Eye on the Scarecrow

—“mu” twentieth part— The way we lay we mimed a body of water. It was this or that way with the dead and we were them. No one worried which... Millet beer made our legs go weak, loosed our tongues. “The dead,” we said, “are drowning of thirst,” gruff summons we muttered out loud in our sleep... It was a journey we were on, drawn-out scrawl we made a road of, long huthered hajj we were on. Raw strip of cloth we now rode, wishful, letterless book the ride we thumbed... Harp-headed ghost whose head we plucked incessantly. Bartered star.       Tethered run... It was a ride we knew we’d wish to return to. Every- thing was everything, nothing no less. No less newly arrived or ancestral, of late having to do with the naming of parts... Rolling hills rolled up like a rug, raw sprawl of a book within a book without a name known as Namless, not to be arrived at again... It was the Book of No Avail we were in did we dare name it, momentary kings and queens, fleet kingdom. Land fell away on all sides. Past Lag we caught ourselves, run weft at last adequate, shadowless, lit, left up Atet Street, legs tight, hill after hill after hill. Had it been a book Book of Opening the Book it would’ve been called, kept under lock and key... Hyperbolic arrest. Ra was on the box. It was after the end of the world... To lie on our backs looking into the dark was all there was worth doing, each the aroused eye one another sought, swore he or she saw we lay where love’s pharaonic torso lay deepest, wide-eyed all night without sleep... “String our heads with straw,” we said, half-skulls tied with catgut, strummed... Scratched our strummed heads, memory made us itch. Walked out weightless, air what eye was left... Someone said Rome, someone said destroy it. Atlantis, a third shouted out... Low ride among ruins notwithstanding we flew. Swam, if often seemed, underwater, oddly immersed, bodies long since bid goodbye, we lay in wait, remote muses kept us afloat. Something called pursuit had us by the nose. Wafted ether blown low, tilted floor, splintered feet. Throated bone... Rickety boat we rode... As though what we wanted was to be everywhere at once, an altered life lived on an ideal coast we’d lay washed up on, instancy and elsewhere endlessly entwined