thousands of days,
millions of moments,
all forged into precious jewels,
gold from the toilet bowl,
pearls from the bile.
And with these treasures
he builds the hill, the cross, the nails,
the scripture, the church, the sacrament.

II.
The artist dreams of attending
a formal banquet with his family.
His father makes an inflammatory speech,
exclaiming "We reject your values!"
Fleeing the angry mob,
the artist's mother becomes a rag doll
carried under his father's arm,
her stuffed cloth limbs
flapping in the wind.
The artist's father drives their car
deep into the woods, saying
"You'll have to find your own way
back to the city."

A forest path leads the artist
to his childhood schoolyard.
In the midst of swarming children
sits a dais holding a sacred book.
He examines the book and time passes.
The playground is now empty.
Searching for the children,
the artist enters the school
through the basement.
A skeletal janitor in filthy overalls
sleeps in a chair.
A pair of disembodied hands
drift obscenely through the air.
At the top of a staircase,
a dead, putrid cat hangs
from a doorknob.

Avoiding the horrific carcass,
the artist steps through the door
to find himself in a dilapidated building.
The hallway is dark and grimy.
A bare bulb casts a sickly yellow light.
In a corner stands the dais
with the holy book.
It is the book of his life.
He turns back the pages desperately.
When did it all start to go wrong?

Three sullen, emaciated women
glare at him with swollen, angry eyes
then vanish through an open door.
Shamefully, the artist climbs the stairs
to his new dwelling.
The apartment is empty;
no telephone, no furniture,
no clothes in the closet;
just bare walls and moonlight.

The morning brings brighter activity.
Gray coveralled workers
repair pipes in underground lavatories,
and the artist steps out onto
a sun-drenched city street.

III.
Waking from this dream,
the artist finds himself four feet tall,
his hair a thick pudding bowl,
his skin soft and translucent.
The weight of his adult life
is curiously absent.
He's an emotional tadpole,
as oblivious of time's passage as a mayfly.
The great work often has strange effects.

This is the house where he was born;
the house where the moon eclipsed the sun.

The artist's father sits in the bathroom,
buttocks clamped to the toilet seat,
magazine spotted by skylight blue,
ignoring the dangling feet
of the hanged man
lightly brushing by his forehead.
In the kitchen, the artist's mother
lies sprawled on the floor,
sobbing amidst broken glass and lipstick.

The buzzing of angry insects fills the house.
Canaries, freed from their cages,
dash their brains against the walls.

Everything is present for the first movement of the opus.
The adversaries that assault the artist in his crib;
the writing desk which stares at him with menace;
the paper clown dancing on the wall;
the chair that walks about;
animated garments with no one inside them.

And his mother, like a succubus,
mingling her own childhood with his,
entering his too-thin membrane
like a virus.

In the evening there is music,
and then his parents are as gods.
When they perform for an audience
they are the king and queen of the universe,
and the sunlight and honey,
daily compressed and locked away,
pours out of them with the force
of a fist cracking a jaw.
And the artist is exalted;
he is a prince basking in the glow
of his parent's flame,
and nourished by the golden dew
which drips from their fingers
as they play.

As the passage continues,
it moves from celestial harmony
to hysterical cacophony.
Howling words, barking words,
words like handcuffs,
words that imprison,
words heavy with unspoken commands
heaped upon their backs,
words that hide, words that cower,
words that slam doors and lock them,
words that create dead plastic worlds;
the utterances of a K-Mart Jehovah,
funelling down a rabbit hole
into blackness.

IV.
May your lost and wandering orphans be found.
May the tender feet of your idols be shod.
May the sand be rinsed from your bloodshot eyes.
May the tyrrany of alphabets be overthrown.
May Pandora remove your aching heart
from her tiny, scary box.

V.
The artist dreams of driving around
his hometown at night,
a black, babboon-headed man
at the wheel.
The barren streets broadcast
an oppressive silence.
The parked cars are filled with empty husks.
From the murmuring tv windows comes
the barely perceptible rustling of curtains.
At the playground, weeds grow
through the rubble and barbed wire.
Carrion collects in the gutters.
A red swastika stains the side of a house.
A fat, balding man stands
dazed and somnambulistic
in the middle of the street,
chain smoking and coughing up
gobs of thick, yellow phlegm.
Clusters of teenagers,
milling about aimlessly
like herds of wildebeest,
suddenly erupt into violence.
the artist watches through
the rear view mirror
as his parents' house goes up in flames.

VI.
The second movement finds the artist
chained in Plato's cave.
The white rabbit has led him
down an oubliette.

The artist's body is different now;
larger, coarser, more self-conscious
and confused.
His churning chemicals prod his muscles
towards their ideal form--hard and firm
--but they remain soft and womanly.
His animals--bear, wolf, lion
--hold out their skins for him to wear
but he remains a mouse
scurrying into corners.

Short circuits and blown fuses
divert the artist's divine electricity,
designed to seek grounding in another,
into anguished, vicious cycles
of terror and compulsion.
Unscheduled rogue medicines
exacerbate the breakdown in the wiring.

Sparks fly and ignite the ethers.
The world of forms recedes from view.
The artist disappears up his own orifices.
His body, shambling about
in the fallen garden,
is trampled by the herd.

On the dark side of the looking glass,
voices cry out "eat me--drink me!"
The artist plays russian roulette
at tea parties full of toys and dolls
with death mask smiles,
while his body, like a headless zombie corpse,
blunders into mailboxes and telephone poles,
and his soul is just a thumbprint
and a mugshot away.

Metaphors are mixed and shaken like cocktails.
Spines are zapped and snapped like pencils.
Trees, buildings, birthday cakes
mourn their missing scrabble bits
and cling desperately to the playing board.

Decapitations at the prom!
Girls are raped by bees!
Homeless lepers fill the mall!
Satan and Hitler run the schools!

The artist's head turns inside out,
raw ganglia exposed,
tongue flapping about like a crazed antenna,
delicate eyeballs seared by
the burning ejaculation of space and time,
a giant, quivering nerve-ending
pushed through a meat grinder
one inch at a time.

VII.
The artist makes a notation in the score
and a new character is introduced.
She is searing radiant white,
riding lotus flowers on moon-swells,
cradling the trembling hearts
of the entire world in her arms.
Her voice a sparrow's breath
on a nuclear bomb;
oceans in a single tear from her eye;
and her lightest touch
cracks open the blackest shell,
drains the venom,
staunches the bleeding,
and salves the lacerations.

She nestles the artist in her lap,
wipes the moth-dust from his face,
breathes fire back into his organs,
and shoos the demons away
with a flick of her wrist.

VIII.
May you catch yourself
behind your own Oz-curtains.
May your toes grow downward
to root in the soil.
May your heart be offered
like an apple for teacher.
May your bear-cub will
be fierce and innocent.
May you cast away
your false nose and glasses
and walk...

IX.
In his dream, the artist rides
a lava-flow escelator
down into Hell.
Monstrous heads and torsoes
pop up from the boiling magma,
but the artist, against all reason,
feels no fear.
At the center of Hell,
he holds an audience with the Devil.
"Many of your peers and associates
will end up here,"
says the Prince of Darkness,
"but you're just visiting."
Riding the lava stream
back to the surface,
the artist catches a disturbing glimpse,
over his shoulder,
of a white, leering, clacking figure,
following him, growing closer and closer.
An acid fear rises in the artist's stomach
as a voice reassures him,
"It's only death...only death...only death..."

X.
The artist wakes with a start
and sets about his business.
The putrefaction is now complete
and distillation is the order of the day.
Time drips slowly through beakers and tubes.
The atmosphere is thick and gauzy,
like a spider's web,
but sweet, like cotton candy.
The artist scratches in his notebook and
the living torah of his letters
embrace him, pull him in,
frantically accelerating,
like incandescent comets chasing their tails,
lumping together, fusing, splitting apart,
a blazing orgy of creation and destruction.

Like carbon compressed
in the bowels of the earth,
twenty years devoted to the work
is gradually, painfully, joyfully
shaped into the soul's invincible diamond.
The artist seems old when he is young
and grows younger as he ages.
He reads the gospels backwards
and erases the pages as he goes.
The tribal elders abdicate,
replaced by blinding. fiery angels
and fools who step off cliffs
to be carried aloft by clouds.

The artist wrestles with midnight-dark devils
on the tops of mountains
and saints bright as sunlight
in the inferno's depths.
Mother Nature dances her dance
of the seven veils and suckles
the artist at her breast.
The Three Graces choose him
as their consort and they make love
in the back seat of Zeus' chariot.

The artist sits under a tree for forty nights
and learns that knowledge is a lie.
He wanders in the desert for forty days
and grasps at mirages
that attempt to sell him
toothpaste and life insurance.
The writings of the patriarchs
are so many chicken droppings,
and cartoon characters reveal
the meaning of existence,
only to refute their own arguments
on daytime talk shows.
The skin of matter is peeled back.
Yang jumps on yin
and yin rides yang,
like chocolate syrup poured on
vanilla ice cream.
The artist takes himself apart
and puts himself back together
like a bag of tinkertoys.

He takes a monorail ride through Valhalla
where he gives Atlas back his burden,
Hercules resumes his labors,
and Sisyphus spit-shines the floor.
He pulls the ashes of
six million incinerated bodies
from his pocket
and scatters them to the wind.
Shining pathways connect
the shards and shattered vessels
of the artist's life,
revealing hidden patterns
like a pinball palimpsest.
His own holy tree,
lit up like christmas-time in Vegas,
like thousands of traffic lights
all gleaming go-go green.

And when the maps have been studied
and the final entry recorded,
the artist closes his notebook,
climbs in his boat,
and continues to sail
towards the edge of the world.

David W. Aronson
October, 2005