ANTIBODIES

J. KARL BOGARTTE

ANTIBODIES A Surrealist Novella

J. Karl Bogartte

In collaboration with

Images by Alejandro Puga The Argentine Lyric Poet

La Belle Inutile Editions

Inspired by a series of aquarelles by Alejandro Puga

“Yes, yes, and all this is pertaining to the magic of Puga's magnetic images, and the atmosphere, literally bristling with commotion! The invisible ones? Passing through town ... A rendezvous with light? The lures are stars, which may be the songs of the Sirens, the bird-women, who do not sing, teasing, tormenting them, the navigators ... The songs to be sung, but are not sung, leaving a great void, an abyss of desire. Their devices may be tuning forks, to test the purity of the songs not sung; or divining rods, seeking the water of knowledge, the solution that glows in the dark, like a poison, or an antidote. The dream that is not a dream, the vampire that is not a vampire, the poison that is not ... Strange devices ... Those stars that are not stars....”

J. Karl Bogartte

2007

ANTIBODIES

I

They had decided to risk everything for a glance… attempting to catch a glimpse of something real, something far more diurnal and full of rapture in the interim, yet untouched by the human mind, unsullied by the cannibalism of rational thought, and looking in the area of disturbance around the edges of the object in question, midway between caresses. Lighthouses were erected to afford the most propitious viewpoints, as well as acting as beacons to light the way––although the appearance and disappearance of light at well-timed intervals was regarded as a more poetic manner of transition, being in flux... In some areas it was called paradoxical sleep, while others called it unrest. Numerous descriptive words were used, such as hemlock, trembling, consolation and dissolution. For the purposes of these beacons, the most seductive was reconnaissance. The diamond cutter, the one you knew only by sight, also added to this profound glance a certain anonymous quality, which bordered on elusive gestures conducted in broad daylight, while dressed to the nines in quiet elegance. Perhaps it was the strange atmosphere that seemed, at that point in time, to pervade the northern cities of Europe. Strange flying machines, some physical, some not so physical… odd contraptions that seemed to repel the light, rebellious images of arousal, and modes of being, all unfit for careless consumption. Life was, or seemed beneath the surface to be more acceptable of possibilities and grand solutions. The sense of scaffolding that was always in a state of fluid brilliance began to appear, at all hours, like some infernal cat’s cradle, all over the city, but often unseen by the casual passersby. The sunlight was a forgery, or a precise Tarot reading––complete with unexpected twists and rendezvous, and a surprise ending––more like a kiss between eyes coming out of the water, a single shard of inexplicable darkness lodged in the flesh and hovering above bone––an endless spark, or a fuse, in those moments of purity just before being lit…. She was neither in love with you, nor with him, the other, but she adored those evenings flying below radar, with the radiance of invisibility… You could just barely see the constellations in her body, a meteor shower, and the rain passing through her veil of arteries.

“The architecture of the psyche pervades outwards surrounding the actual thought that emits it, and it moves with you like a scent, or a glow that lights up everything within your vision, and if you study it, without really looking at it, you will recognize your simultaneous lives, as shadows and as splendid lights caught in an interrupted thought. Your mythologies and personas all wrapped up in the space of your breath passing through numerous dimensions, and they arouse you, seduce you and scatter your eggs. Moon-mad offerings....” She would devour you when the darkness of the moon invades your blood. You whisper something to the anonymous cartographer, and he tips his hat just a little over the right eye, as if to say farewell, but acknowledges your sentiment: “Ah, yes, I have often considered the delectable phoenix of the doorway, and the arousal of the key when it burns the breath of strangers, but I prefer to accommodate the invisibility of my gestures to the milk of jewelers and the children of the Golden Egg… I really must be going now––as always, the hunt is everything.” Each glance follows you, and each moment fills the specter of forgotten movements with the entangled drapery of lingering stares––the object becomes a dream, and the recollection begins anew each and every evening at nightfall, before it passes into revelation like a shadow caressing your voice.

II

Sometimes there are very few revelations without changing the sex of that persistent luminous moth who still haunts the edges of your awkwardness and your watery shores, into the mirror of twins who, in spite of their arcane memories and aurora-driven dialect, are always the last to leave the city and the last to touch you. This amazing fact, in psychological terms, points to the habitual swaying of the chandeliers and the rose-hammered serum of ageless habits…. The travelers came through the windows like a horde of dreamers walking in their sleep, and in slow cinematic motion through the remnants of the city that bears your name, your good fortune and your careless children. The bottles containing the splendors of good and the powers of evil are mixed together in the disguise that allows you to wander unimpeded by either laws or customs… But even though they cannot see you, the rustling of your every thought disrupts the silken antlers of the parapet. Weapons are always drawn and brandished like special days marked in the calendar with that proverbial “X” which never really helps you to remember. The moon also never fails to mirror your bewilderment, month after month, year after year, and even now centuries later the scent of lilac precedes your arrival and unravels the thread of cognition. The sun keeps getting darker with its own adorable gestures of stalking tigers in trees of long, drawn-out hissing sounds, and unopened letters… Yet the glimmer grows brighter than thought or sight of anything resembling movement. There is the elegance of the barbarian, caressed by the slippery vase of well-licked night-drops in the warm grass that wake you and bathe you, and groom your pleasures with the hunger of a lover. Any portrait of this, either here or there, is unimportant, except to the extent of inviting speculation and mystery, and you yourself are never who they think you are, swear you are, on the even or the odd side of any theatrical clarity. The Navigators, the ones who, in the sinister unfolding of their natural selection, lure the melancholy of medieval medicines from the torches, and propel them through the flight patterns that our mysterious Lady of Ambergris emits, in her sleep, in her shadow that wanders far from her sleep, in her own penumbra of panting helmets, these Navigators – yes, it should be obvious––only them, the aleatory ones, the ghostly candelabra of a hour's ecstasy, the ones who have already left their tales and trembling

devices, and departed in the brocade of a howling window.... There was a great commotion only moments ago, a last kiss, the shedding of ghostly wet fur and the unmistakable scent of invisible writing. Now, at this moment, there were clusters of time in the hallway mirrors, harems of light and particulars of multiplication that would not soothe the rapidity of unfolding desires. A heart-rending phantom fills the parcels of your vast undertaking, and the sigh of a great hound leading your way through the crowded terraces of somnambulant construction, where the objects of fulfillment unfold their costumes, tear their veils and consume your reflections. Your hand, kissed by teeth… Your breath, the clamor of white horses in the damp morning arbors, led by the bells of the woman who left you lifeless and full of crystals––the assassin who loved you beyond reason. There remained the Queen castled by the horseman’s pawn, and mated in the mad blinking of the second Queen’s nefarious eye, to topple the King at long last…. She is shaped by golden bowls filled with both darkness and light for the magic of inexhaustible projection against the towers of rising fog, and the zoological poppies of hunger––it is always you, always almost arriving, and drawn like fireflies to the sap of extinction, dripping everywhere. Her dagger severs your shadow into a very swift and precise measurement of perception: what you see is the blood of things that beckon you, and beguile you and web up the unavoidable body of waking up still alive. The cocoon is merely a reflection gone wild! The sea follows you everywhere with its silver medallions, and its crescents. The intoxication of the species is still to come. You imagine what is still as yet to be read. You fall asleep going up the stairs. The stars lay deep inside, down where the wolves groom themselves and drool a distant light. The bride is always a bride and always being robed. You leave before your time, and return much too late for illusions. It is the water of your desire that dazzles the different dimensions of how you think, and how you are thought and hunted, or haunted by the approach of falling, or flying.

The permutations of innocence are rigged in the game of chance like an over-zealous widow who haunts the night charmer. It has been often noted that the City of Night is older than time and even memory before time, and that the mirrors walked and the firebirds took breath and blood from the pain and the pleasure of each shadow under the moon, each reflection that follows the beating heart with its passion of fog, its helmets of desire and a rich spirit of disorder that would bind itself to anyone who releases the vague stilettos from their hives. It has been further recorded that you were once but a slender ghost that prowled the shipping docks and warehouses where the gypsies came to die, and the last resorts were shifted according to the mineral deposits that lingered much too long in memory… Crystals of electricity and forlorn clocks peopled the great ships that faded from sight. You were the most beloved of thieves, and your exploits were as liquid as oracles performed by beggars and lepers, while orphans and other chimera danced around them. The woman with the taste of absinthe sings to you: “It is not often I break the silence of a dream, with words, but only with knives that make for a more subtle brilliance of execution––sublime in love, wrought in the iron of a glance that goes on forever, and blossoming in the shipwreck of a sudden torch that attracts the moon with fatal touches… Pardon me, but I have forgotten what you asked. I am seldom at home anymore. I dance with the wind. The sphinx knows my name….” When the Navigators come and go like mist glowing around candles….

III

Together they formed a society of mystery, and released a vagueness into the central glance of things, useless, abandoned, shy things, that compel the strangeness of dreams to intervene. The stance, studied and disrespectful, to be objectified, bordered on this vagueness with which you, or she had come to understand as an empathy for the hunting patterns of nomadic hives… The honey of such hives passed as great oceanic sighs of rapture through the more questionable enclaves of movement. ‘Je promenade dans la rue’ became a distinct and more feral variation of the last dance, and was welded to the hinges of time. The shadow of another follows your shadow….

“There are things that I could never reveal to you, even though you know them all, know everything, even understand. I think of you as The Diviner, the one who leads the way, the one who takes what I cannot reveal and lights up the world around us… But I consume you when you sleep and make other worlds accessible to the strangers who follow you and dance for you. I am invisible to all accept you, but to you I am all things, all things other than who you are….” “I don’t know you anymore, and often times I can barely recognize you, except for the scent of your dreams, which are like the howling of jackals, and taste like jasmine when it reflects the moon. In this way, I am drawn to you over and over again….” “In the morning you struggle back to life, and I bathe you in the blood of starlight, and lick your flesh into breath, breathing light into the fleece of your hunger and your thirst––you stir and move like honey in the throes of the tide, when it ignites, when it shatters the stillness of the horde… Your gestures are like those of the somnambulist, shining in the lunacy of what no one else can see….” “You are the mirror that projects my shadow against the warm hysteria of ancient trees glowing in the nighttime jars––medicines of arousal. You become possessed of the sacred function of knives kissing the belly of absence and fluid sense. You are alone with your eagles and your raven’s serum, splicing the sinister words of revolt and tenderness in your sleep onto the flying stones of wilderness. You are living with the water of my shadow, flowering in the sound of your existence….”

“I am everyone you have ever loved, and died for, and everyone who haunts you. For this reason, you wander the evenings, and the rivers of those things that take you by surprise, and melt the language and the landscape filled with the furniture of light and mystery….” But in reality, there were no illusions, phantom limbs or beings guided by light and loving to obsession, without a thieves flight from window to window at the height of towers and steeples afflicted by witches dipped in ether and nocturnal longing for the other. A dive in space dislodges the keys and reverses the usual direction of reason––it is a lofty maneuver contiguous with oneric doorways that brush up against you and leave forgeries in your name for no apparent reason. The antibodies gathered stars in the jeweler’s vise and followed the signs left at every scene. The compass of bright and disheveled murmurs sets up an encampment of photographic still-lives, hidden activities of ferocious gestures and determined ignitions––It is the wind that swirls around you with its tiny fires, its insatiable fingers and pathological reflections, in conjunction with illicit complicities… “I would follow you through those animal entrances known only to those who awake before dawn, still enmeshed in internal geometries, and held fast by fibers of deluvial expectations. I kiss your eyes and make them wet, then unlock them with teeth of amethyst, and give them visions that unfold across the balconies of a pure and unselfish possibility. I make you transparent with the sunlight on pigments of ruby and emerald and other ultraviolet-inducing caresses….” She reflects you like a battlefield, and the spirit of the times begins to wander through the arsenal of the very first touch of enchantment, and the very last gasp of air, fire, water and earth. The witches waking up in the Middle Ages turn in their bodies like smoke.

IV

The water rises up through you, a body of lighted water, enlightened bodies lit up by the brightness of the sea, living water, caustic and luminous in a lunar hide-and-seek of antibodies…. From the moment you leave, until the moment you return, the world reverses itself and shimmers in your mind, flowing through the arteries and streams of the thought that trowels its lair outside of your mind, guarded by the daughter of the owls and the Navigators who never sleep––ignited by meteors in cabinets of imaginary space that multiplies with the speed of light… It is you, at the gate, sleek and angular as a panther, and propelled by optical tangents filled with the healing substances of night runners and jugglers of the highest degree. A single drop of silver will always announce the moment of your receptivity to the changing of the guard, the tapping of a blind man’s cane, and with the most dangerous grace, the long-stemmed black rose finds it way, without fanfare, into the antechamber where the secrets of the universe are humming and rattling like wind-up toys. It is no wonder, then, that the Diviner is in love, and has always been in love with the refraction of moonlight in the golden alkali of your heavy breath, and the rapidity of crystal on your lips… When you move, the thought of transparency weighs heavier than the aurora when it lands, and is for all time transferred onto the door of no return, which only opens for the clairvoyance of the key, to which she has appended herself. A poisoned glance, a dusting of enchanted hyoid powder, a dash of raven’s flight––and with more daring, some inexplicable Elastic Properties and high doses of gravity cleverly mixed in, and your very presence ignites hallucinogenic windows viewing the nuptials of morning and evening when they gather at the controls of the phoenix, and the twelve weapons of delight… The altimeter surpasses itself and the landing gears spread out in every direction. They are watching you, those ravenous voyeurs in whom everything is sacred, and every liaison is but a moment’s act of treason in the face of calcinated rainbows ground into Sadean hummingbirds the color of dawn, when it fails to arrive with its usual vexations of centrifugal force.

You hear voices repeating themselves many times over, saying things not meant to be heard, and the sudden thought crosses your mind, that the only means of disruption common to every adventurous spirit, when the horizon fails to recede, and the circles of astrological import have begun to follow the open mouths of disguises too difficult to decipher, is that every effort be made to blend in with the shadows that have escaped from their bodies. The hour has gone higher up the ladder. You dismantle the weights from their balance, setting free the scavengers of auras and the music of the spheres, moving out across the desert in long black coats, their weapons shining, dragging irrefutable lures of splendor. “It is you,” she said, over and over again, “it is who you are, anonymous and silent adversary, antagonist, sword of the marvelous, loom and lathe––You, besieged by gridirons of the universe between words, between the first kiss and the last, between the acceptance and the refusal, and whose stubborn defiance enchants even the gemstones, the singing stones thrown out of consciousness and the stones not here yet, but seen from a great distance…. “I have no desire but for the fire of your heart in the underground city beneath the forest, where the Abyssinian brides come to bathe and spin their chrysalids of glass. The abandoned printing presses that still moan at midnight, the hypnotic grinding machines in the goldsmith’s tower and the green bottles of pleasure that patrol the courtyard like after-thoughts….” They often gather in the specter of disquiet, on nights like these, in the appearance of the most audacious tendencies, and each one a source of unreasonable pantomime––even assuming that in certain circles the atmosphere was considered to be one of uncontrollable déjà vu. They each, in turn, with the most frightful and arcane humor, become analogous to a single alchemical process or solution to the whole debacle of outward flowing sparks of paradise––sentiments, by hook or by crook – like pieces of the puzzle of one reality through another, one direction out of many… there are no codes of value in the works. There will always be more locks to pick. A mink for dousing. The spyglass for love. The pitchfork. Auburn. The mirror sleeps and dreams itself….

V

In the brightness of your eyes in the dark fields where softly whining embers move like sabotage, along the edges where the darkness meets the light, chisels make room for the unveiling, the distillation and the flood of pollen shimmering in the glow of its petals and its lethal darts. At a certain depth, the nets are useless against the tides that, excitedly, are no match for the trembling in your voice. You are the blind lily of the tiger, at the level of the whirlwind when it pedals across the jetty of irreplaceable bewilderments. Language is breathing, causing the body to quake at each sound that barely makes its way out, clawing its way outward, in a space almost ill-suited to it. In this city by the sea, the language is exhaled, the words bleed and breed, and a scream is a full breath––but here, the words stay and make shadows. Here, the words live outside of you, and erect their spires and nuptial beds, and the sea of this city begins to speak its own language. The honey of your flesh stretched across the caravan of distant lights, between the lips of voodoo dolls spinning on the aroused night table, where the vanishing cream lives out its life in unruly sighs and moans… The water is a woman’s voice that flowers inside the darkest ruby when it evaporates. “The roses are dangerous and will follow you if provoked. They will trace you like phantoms and turn you into a city. They will melt you back to life.”

VI

Imperatives always suggest the most far-fetched solutions, and the magical art of preparations were at the center of every obscure endeavor, both suspect and authentic. They were the ambiguous ones, the elegantly anonymous ones, who’s every gesture and nuance mimicked those around them with such precision that they disappeared in the midst of them, and left the stage for the mad dash through the streets. The body of sorcery is buried in the water of sleepless nights and the stairway orchids, those carnivorous overcoats that wander through the starry rooms, strangely resembling the lush, plenary capture of obscene maneuvers in the lovers’ bed carved by Sarracenia, that well-known magician and fortune teller who lives in the questionable part of town… like a necklace of last resort. The guests are always babbling about nothing in essence, and only when you arrive do they fondle their phantom limbs and consult the softly humming compass of regret, to free themselves of the memorized contraband, and fan out like extra sensory hummingbirds of delight…. There are no doorways, only reflections that shape the morning. The eyes do not see what the wind cannot carry without tears. To dream is arson and looting for the sake of the forest that trembles when it wakes, and spreads rumors like growls propelled out of a daring gambol between the night-light and the magnetic north of a feverish escapade. You are the central focus of this maddening lassitude, and your portrait never does you justice. The animals lick your face for knowledge, and scratch at your voice with claws of light. You are always a great dream that ripples in the midst of a gathering of sleepwalkers, who sacrifice nothing for the sake of clarity and resilience, in the dense and brilliant nothingness of darkest red spores at dusk––a continuous kiss in the aqueous time zone, where desire is the only weapon worthy of targeting a shadow for gravity, and spinning it around your voice, aroused and trembling, with impossible locks in the act of being picked… You coalesce into an unfathomable joy, and rise from the earth like pearls ahead of schedule and filled with the roar of disbelief.

You are the most daring cistern of possibility, during an evening stroll, when you blend in with the space between leaves, without the grace of time or water, but swimming, glowing and transparent, yet keeping a vigilant watch throughout every interpretation, like a cloak that runs ahead, burning and hollow…. At last, with the infinite arrogance of a prism, and the river of her smile, that sheds its pristine bodice stalking you with the reverence of a time machine whirring and sputtering on the edge of consciousness – you are always evasive on the issue of myths and legends that gamble on your whereabouts. The old and sometimes feminine doppelgänger of mysterious links rubbing together and causing sparks in the wolf garden, is no mere omen, but a tangible gem of unearthly beauty salting the earth. An Ace of Spades for the entranceway, where the thickness of light sets up a catapult for the newest discoveries in science, rushes ahead of you, dragging the spindles of its heart. In every room, every one you’ve ever known, and in every face there are traces of excruciating tenderness, acts of treason and other distinguishing features more enviable than lunar bees feeding on the evidence of the perfect crime. The last time anyone noticed your untimely arrival, was long after your departure: “Ah, but the aerodynamics of a séance are enough to wake me at the precise moment of your passage, and the nacreous fluids of the seer project the glass slippers of a manikin’s revenge… I saw you out of the corner of my eye, and only for the sake of the obvious flaws in space, when they overflow in the epidermal splendor of your eclipse. Will you be staying the night? Does the wind attract your desires? What ill-disposed gears make fire visible in your displacement?” “You know that reflections are very much alive and breathing, and may even resemble foreign objects that harmonize with a desirable amount of loathing and disgust, and yet, while dreaming, they often exhale the luminous stones thrown by darkness when it rises above the surface. When they are aroused within the darkness, exploding – It is still your reflection, and still not you, but your transference on the verge of waking, and becoming more than you, when you cannot be seen….” “A revelation on the tip of the tongue, an opium of light.”

“My own identity ceases to be the silvering that pulls the arteries of your ongoing dialogue into the fastidious shapes and molecular optics that beguile the lovers entangled in their geode, in the morning, in the mines, in the witch’s gown where the lightning rods await the window of opportunity, and the last chasm of joy. It is no ordinary family portrait that unravels the looms and the portals of your ingenious interference. It is you, tipping your hat and winking… I am not sleeping in your presence. I feed the shadows….” “The stars that were once the heat of your breath in the evening, are now the unmistakable clues leading to an identity shaped by the little mirrors of the wolf, placed equidistant from each other during the summer solstice, to catch the lost words between pauses. I wonder then, will she return, with her meridian hours and her starless plummet? Will the owl-people prepare the visitors for the feast? Are there meanings beyond the ordinary disguises? Whose shadow are you, and who will you become? Who dreams of you and why”

VII

The seeds of metamorphosis are cultivated in the gardens of a fierce and clairvoyant gasp that unfurls through the doorways of a city by the sea, haunted by the chiaroscuro of a thousand and one delights, and the shipwreck that spreads its golden dust over the cobblestones of a sudden departure. There is the unmistakable evidence, a scent, a shining tuft of fur, of passing through, often noted in legend and history. There is the golden dust, like a blackout in the city that broke all records of comprehension. There is the flickering of a sudden downpour, and then the clash of recognition. There is the desirable cobalt of a voyeur’s hesitation, and the shimmer of acknowledgement––they go hand in hand. It is completely unnerving, but never innocent. We met in a manifesto of the moon’s fullness, pursuing glances made of melting ice, and I adored your reflection hovering on the edge of reason, and filled with those peculiar pathologies of “the voyage”, I found you glowing and under the knife…. The tides of consciousness were reversed in your presence, heading in the direction of the eyelids that trembled with the quicksilver when it reaches the ends of the compass, above the vials that were singing, and the tiny explosions that went on beneath us…. Since that time, you were consuming the vague displacement of beauty, divining its locus among the rabid poppies bursting for your birth, so real and so completely unknown, so mysterious. How real you were, I could not imagine (and perhaps I could) with the fever of your eyes in sleep and in smoke over the gestures of the masons who never quite understood the laws of balance and equilibrium…. Even now, one can hear the leaves speaking in tongues, and the molecules of space bouncing against those of time, emitting and spiriting your face and your enigma against the landscape that struggles in its consciousness like lovers, to retain forever their cries at the height of their ultimate and decisive moment. Their endless moment of complete transparency… Their ocean, and their starless night… Their cocoon….

To vanish or die, to return unscathed, to uncast the shadow, to scatter the reflections throughout time by the Navigators who have no second thoughts about the validity of what is real and what is not, to face the forest coming towards you with its implements of flight, and the desire of flight for you––every movement is at the eleventh hour and decidedly the most propitious in scope and dimension. Only your mind is supernatural and only when not thinking about it, when it wanders off on its own somewhere: “Mind, where is the most wondrous thought?” “Night, where is the watchman?” When you wake, there are the emerald locks, the twelve emerald locks of the twelve obscene positions described in the Secret Maneuvers of Flight, opening and closing and held up by your breath, which is glowing, just to the left of the horizon. It is a green that always reminds you of that last night in Venice, and the scent of an impending flood of infrared that heralds your approach, precise as the facets of a diamond. When you arrive each time, the light goes out, the droning begins and a whirlwind upsets the game of chance.

VIII

There was never any question concerning the rich veins of equilibrium that held their seductive radiance at great distance from either the a priori or the a posteriori of a greater cinematic validity––they were the ones responsible for the dangerous acrobatics of incredible movement. They were the pure glassware devices and spherical vessels of the Diviner’s sister whose mystery equaled your own, and balanced it with a brightness unheard of among the elements. If you loved her, she was your path of least resistance, but the most sinister, and the darkest of all. She allowed you to wake, and move with a brilliance only time would tell. She loved you endlessly. Each movement in the alchemical destination centered around the transparency of the quickly revolving ilium rose of antiquity, which placed the city at odds with the hives of witches battling for the uneasy objects of desire… The spirit of the forest fire was everywhere! At the landing-site, the Philosophers grappled with their unbalanced and illuminated daughters (the candles of their voices meant everything) for the supremacy of glance over movement, before blending their veils in the bedside manners of the irresistible ibn Hayyan, the night-blooming flower of unreason… The Navigators faced every obstacle with the most unorthodox humor, and with the finest linen. There were never any regrets, and every theft was a celebrated caress that riveted the aurora borealis to your evening strolls. Every chance meeting placed another exchange of mystery in the web of saliva that attaches itself to the external objects of the dream. They are watching you with the greatest anticipation, and throw animals in your memory to still the sirens. Nothing appeared miraculous or sacred without the sudden swarm of wasps torn from the lover’s ferocious alembics, their feral nuptials spinning brightly in the grass like a puzzling mirage, or a group of phantom fingers caressing the excitement in your eyes…. There were no miracles, only glances that unveiled each other without remorse or tenderness.

IX

The curious atmosphere of mystery surrounding the Navigators may be looked at from many angles, and they may all be both suspect and authentic at the same time. Their movements and activities during certain periods of time were indeed mysterious, and their predilection for exploration in the most obscure manner, was not one of pretension, as some have suggested, but rather, as one of them was once quoted as saying: "Imperatives always suggest the most farfetched solutions...." The city by the sea was not a city, and there was no sea save the one that carried you along with its ashes and its flowers, its sweet mummies filled with sunlit pollen and riddles from the 14th century concerning windlight, waterlight and thoughtlight, all combined in the soluble antipodes of poetic anarchy, and sifted like a great fire that is never extinguished and never very far from its source. To be clothed in water is not considered of higher value than to be adorned in wind or arrayed in thought, or even light, but all remain on equal footing, swift and highly contagious. The one who lights the night, prepares the level of preconscious babbling, and the Illusionist is a blur of frantic kisses and hurried restructuring. All is not lost, and the bones cast in white gold are arranged according to the interstices of sudden occurrences never explained, but drawn into a circle, and touched, one by one, then released under the auspices of their own recognizance. The magician is a distant cry. The hour sheds its skin…. The air itself, for miles around, was filled with an incessant buzzing of misplaced objects and peculiar intuitions. New desires that propel enigmatic veins feeling their way in the dark, arteries of light, marvelous vessels making circuitous flowing sensations, finding new points of entry that start up the chilling motors of resuscitation. Light is bursting on the terraces. You see her in the molecular stillness of a starry and clearly pathological doorway, outlined by an early evening of ghost writing and words of milk, and catching the sight of what cannot be seen, you are tilted a little to the left, and one flight above, where the sensate beings congregate for the feast of themselves in the glowing of the marshes––where they become night, and a double-reflection for the bewitching hour.

In your clothing of the forest, there is the Philosopher’s Stone filled with the rending muses of anonymous disruptions, in a sudden downpour, in a windblown warehouse, and with a walking stick that mesmerizes the seeing-eye wolves and ravens, you, and you alone, are not the last witness, nor the first, but the only one whose magnetic field of hunting and gathering follows the horizon with aortic and parabolic mirrors, gliding in the turbulence of “the little death that overshadows the blind man.” She exposes her geometrical optics in the phases of the moon, and pries open the scintillating radius of your hunger, and by loving extension, blurs the scaffold of your transparency. There is a fabulous haunting to the fixed point of your desire. The opera glasses are melting your secret passage. The anvil of discovery hitches up the horses of infernal returns, spinning in the opposite direction, and the Geomancer raises the volume. You pass through a family portrait, and exchange the faces, while the light moves behind…. In the center of a battle for the erotic negative of your voice and your presence, the passage from one into another, from here to elsewhere, would be analogous to the Navigator’s sublime movements in unreasonable perception; perception being the sumptuous arc of the dive that plays it to the hilt, in a sword-like fashion, but lovingly and with abandon. In the Book of Transparency, it is called: The Art of Savage Glancing, and references the mist in the shape of a woman rich in phosphorus, who invents the new world in her image, and seen only peripherally until moved out of an infinite longing, or despair that never disappoints, even out of fear, like reindeer fading in the distance of a trance-inducing and germinating thought. A dreaming in the landscape, between the trees… It knows you. It grooms you, and watches your light breeding. The mayhem that stretches the tropism of numerous bodies in thrall, held aloft by the savage whispers between enemies who adore each other, is none other than a post-hypnotic stairway that arrives several days early, posing as a craftsman of relentless choosing between this, that and the other. Explanations are uncalled for, and anyway, their serial numbers have been filed away, and their fingerprints are more like butterflies than starfish. The hounds of engagement are driven by the scent of your seduction, and a time exposure of immense proportions, (as a result of a flaw in the golden mean) directs all the available light to your alignment in space and time, gasping for breath and the quicksilver kiss.

An infinite longing that never disappoints the bright, incessant bath and the bathing dance that invades your night vision, feasting on your face when you become soluble and radiantly tarnished, you bleed with orchids for the lanterns swinging in the dark, shaping witches for the light. There are jellyfish in the trees… In the hollow, stirring bones of the baying bitches. You pause for a moment, between truth and hearsay, vaguely conducting the architectural beeswax of the elder mounds blurring time, when they rise to speak. A perfect crime, perfectly round and slender as the river lifting upwards along the meridian of an accident that throws the next day into a celebration of distrust for anything not burnt and caustic by the lunacy of love. You leave your gloves on a table in the dark ages, and the stain of your empathy enlivens the symbols of navigation––they light up in your thoughts. The penumbra that beguiles your disappearance, powers the lathe of your iodine-scented tributaries that retrace the city by the sea, and by the woman who leads the she-wolves of obscene calculations deeper into the mysteries of the wedding night. Her last message came with the tuning forks: “I will seed for you, and flood out in ways you’ve never known, triggering with spices from India and expensive silks from Samarkand, and all the abundant chimera of those asymmetrical glowing sensations in the nearby physiological and pharmaceutical threads traversing La Celestina, the tree-like root system, noted for its dream liquids and irrelevant slips of the tongue that attempt to throw you off course. I know the way, and I have weapons.”

X

It is the bees that stir up the conference of seers, and the flesh-colored buzzing of those bees in the singular fixation of uncovering what was once forgotten, and often used as black powder for the early morning diversions and medicinal gestures of escape. The ageless transom that forms, out of your hesitation and your fears, a double helix of spontaneous revolt, slowly dripping and sputtering in the bell-chamber of a priceless evening stroll. In the glass spine of your hunger, there are great waves and fortune-tellers that are lowered from the cornices with great fanfare. The reflected woman and the woman’s shadow, purring like a convex mirror twice the distance around the sleepwalkers tentative table of babbling, passes through the city like a great black wing of hissing and fierce words of love, that ring both the odd and the even aspects of your presence, and your pleasure. The light of the moon is frozen honey propelling your gaze. Your antlers keep the machines bright and motherly, and the houseguests have left in their finest disguises. From a great distance you are starless, and more beautiful than a last breath. “I have been the forest for you, dark and oval, and I have been your twin, shaping the mortar of disproportion with the amorous precision of a gem and a scalpel in the eyes of a lunatic, in those pure moments of reflective adoration, both delicate and cruel. I have been your method of travel and the future reckoning of your expectations. I can see in your sleep; you can see in mine… Together we are incognito with our calipers and our liquids, and follow only the signs that illuminate those that are to follow––Apart, we form the ghostly moth of incandescence.” The organic fabric of the criss-cross between your night and mine, is in all events unfolding as the shifting of shapes along the high beams above the city, and in the corridors beneath, where the Spanish Inquisition had come to rest and lay the eggs of a wondrous, but agitated twilight that mimics the initiates of la metamorfosis furiosa, or the great escape slowed down to a crawl. The Navigators are ruthless and tormented in their acrobatics, and never return to the same place again without a crime or two that refines the heraldic nature of their magic. Each crime is a precedent as well as a visionary tactic. Every movement signals the surrounding environs with the

romance of daggers and arson, sabotage and spells of every kind imaginable. Subterfuge and random acts of transparency transport the unwary through the miniscule portals of a midnight rendezvous, complete with those cinematic touches that bring tears to the eyes. The tender swarms of plumage. The fondling of each coal-fired reflection breathing on you the warmth of migrating spores. A moment of hesitation in the middle of seduction, and then the darkness of the hunt, the cluster of veils which come screeching to a halt. The enigmatic gaze that rattles the bones into a game of hide and seek. The dust glitters for your eyes in the owl’s turbulence… and in the stillness of your exploration (to engage, thrust and strike) the light dims for the curtains to linger and feed on your scent, and the heavenly bodies that begin to vanish ever so slowly with each caress that seems to last forever…. The spinal cords rising up like a fountain, a phantom fire, a gothic chase through the streets for the objects of desire and the disheveled bodice of a woman who rules with a Midas touch, releasing the ermine of relentless translation from one being into another, one moment to the next, one sliver of recognition into the other––the other, who most often resembles you, with the flood of sparks from the welder’s rapture. The shipwreck becomes the crucial timing device….

XI At this hour she rings the bell, and the animals come to listen to her disturbing tales of passage and marvelous chances, tales of intelligence and forgotten messages, very short, but sublime and bewildering tales that make no sense to them at all, except for the urgency and emotional tenderness of her voice, which soothes them into dreaming of helpless prey. She knew the effect of her own words and expressions, and of her gestures that formed entrances out of shadows. She knew that dreams would soon depart for more exciting liaisons. At another hour, in that quarter of the city where the rain fell upon the pyramids that come and go like the most unwelcome guests, the Navigators had no time for conscious solutions or innuendo, and instead had assembled for the compass rose that would soon change places with the more amorous and death-defying of their thoughts. They once traveled by train, dining in the early quiet elegance of the dining cars, and spoke in hushed voices, often encrypted with kindling and small fires… Now they simply vanish. The aerialists had meanwhile taken refuge beneath the horizon, suffering in the distance like lost children, and those who wander off somewhere, never to be heard from again… It is always a puzzle, and always takes the differing shapes of candles when blown out and left unattended for hours, sometimes days, even weeks. Like many such mysteries, your glow in the center of the city is often the source of quiet musing, like a robe with no one in it, shoes without feet, or a magnifying glass with nothing to magnify…. There is the answering mechanism hooked up to an echoing stag with golden shutters that outshines you, and even distrusts your enthusiasm, preferring instead, to speak directly to your image, your fiction and the shape of your absence… These days, when you do decide to stay for longer periods of time, give in to whatever spectacle unfolds, or consent to be photographed, your demeanor fills the space around you with such consternation, that anyone else present is instantly carried away with the intense ambiguity of your movement. Like trees in the wind, their blurring a distant cousin to the snarling of hounds, your qualities are like the rubies of time, and your presence is always suspicious. Sometimes you are not even there, and when you are, sometimes, your appearance is optional.

Your crimes are peopled with the most amazing primordial forms, moving shapes in the sparks of the air, and in your voice, and your sweetest joys are passing through the desert at great speed. She rings the bell twelve times for the thirteenth empty space, to fill it with your intimacy and your splendid discord. The sky breaking out of a lost wax process and seen in her eyes up close––like a great battle seen from high above – the bright water that signifies all that is outside of your perception, phantom manifestations that flower out of molecular hallucinations (yes, they can see us! They are amazed at our veracity, and our means of travel excites them…) and the green of her psyche is a tungsten ladder going up in a flash…. “Angelica! Her fruit is dripping, and the swarms are sipping in the sunlight, landing by their teeth in the cross-hairs of the Hanged Man’s vision….” “The wolves keeping watch over us, drawing their circles around our sudden vertigo that coincides with the golden ball-bearings of a sudden agape for the thief in black––the one who’s knife is never far from cutting the ribbon.” “A knock on the door never fails to unleash the centuries of occult elixirs and unnatural perturbations which, when poured over the sleeping widow, dispel a rigorous belief in the continuity of time….” . “Your hunger and thirst are to me the joys of the feast, the artifacts of a presence that will always veil the erotic point of no return, fixed in your reflection, on the left side, and reversed like a tiny sparkle of light, as well as in your shadow, on the right edge of it, a barely visible red glow that lingers behind your shadow… It is a mystery, but not fixed in stone….” . “In a hurry to secure the wings to the body, it is necessary to spin rapidly while balancing in the exact center of a dream.” “The sea enraptures the last train and the last departing omens, huddling together in the fuse and in the plume of an almost transparent lacemaker who never reveals her fear or her pleasure, in the lop-sided ghetto of remorse and faithless eroticism… There are jewels in the flesh, and it is

twilight in her fangs, and you alone have elected to follow her as her mirror….” It was you especially, among the Navigators, who strangely seemed the most tormented, and the most secretive. You were the most tender and the least prone to preferring the ancient places, without tragedy or humor, and the other centuries that have already revealed their secrets, distilled the oneiric liquids and poured them into little glass vials. As a saboteur you were unpredictably brilliant. Your glance alone was enough to rattle the darkness. Your anonymity was a treasure that compelled an amazing display of priceless curare darts for those who deserved them, and desired them more than anything. You wore your finely tailored suit with sardonic bird-like serendipity, and no one dared to question it. You loved the one who stalked you and lit up the backyards with meteor trails––You often exchanged places with her, stalking yourself…. There is a windy space in an empty factory that leads inevitably to a revolt of bathers and other swan-like creatures, other opium dens and marvelous weapons that arrive before you, like amulets, or sound patterns flowering in the garden. Ethiopians are dancing. Trees are dreaming you. The nude bicyclist is followed by embers. There are secret messages everywhere, and the night rises. Ancient murmurs of the heart are your undoing, your destination and your radiance.

XII

Once there were no sudden visitations, no magical destinations worthy of a crime, no stones filled with light, nor were there gestures that effaced with great power the reverence of memory, but to invent a revenge upon all things that far surpassed the qualities of reason and balance––a love that shattered the city by the sea, that sent the Navigators through all that passed itself off as a reality, and a phantomless movement without shadows… Shadows are phantoms Their maneuvers are more animal than either light or scent, and strewn with minerals as starry-eyed as the Latin shaped aorta dancing on the water at noon, in broad daylight, and more anatomical then cursory vision affords––and not just for the sake of mystery, but out of pure and unruly invention bordering on lunacy and, yes, for the pleasure of the old and ravaged Diviner’s daughter touching herself in the garden for the lure of the bees. Her honey rushes ahead in great pools, lighting the way. A murderous inventiveness shedding prisms and midwives, masks and wedding nights, making for a slapstick midnight ceremony that turns weeping into an art of stealth. “The interminable shrieking night of the peacock melts the windows of the serpent’s body, while the doors slam continuously in the tower of discord, where the white deer-women loosen their stuttering and nervous tics with moon-infused calipers that bring the rivers of abandon into the emptiness between reflections. The lemmings have invaded the Dogon bridechamber, like tiny stars that circle the hypnotist who fiddles with the androgynous keyhole – the way one plays with a knife at the throat of a swan… Daring to bleed for her….” There remains the opening and closing of your presence, and the departure of your arrival draws near, as on certain midsummer evenings the drapes burn down, bright and crystalline, as if disrobing the passageway with carefully orchestrated violence. No hooded figures pass this way without savage caresses. No wings without whirlwinds. No lightning rods without glances. Your flesh in bells….

You are the roots of her dark and slippery gait, her center of wisdom and that endless shadow just offstage to the right. While she draws the diabolical calendar from your black and soluble bones, the exchange of masks swiftly proceeds against the cabinets of reason, which permeates the exchange between you and her––and the light is drooling down your body of days and nights unfolding in an instant, but covering the earth for centuries. What can you see through her eyes? What is the scent of light? The arousal of darkness? Where is that passage between you and her, flowing through each other, when the nature of things inhales the sleepers’ shadow, and exhales the cooing sensations of a lunar eclipse? Where are the pilots and the guardians, when the last flight reaches the zenith of the lovers embrace––eyes rubbing against each other, bones touching, almost shattering––and the friction of navigational properties leaves nothing to be desired beyond the sense of continuous arousal? When will the splendid forks in the road release the flame that leaps ahead, enchanting your aura and licking your claws? The breath on the back of the neck, when no one seems near…. Secret codes were everywhere, passed from hand to hand like coins of indefinable light, and the eminent domain of those who still practice the perverse arts was guarded and secreted like priceless emeralds with fissures of gold. The likelihood of either surprise or revelation was defended by harsh passwords that burst like wildflowers in the jeweler’s intense and phosphorescent stare––his apprentice was emerging as a seer of great visions, although she was becoming more and more transparent as the years quickly passed. She was never fully cognizant of where she was, but kept up a facade of brilliance and tender sighs. Her eyes were lighted from within. Her flesh contained within its hues the confusing diagrams of flight, glowing veins of direction. She was neither here nor there. “I am beside myself with the most unusual tendencies, pure as the burning of ingots and shards of earthly movement. In my breath are delivered the secrets of magical deployment, and the imaginary psychology of desperate merging, pushed outwards like wasps from the inside of a dream. I am your longing and your demise, your slender thread. I am not your blood, but I flow through you like the dark messages of your blood….”

“In my transitional state of being, there is nothing I wouldn’t do for your security and the obscure nature of your being––I am very dangerous, and as a theoretical powder my ovaries signal the haunted places to convene in the gardens and in the council rooms by harmonic means… In the same fashion the assassin arrives in soft shoes and without fanfare, clues or hesitation.” “The clothing of my specter fills the void after dreams, and when acted upon by opposing forces, maintains a constant velocity not unlike the heat which drips from the leopard-woman’s mouth when she rises up to lick your face. When I shake my specter, the distance between what you see and what does not reveal itself, finds a balance in the melting point that disrobes the landscape… The bride rotates at the speed of light….” “It is thus your pleasure that lights the way for my shadow to bathe with your reflection, and the visionary apparatus that releases the Navigators from their predetermined flight, and in turn makes radio-active the freshness of sapphire in my hair… for you, always for you….” Who would have known that the Navigators were blind in their flight, in their dreams, and in their evolution from witness to provocative centers of occurrence: in mid-flight and in the group portrait which survives from the 17th century like an unfinished manuscript, they who were not when they were, have knowledge of those who could who appear not to have. It is a rebus and a crux, as it always is, but crystal clear in execution. Dousing for the objects of language in the shifting canals, and behind the curtains––no glance is either forbidden or appreciated, but imperative.

XIII

On a table made of bright fog, in a room of hard black coal, the visitors arrive and depart like ghosts more desirable as water than memory. They manipulate time into splendid movements that could be both sublime and dangerous as a form of erotic landscape––in an animal sense of being, when desire hunts for its object of hunger. Movements that imitate the velocity of quartz, which begins to grow and spread out like an organic wave filling the city with tender kisses, or crimes of passion that light up all the little corners and niches of the world. They make daring escapes seem like seductive maneuvers, when they exchange places, or vows, with the loving dexterity of swordsmen, slicing water into precise cubes resembling golems with golden eyes. The sunlight covers you with glowing fur. The forest singing for blood, as it rapidly changes every movement you make from one thing into the next. The wind providing kisses for your presence in visions that hang in cocoons or in eggs that adorn the passageways like faraway distant places…. In the shallow water that distinguishes magical practices from the blinding lure of sirens, hands are touching the thirst of things that power the psychological planetariums filled with passing glances, both mercurial and spindle-shaped: “For you I move close, which from a distance seems like the swaying of bell gongs that never touch the sides, and swinging wildly out of control, yet following the resonance of sounds that could never have been rung without knowing you. For you alone I become visible, but only in moments of darkness and joy….” The Navigators passing through the vestibules and antechambers like divers mesmerized in their arcs, they lathe into amazing and marvelous structures of reconnaissance––that defy gravity and reason with alchemical weddings in arcane Spanish dialects––that merely open doors which were not perceived as openings until very recently. Forgeries and artifice are mere analogies to the beauty that does not shine except in the dark, where you place your weapons in a circle around you, and you dance with the witches.

The locks are opened with the keys of stars more liquid than tigers or dragons, old and profound, and who sign their names with invisible ink, deeper than black… and bathing with light in sleep. You are the amalgam that fills in all the empty spaces with sacrificial ablutions across the spectrum of radiant colors, down the street that splashes up on the shore where you once lived, a thousand years ago––when your eyes opened for the first time.

XIV

She is always the last train of thought and the delicious last supper in the blood flow of the solstice, in the morning dust, when she combs out the rubies of her disfigured hair, spreading mayhem and ecstasy everywhere. When the coven of her shadows are released each day, she is the rain that turns the spinning table of raging forest fires, for a slender moment, in time, that lasts forever in the gist of things, an axis of unmeditated seeding and scattering… Her breath flows like quicksilver. Her presence is the bore of a tunnel careening out of sight. She is a reflection of birds of prey that illuminate the history of magic and unorthodox transformations, when she tastes your dreams, and sees the color of your desires… a double mirror of flesh-like smoke. In her movement through you, she is a roulette wheel of nighttime stars in the field of animals hunting, and in her ascent she passes across your sensation of reverie, on the cold, cobbled stones, like a fighting knife, dropped. The oil of space captures the moon in its image, and running in the scent becomes her myth and burns in the black fur of her thirst… blood running in the family, in the spirit of transparent stone, a mirage. As the rare flower of the entrance she was almost here, and not quite there, fading in and out of the séance of everyday manifestations, following the throat of her map over the cruel and invisible places, desperate and looming places––she is not the rainbow of absolute silence, but the flood of pure invention. It has often been observed, that the emergence into solid states of being in this haphazard place, in many times and configurations, that she may have guided the most powerful of the Navigators through their placement of crimes and mysteries across the entire fabric of a splendid reality. She was the essence of their priceless anonymity. She was the main-spring of their aggressive subversions that catapulted the Tree of Salamanders and other heartrending species of wilderness to the ends of the earth… where the landing field is often unsubstantiated, but never unloved and never without great fires kept continuously burning, even in dreams.

There were antlers as well as thorns attached to the mythology that guided them all, and watery ascents that exposed the woof and warp of amazing acrobatics shining like rotating capstones from one hive to the next, one depth to another, from soma to diaspora, hunger to knowledge, and in the spinning of their treacherous tales, nothing was spared from the gauntlet of a sleepless night. Inklings and suspicions were like flying machines of the most incredulous volition. Escape routes materialized in the air, or in the middle of a sentence. The senses took on aspects of the most baffling erotic positions, stacked up like the glow of an unusual wing structure that attracts distant places, and passionate reconciliations in the blink of an eye. “When last we spoke, there was nothing to explain the bright white scarf, the shiny top hat and the walking stick. There was blood on the table, and a gyroscope that resembled the ape’s attempt to communicate with its reflection. I suspect, by those little miracles, your arrival is eminent….”

XV

They were never on time, nor did they ever respond to the measurements of time, gravitating around it, pulling it out of shape, stretching it and often grooming it for transition… and they most often chose the slight of hand, and the slight of mind, embedding the distance between shadow and reflection into an audacious moment of concise trajectory. Proceeding with amazing diversity, and almost supernatural degrees of disproportion, they would move mountains and seduce the sirens with their maddening midnight gesticulations, and always left at the scene of each sublimely executed debacle, various pigments of light when forming a language stained by the glass of centuries. A cobalt ruby in the aroused and seed-like chasm of mortality was not their calling card, but the highly inflammatory Hierosgamos fluid, dripping incessantly into the larger pool of psychosomatic wind-chiming, and echoing like a sleeping girl entangled in moonlight with her delicate fingers grinding out the henchman’s pearls… She would be the bright vermillion shadow unlocking the cabiri fireflies that often plagued the passionately studious astronomers in their naked mimicry…. But, for the sake of extreme clarity, there were no angles left unmeasured, however obscure, nor facial expressions or body language left unrecorded to taunt the dark magnetic powder of the sun when it disappears within the eclipse. It is a most unsettling manner of speaking, in the swirling center of mirrors that face each other, when their words form the objects of their desires, and the salt of their bright bodies can be seen rising in the morning like mummies spun into crimson threads resembling weapons at the moment of being fired. It could be assumed that each subtle gesture, each single, almost obscene movement be regarded as the proper means of seduction, or attack, but not all is as it seems. The hysterical chandelier that follows you could be your worst enemy, or the one who pushes you to the furthest reaches of your own unfettered tinkering. The heat which announces the anonymous embrace, could be the anthropomorphic earrings hooked through the feeding chambers of your sworn testimony: “I was never there, but I know the bitter sweetness of her plumage and her watery inclusions. I have held her keys…. ”

The dance itself was a masterpiece of joy and derision, and the heretic spirit of lasting impressions, moving by owl light and wolf glow through the autoclave of parallel rays strung up in the sidereal archway of your last disappearance. You were becoming more and more transparent, like the wind that seduces the light out of the crystals that touch you. The last flight through the city was like a flood only dreamed about, and the moon follows the emotional residue of your insolence. There was onyx in your voice. It was not the conjunction of disparate minerals, but the mathematical formula that filled the hordes with that primitive rainbow powering the golden mean, and the footprints of those who almost died as children. A world transformed by a single thread defined in its awkward stance of landing backwards into gravity and alignment against the stars, and against the light, in its hooded and swimming body, in its burnt out age old spell of eternal love, for the cabal of women in the dew of a flash fire, and a moment of utter silence… Seeing through the hound dancing with the horses. Your last chance. The horn of lightning. A web spinning. Fresh blood. Your window is humming…. The spyglass mating with the wilderness in space and time, ground out of the earth by a lover’s kiss, composed of the basest materials and burnt in the defiance and innocence of evening rain when its magnetic needle turns inward… A conspiracy of fiery glances, raven-like movements resembling an almost visible catapult that plays hide and seek with the witch’s casket and the elves falling from heaven, and you are revealed on the other side of your reflection. There is no easy way to describe the passage, or the voyage through the scarab’s bride, by way of the gargoyle that continuously calls out your name, and signs your letters in a foreign script. Axierus and Axiocersa, Innana and Utu, Athanor and Amphora… double moments in time, mixed in the whirring past tense of one into the other, from the sphinx to the funeral, from the egg to the knife, from mythology to hoax, from weeping to phoenix, from the doorways of reality to the nourishment of the psyche’s blinding roots, and back again, through the anthropologist’s reclining nude… the one who guards those who play their flutes in the dead of night, and those who measure out the anesthetic for the sudden appearance of a dream passing through the walls….

The watchtowers are quartz-like deposits at the edge of perceived stillness, where your clandestine moorings baffle the matriarchal vessels with gifts of insight and hybrids of spectral landings, forbidden arousals and surrealist hieroglyphics multiplying at the point of least resistance, where the somnambulants gather for their feasts, leaving behind only bones that glow in the dark. Hallucinatory pigments and other witches creams smeared on the heavenly bodies geared for indigenous flight, and lighted from within, pushing transparency through the earth (seeing only jellyfish tendrils,) and only for the window of the body, through many layers, shimmering in imaginary reality. You are real, and the mind is in heat, bleeding moonlight… The Navigators have all left centuries ago, and their offspring are still in love with their ghostly intuitions, their horoscopes and the amorous permutations of the conjurers.

XVI There were memories that soon lost their appeal beneath the onrush of parallel nights and days, and the missing link that shook the veils of hysteria and other such miraculous solutions, were enough to propel first your shadow and then your reflection across the various manifestations of perception and crisis. A black sun like a haunted ship. The lunacy of love, that kills love, and seduces it into reawakening in a furnace of starlight…. The fire of purification follows you like a warm breath of crystal hanging in the air, and a field of standing stones that cannot be seen without looking in the opposite direction… The wind of your flawed and unsavory beauty, worthy of its weight in gold, nevertheless, is radiant for the sphinx of effective poses and elegant maneuvers. A decoy affords the luxury of running with the great hounds at night through a shining street of ciphers and chessmen playing with molecules and negative ions, and taking a leap into an exquisite utopian battlefield, magnetic with widow’s peaks and disheveled mainsprings. A bodice like a fuse. A burning table babbling with clues and fingerprints. You are startled by distant howling sensations. The message and the recipient, from here to there in the blink of an eye, the entanglement of perception bursting like bloodless poppies beneath the mask of smoke and mirrors, is like a waterfall or an empty dining room where nothing happens for many years, or a hypnagogic clamoring through a diagram of intersecting lines drawn with carbon, or tungsten, when it comes closest to the birds both heraldic and obscene that haunt your nights and breed in ultra violet colors, or sinister objects that watch you undress and sleep, and begin to glisten, or vanish, or… what is still to come. Blueprints of earthly flagrance. A woman with saliva of deadly nightshade, leaving behind her scent of clairvoyant arrowheads––still wet and glistening with whispers. Primal murmurs of the psyche, the wingspan of unbelievable proportions rigged to the vital circulating fluid of pine needles, for the draftsmen, the soothsayers and embalmers who have nothing to lose but the precious weight of their desires.

XVII You remember very little of the exact time or place, but the partitions that vanished made everything unavoidable and unspeakable. Under the rose of infinite possibilities were gathered the Navigators in their transparency, like leopards not quite seen in the enfilading foliage of a peripheral incantation, waiting to leap, hungry for space and perhaps even partially somewhere else... In the end, there is only the shattering explosion of total awareness, which precipitates the direction of passage and the displacement of footsteps, covered with great moths the size of mountains. Provocative histories of light and mineral spirits, and the discovery of the world by peregrinations and mandrake, feline gliding and beautifully sinister spectacles better left uncovered for the alchemist and his black widow, the one who outlines his semidarkness in gold, and resuscitates his underground tributaries through photosynthesis and childlike discord.... “Alloy, my love, the splendors of unconscious test tubes glow with the caustic water of stars, and the calipers of nightfall measuring the distance between arc welding bodies that slip through each other in mid thought, exchanging the ashes of loved ones... we spark and disappear in the stones.” Strange numbers cover the walls of the wedding night, in the language of the daughters and the ripping of the veils, and the words follow the messengers like the ornate chairs of sorcerers and thieves who have extricated their claws from the sorrow of lost civilizations.... Dawn and its ghostly animals haunting the sleepwalkers with the bones of light arranged according to their inner voices, like symmetrical objects left in the expectation of a crime... Everywhere, like a strange and deadly flower, the smile of the astrologer of Santos-Dumont would suddenly appear, knocking the blocks off the shoulders of passersby. The fixed powers and the fundamental forces of a midnight rendezvous set into motion the table manners of a swan, and the axial of consciousness shifted just a little off center––and when you went to the other side of the room, your reflection pooled on the floor, and then began to slowly spin like a tiny galaxy.

“Indigo, my love, the divining-rods are prowling the gambling rooms, dowsing for light in its more arcane phases, where the safe-crackers and the wizards touching the witching stick for the violence of chance, are no longer bound to the tides of arrival and departure, having subdued the sudden whiplash of altered visibility for the roots of an ancient language. I become the bonfire of elemental rain... the mist of blood... the monolith of moonlight dividing the storm....” The counterfeiters and the gradients of aurora borealis had combined and emerged under the window of the Tinkering Machine’s pure-bred daughter who adores and reveals herself to the Sapphic wind chimes of a starry night, when it slips past the guards of adulterous moss, wet with dreams and the chemistry of power. She is the kindling of flight, and the breath-flower of random sorcery. She is the single most important clue.... In the sheer baffling of her portraiture––when the chairs of the central vision are surrounded by the owls of scintillating powder, (the lost dust of the orchid grower’s vertigo,) she is far-flung––her presence is the splendid mutiny of precious dwarves and locks. She has no reflection, nor shadow or indications, but the hammering of aurora into dazzling shapes of disarmingly useless beauty is her evidence, and her bittersweet poison. She is the ravenous cocoon of great value. To kill for her is priceless.

XVIII

Not long ago, and perhaps even now, the colors of eureka and premonition drive the Navigators deeper into the miasma of discovery and the unadulterated nakedness of luminous cells, shimmering seeds, bursting eggs in the plasma of bright air flowering in the earth, personas fluctuating through stone, and the flesh-covered hallucinations that touch the horizon with panting and telling tales of visible words––language battling the elements... translucent figures with eyes that envision the landscape and breathe life into it all.... The possibilities have already arrived, and the dance of water, the water of the human dance, is both the subject and the object of the inevitable (she sees through you, and you are her cause for substance – together you both resemble each other and disappear...) The glowing of bones reassembled inside the dance, spread out over the earth like golden pollen. She is the cascading vessel for your sense of ether, and a flower of the Dark Ages that she releases in the center of your dream, by the conjuring site, where the river licks the key and unlocks the sun, and a new mythology of the earth comes slowly into place and lowers its angles and bright excavations just beneath a conscious watchfulness crudely grooming itself. A double of time and space, a double of here and there, a double that sees only itself, a flickering beside yourself, changing the order of things in the serum of libraries and celestial bodies... and not a moment too soon. A double cryptology of The Breathing Stone and The Flying Machine, the revealing and unrevealing of crucial movements, like involuntary spasms in the revolt of the sleepwalkers when they wake in the middle of the street.... You resemble the precipice and the abyss, the masculine and the feminine, the candles and the night-lights, the clay of perception and the desire for the water of light, the face of the animal that mirrors you and the howling of the moon when it unveils you and inhales your passion, exhales the very long, infinitely long shadow of your inconceivably inward moving reflection. A doorway rushes open, a phantom kiss replicates your embers....

XIX

They released the carnal faces of stealth to linger in the scandalous stillness of breathing chambers, with all the resemblances ever imagined, of everyone and everything, and barely touching, yet slipping and morphing through each other’s haunting, bearing the singular fruit of multiple distances between the eminent domains of overtly subversive gestures that multiply for the scene of the crime and the precious chemicals of the mind’s eye. On the great reflecting telescope that darkens the energy of rattling daylights, pointing inwards with the wild scattering of monkeys, and random uncontrollable sighs that seem to echo throughout the ponderously involved breast-plate of a sublime reconnaissance, the conference of bees cranks up the honey of a magical history; bone keys, and dazzling fuses breathed upon by dwarves of invocation leading the blind, the touched and those who linger like precious stones between memory and premonition.... The reflection people, shadow people and those who live as thoughts, as rain and fire, people of the storm and the inexplicable glow, people of the animal kingdom and the night ones like crystals, people of starlight and the wind people who brighten the empty rooms, the people of illusion and delirium, and those who flood the hives with desire, the wolf people and the windows of their spawn, the prism people who engage the skeletal tuning devices and fugues of sundogs and moon leopards, and the psyche people living outside their bodies––the accelerated particles that form the moonless night of eggs and enchanted rituals for the hypnotic people, the Royal Couple of the moth and the scorpion beings, those who live in the air and those who cannot be seen, those people who resemble other people and live other lives according to the river and the sea, of mercury and the spirit of disorder, hybrids of consciousness and instinctual flight, half reflection and half shadow, half mirror and half phoenix, owl and human child.... If quicksilver is the mermaid when she sleeps, what is the object of her dreams? If you cannot see the woman who burns brightly for the emeralds of a fresh kill, where is the mouth of whispers in the sudden downpour? Where is the crime that distils the hesitation of seers? What were the traces of her

rapture, her hunger and the apparitions of her body? You cannot see her, but swim in her blood.... In the subtle acts of sabotage, and tender assassinations, the Navigators realign the acts of love and savagery, tempted and suffused by the hermetic sciences and the fervent larval vessels, analogous to the nuptials of spectral masks worn only in darkness. There is no known cure, and the temptations are superb in every realm. Their presence in any given shape bestows upon the objects of time the pharmaceutical totems of a psychosomatic umbra, that goes back countless years... the obscure whispering, the loom of disparity and equilibrium, claws of anthropology, disparate maps, and the clicking of insects growing brighter. There are voices in the marrow, and presences that light up the shadows and touch each other, when they come to feed, and pass through each other, grabbing handfuls of rich black fur… There are always maiden sparks on the water, always glittering wounds, always blood flowing in the dark rainbow, in the knives and stabbed estuaries of unguarded crossings... The risk is always at the entrance. You are beside yourself with torches. The dream closes the degrees of separation, and you flare up, a distant mirage. Resistance, interception and tempting fortune, like the double-cross, are the precise methods of divination, and even the fortune-teller’s mother, who sings for the vigilant maneuvers of the great grey hound, when she stares off into the distance and pleasures herself with threads of light. It is the lovers, transparent like fire, who darken the day with their hunger, and consume it.... The interchangeable appearances that summon up descriptions of both prey and predator make for a singular identity, and a ruthless nonchalance: "I am no longer fighting the tigers, but I carry the tigers within myself––within the sphere of what I desire, and those magnetic forces that exist without me... How visible am I to them, and in what form would they allow me to touch them?" In the guise of cylindrical movements, the double wedding of the King and his sister cannot be seen... but in the mirror there is a flood that outlines the beautiful designs of a soluble artifice and a memorable conspiracy. Between

memory and premonition glows the blackest flower. The castle rose. The killing heart and the adorable smile. The burnt watermark of desire. Intricate tattoos of light as fierce as hunger....

XX

Through the aboriginal phases of a sudden possibility, when the enchanters interlace the reflections and free the shadows from their respective bodies, and from other singular objects of veneration, there are spindles and shifting looms across the visionary table of swan-shaped disturbances neither unsettling nor innocent. You pass this way filled with omens and contempt. When her glow increases, and her spell sheds all resemblances to any known healing process or stuttering enigma, she spreads her phantom limbs and slips down through the prism of many centuries... a faded photograph of immense proportions almost reveals the shuddering anomaly of her image, like a veil that enchants the fireflies of lost time. Her angelic teeth betray the riddle of her departure, and her hair of lunar abandon never failed to burn the optical and spine-tingling paradox of waking up unharmed by the wonders of the world, or scattered in the wind like spinning seeds, or sparks of great annoyance and longing, that stick to the sepia-toned chimera of ageless savants. Scorpions are gathering steam... Theories run wild.... No one can be certain of whether anyone was ever captured or detained, and yet, the images persist, and the authentic whirlwind of anonymous agitation is the crossbow of an ironic hoax. The mysteries surrounding their whereabouts, in the grand scheme of things, were always accidents. The ageless analogies were like found objects of increasing speed and fertility. Their beauty was always useless and favorable mostly to the buzzing that covered the doors and windows, with the beekeepers flowering in concentric circles. She was seen leaning forward, on the left, near the slumbering boatman, and offering the wishbone of a sputtering tremor, so heart-rending that the cellist of imaginary angles chisels off the particles of last regrets and, on the verge of transparency, licks up the precious antidote: the aerodynamic pearl of a marksman who has no name, nor walking-stick, but only a faded horoscope and a T-square of enchantment. When he touches her, she is the spyglass of the gargoyles in unison with the foundry of the occultist’s last and most sublime hex.

You were the one measuring her antics of identity and polarity, and you often spoke of the marrow glowing luminously in the fierce darkness of others, in the sorrows of the unattainable friction, and in the heresy of misplaced dimensions, cooing and purring in the antediluvian costumes. She was the spoon of voodoo in the cabinet of uneasy space. Time falls. Night breaks.... The gong of her heavy eyelids bursting in the dance of chemical properties, where your magnetic disturbances flood the thought-covered gestures that animate the nearness of things.... The droning hybrids of attraction and repulsion, fondling your whispers, from the howling vase to the invisible shapes, from woman releasing the sparks of a great distance, to all those seen within your visage of moon-colored eggs the length and breadth of feral knives in love with the carbon of perception. Humming cells compressed into diamonds, into dilating eyes of a guiding darkness, into tuning forks for the mythos and fiction of your appearance. Your fading is a thirst that shines in the rain. “There are no limitations except those without clay shaped by the fluid hands of precognitive pathos, when it glides upstream through the physicality of your impersonations... They do not remember you, nor can they even see you. Your shadow is filled with quicksilver, and your memories rush ahead. They dream of you, and yet have no rules for translating your gibberish into mythologies, except when the animals gift you with instincts.” “I have stalked you like gravity when the spores of light hungry X-rays gather in the ablutions of the owl-headed woman, where the mirrors return their sentiments, while the calculus enacts the carnal distillation of last minute preparations... and I have loved you in your aspect, and in the stones that threw us together, and we mirror each other’s reflections, like shadows on the surface, released... We cross our fingers and separate in the rising water... We are not the night, nor the brightness of noon, but we know of them, and they follow us.” The Navigators blacken the names in passing. The ships are molting....

XXI They made no concessions to the physical time or place, and silkworms covered their tracks with priceless antiques and precious elixirs. Their motives were hanging by their ankles, from lofty and obscure destinations, forged and tuned by the animal magnetism of their imperative intrigues that would never end, without a starless pantomime, without the tender sign language of an aleatory liaison––elemental and far-fetched... Doorways were unnatural and dressed with impeccable taste, almost aristocratic in nature, and beyond the sensory immunity of unauthorized entries, childhood fantasies and illicit caresses. Each single movement in the woof and warp of ravens, by their long cloaks resurrecting the parameters and the violin-eaters of nightly oscillations, indelible and mysteriously unfixed in the artifice of their absence. They are the fiddlers of hysteria and jasmine, in the rhythmic swooning of their dream-shaped velocity. The Navigators, in one reality through another, in one counterfeit moment after every other, one asymmetrical forgery beyond the last one, and dipped in marvelous sanctions, profane amalgamations, and yet, touched into a luscious telepathy of thorns that unlace the passing of future events. A soluble dusk, a swarm of chimera, bodies of lighted streams.... They are everywhere, at all times, the licking of animals moving, and fixed endlessly in the shimmering eyes of invisible links....

XXII

They were poised for the hunt, or the joy of waking up together in the center of a desirable feast... and their thoughts collided under the molecular tingling in the serene voice of the flint that precedes their appearance. In the fleece of light and lingering.... There were the green leopards of time swirling in the cave of loud and wakeful roses propelled headlong into the rich scent of a starry night, hissing and crackling with almond clothing and navigational charts burning over the sea.... Where the Cabal of Fabled Weavers in the city of Solanace, not far from the executions of mystery, have laid out their sinister and virgin oils like parchments of stuttering, or miraculous weapons knocking you off balance and unawares, for the surprising throes of a sibylline constellation, and the slingshot effect of instantaneous disfiguration. The scent bleeds for you, and adores your series of poses. Her voice moves you to another place. You catch the scent of her eyes, and the color makes you hear the analogies of others in reverie.... When you dare most, in revealing and unrevealing the veil of irritation and the substance of being at the unavoidable point of disruption, the sniper’s cherished gaze moving in all directions, lighter than air, or fire pawing at the glimpse of having been there before––where here you unfold as a maze... and the solution of being seen, where distance is only an unruly means of access, as others pass through you, changing direction forever, in the middle of nowhere... You become a vessel of magical potions... A group portrait.... A mystery.... You remember only the projection of her visitation, yet the sense of her gathering storm brightens the earthly milkweed pods of an intimate ravishing, bursting and scattering sirens outwards in a wheel of lightning strikes, signaling the reverse of impending precautions. The archive of owls captures every nuance of biological emanations in the secretive fables of each peculiar shuddering of bricks and mortar, pistil and stamen, and those

oddly colored Dutch flasks that appear like lighthouses howling in the wings. Out of your elegant debris you make a descending reflection, then an upward spinning shadow and then a dream-covered glance, to which again is added your reflection emerging out of the forest around it, and you have the entrance to the other side of the landscape, where the vision grinders come in the late afternoon to lose their proportions. Thus, the secret is revealed, and the pieces of the puzzle are set to unwind the babbling of the apes in the glimmer of enchantment... In the Great Hall of Tinkering the last of the chemists and astronomers pillage the gap between consciousness and dark matter, between the hardness of coal, and the myth of another’s infernal perception in the jeweler’s vise of inspired tinctures; between the kiss and the hunger for kisses that distill and corrupt even the Black Plague. With the Navigators they muster the angst and seduction of impossible love, and launch headlong into the sprawling arms of the mist. Arcane messages were left in every abandoned schoolhouse, scratched on blackboards like elementary particles glowing in the rubbing of the female Lepidoptera, in her wondrous vase, like a marvelous lure, with enough transparency to keep her bearings ahead of the game. Warnings were exhausted, challenges taken. You enter at your own risk, along with the actors and their scripts, the chauffeurs and pilots, with their destinations hovering above the intrusion of the lighted forge. A starless cavern, your stream of sunlight seeking the turning point of others... The cursing of the evening fluids, gears and startling petals clamoring for the sea and the city, mixed with the wolves of a savage caress, and poured over the ashes of an endless glance... between the key and the lock –– only your breath is visible in the secret passages of the world....

Fini