Coffin of a Nameless King (03/2009)

II

Emerald Scarab (for Ezra Thelonious, on his birthday)

the emerald
scarab
requires of the sun
its simian
priesthood

on lotus
dias
the infant horus
and so forth

the proper crystal
organizes
every feature
of the hierarchy
so that one must assume…

(DON’T ASSUME)

“a hammer to all hierarchies”
turns out to be an excessive injunction

there are universal matrices
for every substance type,
crystal no exception

therefore, let these priests and holy beasts
iterate their self-embeddings
and rigorous small commands–

they shall harken
who will and must

———
Charles Stein
Barrytown, NY
3 May 2006

IV

We are some distance from the operations of the tomb. I once saw an extraordinary crypt, in, I think it was Venice-some di Medici or other. It was like a bank vault. The granite casket on display in the center of the chamber. Uncertain if you opened it you might find a mummy, stash of bones, or a cache of ingots. Or perhaps-as would be more like Egypt-a stack of promissory notes. The Egyptians wrote scrip on the walls for a kind of life that was not in the future, but of immediate use. To die into the sun yacht, to take one’s place in the kingdom of light, the horizontal universe, timeless, only now.

That images of open wings should impress themselves into granite. That about says it.

But here I have to consider the modality of my own address. Something tells me of myself arising from the depths, one species of which is the tomb. I have written myself into a coming commentary on the meanings of others. But my own voice? Shall it take on a person, and deliver missives with less indirection? Is this what all these rocket ships and phalloi intimate, image after image? Am I on the way? To my own delivery?

Saith the blind interlocutor: we shall see.

——-
Charles Stein
Barrytown, NY
2 August 2006

Guardians of the Inner Nets