JEWEL TRANCE

I know something crazy’s going on I don’t know what
but when I’m an apple
when I’m imagining a fountain of jewels pouring out
of the wax loopholes of this night
and nothing relaxes my nerves which sing like cornsilk
tassels
and the man I am leaves me: I

am a bell pepper, I am a quince,
I am the gold leaves
blackening and beginning to ache and a rainbow
silently appears in the night sky
suddenly you look up, What heard it? I can’t count
the bone hours until I am black
until my skin sings with the wings of gulls and air currents
all I know is this redeeming voice
this jewel this ruby this sapphire this emerald this gold skull ring
around human fingers which dissolve into a haunting river.

I wrap myself in the candle of her arm
and hold close to her warm breath
I let myself begin to hum, as the night
closes around me like a cat: and I listen hard ---

the walls are gone, the planets are circling
our earth for a reason
they circle our sun but they circle our earth
I watch them arc in the sky each night
Venus, Mars, Jupiter and the moon pared so thin
I am amazed --- rubies swirl in gold rivers
pouring from loopholes in the night, which fall
into the quivering pool: the waterfall made a gash
in the ferns the foam mixed
with what churns in my nerves, her hair floated, was moss
the salamander smiled on the rockface of the skull
the Phantom wore on his finger: I picked the vine out of air
I tested it, it was strong, it was rooted
in the earth, I pulled up and swung off
I selected another in midair, I was my father
dreaming of Tarzan when he was a boy
(I had a ring with a secret in it ---
a light) I crawled under the house where the ashgray dirt cracked
I heard my mother creaking the floor over my head
I heard my bones crack
I heard the clock tick
I heard the gun cock
I heard the stitches rip
I heard the cobwebs tear placentas and my ring was broken
from the chain, I searched among the ashes for it,
I picked up a string of molecules which led through a dead bird’s
neck,
I followed it like a rosary, a necklace of jeweled
DNA beads, I climbed into the attic, I crept
I slid, I continued to urge
myself through my wounds, the hatred, the kerosene
mixed with urine and sold for whiskey …

I step on tiny mice feet I walk like sparks
which ignite the ground with heartbeats I twinkle
lightly
I am not alone, the night sings to me of the teeth
which reveal blood during the day: during the day the haze
lulls the city; I descend in the Velvet Turtle,
a womb bar, and sit in the naugahyde animal;
dicecups popping against the bar are riot sticks against someone’s
head, clacketing horses running down strikers,
violent laughter, click click
this is the sound of the counter in the man’s hand
as people go out of the museum
Why? Why? My son asks and that is
because the leaves unfurl again in the tormenting clear light –
the white rainwashed eucalyptus against blue sky
the blackbird’s purple and green iridescence, the red eyes
of black coots with white beaks, the swan
I walked up to disrespectfully raised
its cobra neck and snorted a warning
(don’t mess with big birds)

this is the time for jewels, this is the time for swords
this is the time for bows and arrows and leather thongs
this is the time for horses and apples this is the time
for light to ring from the ropes of water thrown with a thud
into the dust
this is the time for thundering hooves
muffled in the dust the turmoil of skin and bones
strung on the testicles of night this
is the time when people begin to lie down and dream of the furs
they have killed for and in which they sleep
this is the time
when wheels click and turn and bells
ring and elevators open
and people drop money into the coke machine
and this is the time when a woman smiles at a man
and this is the time when that man is working on the electrical
system
which powers the computers which process your checks
and he drops a wrench
and blue and yellow sparks weld him into silver forever.

Now everyone is working with flashlights.
This is the time to send out for pizza, this is the time
to get closer, to notice someone
next to you you’ve worked with for two years
because bombs are falling outside this is the time
the arrows sprout
in the boy’s belly in the surf
because our bananas cost lives and this is King Kong’s
pink mouth opening in the night sky dreamed of
by lonely men who create their own loneliness
following a woman inside them they can’t touch, this is
the voyage
Ulysses went on and that I go on
this is the Quest for the Holy Grail, this is the fingering
of the bloody robe of Christ, this is the putting on of the
priest’s collar
and the ruby and diamond ring of the pimp –
this is the sable around the neck of the Eskimo woman
who lives in the snow, the woman who chews leather
all day and makes clothes so the man can hunt
seals and skin whales and this is when he feels the blue
revolver
of an oil pipe slide beneath his fingers replacing the woman:
this is the story of the grandpa who walked
and walked and walked because his wife was in love with
her brother
this is the story of two men emasculated by their wives’
older brothers
and who let their gift for language go
who lost the dream their mother gave them: this is
me and I’m walking along dreaming of what I finger:

This is the rosary they prayed for the conversion of Russia
which clicked tickertape from the stock market
but was the DNA chain: nucleotides floated
in the warm oceans of my cells: ribosomes opened
to receive amino acids according to the tender voice which sang
along the silver bloodwire of the endoplasmic
reticulum: the zipper twisted apart and black strings pulled
the spider off the mirror and two cells
moved:
ruby cytosine, sapphire guanine, emerald thymine, diamond
adenine, each found its mate
in the snow which fell
silently around the Eskimo couple on top of the world.

The sky is blue
dreams are given to color and everything tells itself forever.
The things we have to get used to are not supposed to ever
be gotten used to. I don’t want to get used to blood
which pours from the snows of my forehead, in the form of oil.
I don’t want to get used to the eye of the man
napalmed by accident on the last day of the war
whose eye tilted like a fish eye, a specific fish eye
which I killed, a six foot sailfish which fed the pigs.

I won’t ever get used to this blood and shit.
I don’t believe death is senseless. Those planets
orbit our earth for a reason and that reason
is this harmony of skin, it contains power in music
and we are shutting off the music in the pipes.
I know a man who has lost and I know I have lost.
I won’t ever get used to the catastrophe of killing stars
by making sparks against a person’s skin
which ends up like the lady addicted to shock therapy.

The lion’s eyes are rubies
in the night sky they are voices of dead poets
they are my ancestors their bones are jewels and
they speak to me tonight. A meteor
averaged a diamond every thirty square inches: a hunk of iron
full of diamonds fell out of the night sky. Why?

Copyright © SF 1973 Gene Berson