Indian Rope Trick

 As a child, it was always expected that I'd climb.

For the rope trick to work, the jamoora assistant must be obedient,

but I was always more likely to be a burning bride,

going up fast, but on my own peculiar vertical gradient.

In the trick, a rope is left coiled in a basket

at some distance in an open field like a baby at a fire station.

It will then begin to rise like a bhoot as the fakir tasks it,

straight up--it's only disbelief or cartoons that add the ululations.

I was the skipper's little daughter, my father in his linen suit

who read me Longfellow--The Wreck of the Hesperus--

and planted without knowing it, the ghost, the bhoot,

that sank my obedience and scotched the trick for both of us.

When the rope has risen, the child is sent out to climb,

disappearing in the clouds, not answering the fakir's call,

He follows behind with a knife and rose in his smile,

to chop her up, bring her down, and reassemble her after all. 

Do you believe in all that?

Or the tales the Upanishads tell?

Do you believe the Victorian accounts as fact?

And the zombie obedience of jamooras as well?

Of course, the trick is just bullshit.

I disappeared into Ginsberg and Grover Lewis--that's real--

reassembled myself, got high then got straight,

and put my queer shoulder to the wheel. 

________

For First Poems: Door To The Wilder Eye at Earthweal, hosted by my dear friend Hedgewitch. She wants to know what instilled in us "...the  maker's rage to order words." 

Notes: The earliest poem I can remember being thrilled by was Longfellow's poem about the Hesperus. My father read it to me and showed me the book--which I still have--so that I could find it again and read for myself, which I did many times. Later, I found the same visceral feeling of discovery when introduced to Dickinson, Ginsberg (from whose poem "America" I have taken my final line), and my man Grover Lewis, all of whom crashed into my orbit and altered my trajectory by the time I was 18. I come from a family of achievers, and my great love of poetry, music, baseball, and not much else came as a sharp disappointment to my parents. But, the die was cast, and as Emily wrote: "The Soul selects her own Society--Then--shuts the Door"

The Indian rope trick goes pretty much as I have described in the poem. It is probably a Victorian fiction from the time of Empire, but who knows? A jamoora is a child assistant, blindly obedient to the fakir or magician performing the trick. The term can be used simply to describe a mindless conformer. A bhoot or bhuta is a ghost. The Upanishads tell a fable similar to the rope trick, except this time it's a juggler whose juggled objects disappear, then come back down and reassemble. 

 

Agua

They search for water with their fat fingers
but would settle for water vapor, thin as faint praise
from a black-dress mother with her big back turned.

Visors are a view of the future,
misshapen fish-eye suns,
blank faces reducing enormous fires to cold coins.

Stumbling weightless vagabonds 
stab pennants into wastelands and wear our emblem,
the sprinting antelope carcass
multiplied like useless inflated money 
for buying phantoms from vacuums where skulls sing anthems

To agua that mummies crave and parade in dreams,
life sustained but life so desiccated it dissolves
for waste and want of agua.
_____

for Earthweal--"water."

The Peculiar Grammar of Ghosts

In the peculiar grammar of ghosts
a thing may weave around itself in a kind of claxon jazz
or whisper up the shiver-bone with an intent to make the place permanent.

Dip this in your eye-saucer babe--
let the penny drop on its edge in the old corpus callosum
where the grammar of your average ghost bursts up from the loam.

I'm telling you that ghosts aren't in the split wood of the vandaled hallway where the copper used to lay its head all venom-dozed inside its dark egg.

No. 

Listen.

Your really-there solid skull is just a rotunda to them.
It's an inside job, a throwing of the vox spiritus, with its own morphology, phonology, and colorful fucking patois.

So knock off straining the cosmic sandbox for that sublingual jolt, 
that glossolalia dune of Hot Truth, babe.
Stop drop and roll. 
Lie there and listen 
for the peculiar grammar of ghosts.

You are the baby on the monitor, a flesh pastry, a keeping-box
where spirits sometimes speak, like dry leaves falling
from the lips of not-there nightshades,
non-nuns with rulers more real than your surprised howls.
_______

for earthweal weekly challenge: "ghosts."