I'm going to read from Nod House, which is the book that
followed Splay Anthem.
Splay Anthem ends with the section called "Nub."
And increasingly, the poems have to do
with a group of travelers, a kind
of lost, ambiguously defined tribe.
And they move into a place-- or the place
they live in becomes a place called
Nub, which gets at, obviously, certain senses of diminution.
And in Nod House, that continues,
but Nub moves into a place called Quag.
And this is one of the poems that
first registers that movement.
It's called "Sound and Subsequence,"
and it's part of the "Mu" series,
as was the last poem I read.
"Mu" 42nd part.
"Next, it was Nub's new colony, Quag, we were in.
Music's weapons for the weaponless, not the ones
we were looking for.
Struck zithers lay in wait behind a bush
on the side of the road, spike fiddles lay in wait as well.
What it am, we blurted out without thinking,
throwbacks against our will.
We were there at B'Head's behest, melon patch inhabitants
airlifted in.
Smashed heads marked our spot.
We moved in as night fell or as day broke,
little way of knowing which.
We lay stitched into the landscape,
dressed in laugh jackets, naked if not for scrub we
crawled under.
We lay on our stomachs.
A flat planet lay under us it seemed.
Cloth our laugh jackets were made of
made us giggle, giggle part wince, wince part giggle.
Rough threads worked our ribs.
We lay stitched into Quag's interior,
face down, sniffed our jackets' bouquet.
Made-up odors made us giddy, gas we'd have sworn it was.
Scratched-up elbows, we pulled ourselves along on.
Legs and bodies dragged in back.
Moaning voices lay close to the ground, an acoustic scrub we
inched our way under, lay close, cut upward.
'Singing,' some called it, keened, kept us going,
kept us at bay.
Laughing not to cry, but cried even so.
That we were there but not there was no relief.
'Aman, Aman,' we made out, not sure what we made out, knew,
not admitting we knew.
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Come what might have been morning,
they opened their eyes assaulted by leaf light.
Sun's bounce of image off top side, underside.
Looked, it seemed, again up Sophia's dress.
The same song we'd have sung, they sang.
Buttocks as-if'd into his outstretched hand,
he the high priest whose apostles they'd have been,
aromatic loin gaps, evaporative adamance, fruit-like lower lip.
What it wanted to say left unsaid again, as if to be
was to be always elsewhere.
A room with no fourth wall missing, no one
outside knowing what went on.
Late afternoon it turned out to be,
the apocryphal she newly draped in sortilege.
This, the new goat-faced angel, the would-be book
they'd have read began.
So spoke the 'he' they sang of.
So had there been a book, the book
they thumbed, so said we, translating the ground we lay
stitched in, sung about sophic light we lay deprived of,
leaflet embroidery, lit but invisible, songs moot,
suzerainty crushed.
The motion of tones telling sight's demise.
The motion of tones beaked and feathered, we sensed.
We lay so still we felt a tree fall 1,000 miles away.
Outside, such as it was, we turned in.
Turning into birds, we cracked seeds between our teeth.
It was the morning after sight's demise.
We disembarked, a boat we thought it was we'd been on.
Gold-faced allure, we could only imagine.
A satyr's trunk translated upward,
we thought, a reign of black hair obsessed over,
the tip of his tongue assessing her lips, teeth, tongue.
The same song we'd have sung leaflet
abscondity, leaflet revelation, sophic rump.
Better not to have been--
better not to have seen than to have
seen what we couldn't have.
Better to be blind, we'd have sung.
Eked out accompaniment, the world
ours fell away from, the motion of tones having nothing to say.
Basking aloft in bodily heaven, we came down.
Quag's malaise lay behind us even so.
Sophia sighed, wanting something else.
She heard the woman with the bell in her throat,
backed by strings, adieu, backed by rattling drums.
There was a man, she said, liked that she
let his hand up her leg.
Said it so near the near side of singing,
she sang, song so understated we wept.
Saying the moment, living unsung time,
she said, mouth a mere slip, rude amenity.
She said she wiped spit from her lips after they kissed.
Made-up words, the words they sang.
The song, not one they knew, Quag's high-country scat
filled with helium, wind, warble, snort.
It was the song newly known to us
we'd sing forever, lost, utopic, wandering, toe tip
to head of hair."