Smoke Signals

Colonel Collins (who published
his impressions in 1798) reports
that among the Port Jackson
((Australia)) tribes, one becomes
a medicine man if one slept on
a grave. “The spirit of the deceased
would visit him, seize him by the
throat, and opening him, take out
his bowels, which he replaced,
and the wound closed up.”

-- Eliade, Shamanism

When I was 9 or 10 my brother
and I would alternate our daily
fisticuffs with combat of another
sort, playing games like Battleship
and Stratego. The latter took
forever to complete, competing
armies in a world-wide campaign,
emulating our century’s worst
and our familial curse
on a brutal field of dreams.
We’d always play in my brother’s
room, listening to mid-60’s
rock-n-roll on WLS, the family
dog Shep (really my brother’s)
curled in a corner with one eye
trained on us as brother and
brother had it out the abstracter
way, our infernal proximity
writ on the world’s crass stage.
Being both my mother’s sons
--well fed on healthy but
colonic foods--one us was sure
to fart but good during the long
courses of that game, a
really bad one which we came
to call Stratego, eponymous
gas for the piled corpses
of ancient battlefield. Those
farts seemed ripped from hell,
scattering our armies in
a gassy rout for a good five
minutes, chasing us from
the room. Stratego thus became
a code for us, a rare alliance
between two sons who
fought for our whole
childhoods for a champ’s
portion that was spoiled
by the bum conditions
of our home and time.
Whoever nosed the
affront first would declare
Stratego to the other,
offering fair warning
of the presence of a
swarming mushroom cloud.
Old father, is a problem
named thus solved, or are
names just masks for
a greater perplexity’s assault
up from deeper ground?
The Sibyl’s sooth was
was just a swoon on sulphuric
gas up from a fissure in
the Delphic cave; her
stricken gibberish (she
was not permitted to
leave the room as we were)
in some broke-bowelled
torrent was a scat only
the priests could interpret
and pass as doom or
boon of Delphi’s
upper lower god.
Are farts like sneezes
irruptions of Your harsh
black pale into our days,
rude whinnies of a
horse we ride we
rarely know we’re riding?
There’s a priesthood
for all the body’s rants--
interpreters of dreams,
phlebotomers of the
the body’s brute terrain,
hapuscribes of death-throes
and dowsers of the sneeze:
As if all the body’s
orifices fissured and
fizzed forth troths
beneath self-knowledge
and control. When I was
having my first seizures
I sometimes smelled a
draft of something worse
even than farts, a dead-
man’s rot-soup smell,
spooring from the undersides
of whatever frame
stuck and held in my
downward-whirling mind --
It came to me once in
Boy Scout Camp; I sniffed
around the tent at the bland
green cots trying to figure
where came the smell
as the horrid vertigo
began to grip my mind.
That smell was like a
sudden black hand with
a palm of votive rot,
corrupting me for good.
Why must Your ecstasies
all fly with wings of shit?
Why must we root in
graves to whiff the
eternal sense of it?
Why the dismembering of
sense with so brutal hammer
and tongs, despoiling one
life intro pieces, flesh
cooked from bone in
cauldrons burning at
the bottom of the world?
Why are agony and
horror and disgust
the three cups embroidered
on the tabard of Your
tribe, filled with the dregs
of every yearn and ache
to go rotten in the world?
Years later, when my sister
got married, during a very
rare reunion of my family,
my two brothers and I
stepped outside to stretch
our legs a bit and safely
loose a rash of reechy
farts. “Mom’s cooking does
it every time,” my older
brother said as he klaxoned,
and we each sublimely
smiled at that one utter
truth between us.
But it’s really not my mother’s
fault, not that way; bread
and water from any table
makes us each shout
our Strategoes. We walked
down that dark suburban
street a ways and back,
sons of a demon opera,
singing all the names
our darker filitude from
those vents beneath all
proper mention, three tubas
blatting from three
corners of the orchestra,
three whales spouting in
bass-cleff harmony. The
dissonance which rudders
us in such assy gasses
keeps us here on earth
where hell’s just a fart
away and your ephiphany
makes me wonder about
the integrity of the ego
when those voices
far below are hollering
in unison Stratego!