From THE YANCEY COUNTY POEM CYCLE

 

1. The Beauticians: God the Father Almighty creating and forming the heavens.

 

The first heaven and the first earth passed away later on. When the thousandth night of reverb is still the first, filled with the opining generative neoplasmic lurch-to-power that marked the first stillness out of being into new not quite stillness or a kind of persistent residual dolor, the powers of regenerative destruction chloroform the eyes of the not yet creeping things of the earth, what the angels no angels yet call a literalism of the imagination, the ideal form perhaps ribbed with ash and atoms and the radium that twinkles in formative motions-- lo unto these hills the after-dearth was without form or void, the bismuth spirit curdled the noumen, the redeemed sentence hidden in blackness suspiring a thousand times as a spectral swain to spectral middens, a pre-world of dimorphic intention ye clockwork percuteur, the turgidity of spatial vacuity, an inviolable weight and the idea of a yellow flower and said, Let there be light, Let there be light, Let there be light and slanting ray after ray after ray of post-natal slime.




8. The Astronauts: God forewarning Noah to make an Ark of smoothed wood.

 

Lasciviousness, like the newly minted ganglia of a swirl of starlings, is everywhere. Not yet even the astronaut. Not yet even the golf course. An epic fail. It is like when order is a disrober is a disorder is an ordinance which evades and invades itself, the mouth somewhere else always an anus, the clementine split, the whorling stars unredeemable on the edge of putative lust. Build a mother and or a father ship. Ship the slither and egg and fin westward ho, on a brightling zephyr, with the hope of cleansed minions, with the hope of rakish angles and destroyed splendour which is a mobility spectacle of linear animals. I have peered into the future and seen some cubits and wood of gopher. Three stories of ritual sacrifice—red-hot irons, my feet, my feet/ghost-noose/dig a hole and the imagination and the body go into the hole and then Wham! a thicket covers it. A coterie of beasts. Paired naturalized gonads of non-malefic intent. A bear may be chased with a dogwood branch. A lion may be tickled intently or hypnotized by a pushy corpse. Surry up them victuals!!! Tater flitters!!! Fatback!!! And unto those waters may all future nuptials and hysterias flee, a passional regime of fugitives and signs.




25. The Textile Workers:Jesus and Simon the Leper asking Jesus to eat with him. The two Disciples, Mary Magdalene washing the feet of Jesus with her tears and drying them with her hair.

 

To belabor an infection is graceless under a wide sky with external nature configured as a baby bird tucked inside the skull. This isomorphy, this lava, this ointment. Denarrii and nard, innately transpired, exchange of spiritual value for material congealment, the world a plume of essences and innovations of the state. The poor, not so much the poor—spirit fingers, Turn!!-- as the glamour of the ruse. The grave shallow. The motherfucker buried once. The deformity. The earth spat him out, long tall bohunk said, black lunch pail, lint-lunged, stercoraceous, a snake in the baptismal, the baptismal painted harlequin green, the River Jordan righteously non-alluvial and free of trout, overtime pay, the motherfucker buried once, the deformity, and hauled up by his armpits his wild love now unfettered and perhaps demonology can be tempered by a life of agriculture and plaintive circumspection. A worm can romance itself. Anoint its head with its bottom. A’roint the crotch out of the palavering tongue of ablution, feminine and fabulist, and Judas he became a discursive animal framed by latitude, ducat as sigil, renounced virtue as infection, the blah blah orator of such monotony perfection quare and vulgar, and most rightly an intralinguistic renegade, an admirer of camel-as-machine.




34. The Comedians:Herod, two Counsellors, four Soldiers, Jesus and three Jews.

 

This welter is infirm. Knock. Knock. Finally, a word or two about napes. How many does it take. I drift westward with the Hammemites. A good goat will do that willingly. Their fiddles yellow and florescent. Wanna go make out behind Fuddruckers? To loll or shank. To harrumph or rake mercilessly, a rakish angle, a worm in the sky. Then the doctor says, Ok, Now it’s my turn to cough! Such misery is pellucid. Then the fat cannibal turns to the skinny one and goes, I prefer white meat, but the rosemary was an inspired addition to the recipe. Nothing is worse than the true lip of everything. Achhk, you bahhhhhstaaard! That's not me bagpipe! Please god right. Nothing is worse than a rueful ship of acetylene. Dalai Lama, Dolly Parton – there's a difference? Please god right. Nothing is purse gland a dual pimp whose phone rings. Please god right. Nothing is cursed atom a fuel chimp blue thong blings. Please god right. We must listen, for not listening is like placing a souvenir on the parapet, is like not insinuating that the globe is all fulsome indolent sans post-anal tail and that my love is not starling-like, O Lord, that your love is not star-nosed-mole-barking-on-a-chain-like, O Lord, and I am so happy to have been gifted with these oars as the green waters rise ceaselessly and a lecture is not like a lock of hair and an umbrella cannot be raped in the face like a lock of hair defying the starlite of pantomimes. Dear Herod: We all sprang from apes, but you didn’t spring far enough!!! Shalom!!! So the precinct commander says, Cocaine? Tastes like regular old angel dust to me! It is one thing to sequester a body. The moral of the story is: Don't count your lesions before you scratch. It is another thing to fume and contemplate in a rosary-ring of mittens on a hardwood floor in the fire-glow of generations a spot of tea in an inexplicable eye. A ten inch pianist. So Jesus turns to Judas and says, Why do you always have to be such a castrating bitch?




37. The Security Guards: Jesus covered with blood, carrying the Cross toward Calvary. Simon of Cyrene, Veronica wiping the blood and sweat from the face of Jesus with a veil on which the face of Jesus is imprinted, and other Women lamenting Jesus.

 

Veronica’s granny magic and second-face/simulacrum face/doppelganger vizard/faciality of witch nonce and white-limned apple blossoms of freckled pock cosmic expanse and she had swept her rooms dutifully and swept her bones and grief into another sky and the spring excess roiled each year in her surfeit-tongued mouth and daily and daily and orphic vernacular and her dulcet-throated warble applied ministrations but the walking did not cease: I thought I saw a bluebird sitting on a post . . .I heard the voice of Satan crying in the woods . . .I saw my own heart laying . . .black with blood . . . this retrograde and tribulatory path the fearful asymmetry of what? a multi-syllabic stob fashioned for outrung spectacle the lord traced his abdomen in the sand one consequence of decoding the enmity between empires God-becoming-man the enactment of local particulars as means of crow-fear and fatalism interred that is no way to dress a hog Billy I heerd you were quare as fuck catfish prophecy knocked out its head the house covered with lye the billowing grasses the smokehouse salted fatback for this the glory of walking of burden the darkling bluff of time the stob an article of faith wheelbarrow porn bonnet and brood breath as black-light and white trash stretched a suppleness not yet seen the solution to walk into the blue milk sky, the eyeball of the infant, the sunshine cure.




40.

Freaky the humus elongated spine. Complex o’ cyborg as complex of spirits. Suicidal prolapse. A related story: now I see Moloch has been with me. He is a hairy midwife. A team of atomic roses. Bedizened. Grasshopper collars the size of moonshine wings. He erases the hoariest speech. Realm blood blistered with plague. This is that very Moloch or Mak or Prometheus or Medea or Pinochet or Homer that arrayed in a cassock of horsehair speculums the mock apologies of embodied sweetmeats at night, and rakes the millefleurs in plowed and ghoulish lairs during the day, which ensconced and wrangled as it is much distortion erodes, the matteracks and their insidious flares spit and mugwump—the delay. This is the drag, the pimp, the ol’ ragtime huzzah, the man hag, the god bag, the whip of chimps, when the fusillade amps and racks and the fire burns little girls' dresses and engorges the one-horned mare, making the galaxy but a pilgrim of dubious birth, haggled on a trajectory rent and rare, ye will know, ye will know, Jesu Cristi, that I talk of nothing and therefore of the stammer invested in me divine ye into nothing. An ancillary pose: Alas, Love, the mask of night is on yr face, but fain do I dwell on this form, thou art more cunning than the inconstant moon, the flux and rapport of a mendicant’s face, and by light and by gore ye shall reconstitute and interface with silhouetted souls bereft of public distinction, hagiographic and serene, segmented and pleading, zone of flight and bond, renunciating and never amused salvific cowboy, irreducible schism in the anginal sky, does it please you now to light our way?

 

*portions of the titles are taken from the Ordo Paginarium of the cycle of York Mystery Plays

 

Tim Earley is the author of Boondoggle and The Spooking of Mavens. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.