Nam Le

I.M. Ché Frye i Kubla Ché, dreaming of ancient Egypt, ate his hyacinths and was marvelous. Wherever you are is what I’m meant to say. Before you beauty come, Dis crouching among the black basalt, kneading master’s soured linen, watching (bewatched) the great beaten gold litter borne by, deltoids sun-dewed stone, temples bronze & strong &     in train     in thrall perpetual — I am of a mind, daddy. Like, inside the blind-white cloth-of-gold, the scented, sweating box she sat in (think box, lock box) — Phoenician forest, seeder of  known world’s every known green: malachite, sea-green jasper, chrysocolla, olivine — & outside, too, other-handed, other- landed, in rainless, treeless Thebes, my dark knees tendered by two lands, rubbed bare by work & love — Move the tombs to the cliffs of Beni Hasan. Send salt from the four lakes. She is Nefertiti, she shares the crown, she brings the single sun. You do not watch the sun. But in the Deeds of  Suppiluliuma she says she is fearful     but there is no fear past true heresy, her beauty is clear of the next line & the next and that kind of  beauty is     if not redemption the possibility of a separate resurrection. (Am I not beautiful too?) The miners are instructed: Find a vein, gouge it to the very end. ii Princeling Ché, wolfling Ché, fish- eyed prodigy, anabole, brother mine, all-beautiful boy, who’ll turn your pages now? The lines unfurled before you in your sleep, who sets them to song? I cannot. (All men have crowns and every crown can be broken.) Were your senses mixed (blood shaking your heart — orange, with violet veins) or did hearing alone stay and go last, were your nostrils, at last, unblocked, your ears, at last, symmetrized, did you unravel first silence    did you dream? Maimonides says of Abraham it is not God he disobeys but Elohim; that in the bureaucracy of divine instruction the envoy fore the eyes supersedes the voice in the ear     did they close your eyes, daddy?     they must have closed your eyes (enucleate the globe, ligate the four recti, fix in formalin) for under the sole edict of sound the son is killed. iii Of  your father we dare & do not speak. iv Wherever you are, you are not your death. You are not your cold body, your subclavian blood, your spine upon the body block that proffers up your organs, your humors pooled with gravity — you are abed in natron, my friend, you are forty days not in a metal slot but roused into the mirror world, the eastern fields of light, the father sun rayed gentle on the rushes & not the prosector but the jackal keeps your stomach & the falcon your intestines and your heart remains your heart is yours for you there are no more tests of   heart. v My friend, magnificent, across your empty desk they go on trading base metals & precious gems. They found flint in feldspar caves, below the first cataract, where single stones, actioned by wind, can mother a dune. They trade tin south to children of  the stars, mix alum with deep-red alizarin to dye, to delight them who are yet to learn the violence of  such charm heart hanging in its bloodslick chamber     heart gleaming in its rubied darkness My husband, my god, my gold-mad son lorn issue, dim & darling eyes flooding with natal sand, every night flooding my free past. What’s a queen know of this     my babies in their sunless cease     what’s a queen’s knees know but milk & crystalled honey     her throat but subtle Mareotic wine     sun smelted to gold, disced & sledding behind her the whole world’s whole life given her to give — vi Look, the dreamer comes! Was this what you sleep- conceived, this equal dialogue     this black silt talk rife in death & germ all-mixing, estuarizing, high-banked along the flood’s go-down? (it lowers down its voices, the flood     it helps me to think, blessed ram, of death as flood     for in it all things high & low, fair & dun, flax & inlaid faience, free & liened & husbanded are leveled, meet, and proven in the engorged     the enchafèd delta.) I see it now. (The trick of death is that it keeps returning.) Lady of all women, they call me, they are all my children now. (Labors of my dim life.) I will prepare each part for them. (From the front, no back     from behind, no face     am I purged at last of the various envies?) I will build a city for you. (I will build a city for you.) vii Twenty years ago we were nineteen and already elegiac, we were future tensed & annealed, we were quenched in the dark peace of violent histories — Karnak, Babylon, Persepolis, Byzantium — the names alone     (quarry our bones, convey us to Karnak)our names we preserved, bent to stave & strophe, accomplishing our envy, gathering our violence, we were altogether desire, (only ever) all we would be     full of  imminence     (light first, sun later)     stayed, asituate, unforgiving. viii Now you are time’s but I say to you, Ché, in full mouth: We will be perfect. There will be a recognition. The skill has left your fingers, the dream your brainpan but time, too, is prospected by work     (the lumen of the vein)     (the schist afire through the rock) and humans, too, may burn like candles, their spines wicks, their feverdreams the sputting flames — Work in the shadows. We will work in the shadows, the rest being the madness. Naughty naughty boy. Ward residuum. Hold to murmur, hold to method. You see? Time breaks along its faults, lays bare its jeweled fragments for those who love and work. It gives it all for free. It asks only reversion at the end. (And like, that end whereof we could not think     thereof  (no questions asked) you spake & said, My father     and you answered, Here am I, my son)     O tell me — go, you go first (you went first) — what reason makes this right, what insupposable value, what excuse but ultimacy which all know to be the breath of evil? I will build a city for you. ix About beauty they really got it, those masters: great wonders call for great suffering. The father straps down his son, carves along the throat’s chalked crease (signaling purpose), the slavers slough off infants into sand holes (streamlining, focusing the workforce), the queen conceives eternal city, she deracinates a people to upraise it with their bowed backs, mortar it with their warm, oxygenated blood     sunk generations & contingency & opportunity cost     gambling our own lives’ great gamble: that wrong, actioned by time, can be made soluble in art. So, Volchénochëk, you may be absolved — I tried & trying. x Listen, I want to say something to you. You arrived just in time. You told me they’re not better than us, you honored our sin, repaired my will, you were havoc in the trees, the dense infolding fire & its fuel at once (white fusion, wild usufruct)     always your mind was the Emergency, always severaled, chording the upper & lower, equal & bonded in appetency, bonded always to mine. This is a moment of children. Who cares who sees? (Who sees?) We scoff at faultless entropy, we strip the pith from the inner stalk, we count to three. Talk me into it, daddy (the first rolls were blank)     oxidize this carbon black significance — heart of water — this red hematite & blue frit, these yellow ochres that every child knows enflesh the unreal sun — xi Put it another way: the ink gleams for three more words before it (and meaning) sets. In those three beats I must be thousand-faced, entelechied, liable, I must be totally told on — in the middle of my life a myth, a tidal mouth, I am planted in bitter celery, in the phytolithic matrix     all-possible clay     I sense your slow impulsion all around me. Heart’s lake, calendula on my fingers, laughter in the morning- golded reeds (shaking the papyrus), the scale in the wind that shakes the reeds,deus absconditus, the only gossip of the living, I miss you so much. xii Either we are eternal, with neither end nor beginning, or we are sprung from a single thing and proliferative — in either case death is not death (though time cannot but give form to suffering). Believe (if you must) as I must: In all things moment. In each thing everything.