Dragon Attack

IF THEY’VE COMPARED YOU ...

Eugenio Montale

If they’ve compared you
to the vixen, it will be for your prodigious
lope, your darting step
that joins and dissevers, that scatters
and freshens the gravel (your terrace,
the streets by the Cottolengo, the meadow,
the tree named after me all quiver with it,
happy, wet, and won)--or maybe simply
for the gleaming wave you broadcast
from the tender almonds of your eyes,
for the shrewdness of your easy stupors,
for the havoc
of shredded feathers your baby’s
hand can wreak with a tug:
if they've compared you
to a blond carnivore, the faithless
genius of the thicket (and why not to the foul
fish that shocks, the stingray?) it may be
because the blind had failed to see
the wings behind your slender shoulder blades,
because the blind had failed to see
the omen of your incandescent forehead,
the line I’ve etched in blood there, cross and chrism
charm calamity vow farewell
perdition and salvation: if they failed
to see you as more than weasel or woman,
whom will I share my discovery with,
where will I bury the gold I carry,
the ember hissing deep in me,
if leaving me you turn away from the stairs?


transl. Jonathan Galassi




An unusual and rather entertaining apocalypse is the third century Gospel of Bartholomew. This features a conversation with Beliar (“worthless”) the beast, whose name used to be Satan. He has been brought up from the abyss by Jesus as a curiosity to show a band of monkish visitors and is “600 yards long and 40 yards broad with 8-yard wings, bound by fiery chains and held by 660 angels.” The apostle Bartholomew interviews him while treading on his neck, a familiar image in art. Beliar tells the whole story: how he was the first angel to be created, how he refused to worship Adam and fell with his followers (only 600 of them here), how he wandered to and fro in the world, how he seduced Eve (his method was unusual: she drank his sweat mixed with water), how he punishes the souls of men and is punished himself, how he sends his minon demons out into the world to tempt.

Bartholomew also contains an early account of the Harrowing of Hell, told, (unusually) from Jesus’ point of view, and, even more remarkably at this early date, a first glimpse of the Virgin Mary as Queen of Hell.

-- Alice K. Turner, A History of Hell




INTERVIEW WITH
THE DEVIL

Jan 2005

“Hell is just the half of it,”
the Devil told me as
we both swum and flew
the ramparts of His domain,
“though its the greater part
of heart and laps forever
at the mind. Only Jesus
and certain whales have
fully harrowed here,
so dense and
dark with convuluted
fires no living man
can dream it and not
wake thrashing down
in drowning bubbles.”
The Devil shifted beneath
my feet as if unaccustomed
to bear the freight of living
soles, though I knew it just
to be a ruse to get
me to step off into
the immortal fray.
So I stamped one foot
on the base of His
serpent skull, reminding
Him to resume his
sooth of my harrow.
“Much has changed
here over the bright
millennia. We’re like
a suburb that has
swarmed its banks
to devour the province
and then the state,
so plentiful the things
you have come to damn.
Just last year we added
a circle for virtual addicts,
cartoofing ‘em in
a ditch of busted
up computers where
they are compelled
for all eternity to
watch real demons
play and pine for
the life they never
got around to.
“Fine,” I said, “May
JD Powers give you
a Gold Medal for such
model modalities. But
where are the vaults
of those lost and tossed
and too-named depths
we buried from the
Christian light of days?
The Devil groaned.
“Gimme a break!
It’s been 500 years since
Hamlet declared that there
were more things under
heaven and earth than
are dreamt by philosophy,
and all of ‘em fell here
in the reign of such
cerebral foolery! You’ve
sent an empire of blue
empyreia down in the
broken hulls of ships --
flat earths like falling
apples, every proper plate
of armor a lord could
hammer sealing off his
queen’s amor,
the two skulls which
the Cerne Giant once
held in his chalklike hand,
the entire contents of
Cerridwen’s keg,
even all semblance of
my topside self, hooves &
tail and wanton goat
pecker, all of it cast
down in a spiralling
yowl your empty churches
all choir. As you can see,
the rain of broken augments
is incessant, a blizzard
of torn flesh and outdated
names. To rule in Hell
is to wear a crown of
starry losses, and be
their dark keeper, Dis Pater
of the disposed and dispossessed,
doorman to the gates of
an eerily vast landfill
exactly under all you
slough off the eroding
continent you call a self,
massing up your other
at the bottom of the rear.”
Sated of my salt’s derange,
glutted on this whim,
I thanked the Devil for
the tour, clipped on
my paper wings, and lifted
up fro the mire of doom
to emerge as if from
water into the quiet of
this predawn room,
in the thick of sleepy,
not yet dead-enough todays.
The only sign of my
harrowing is a strand
of seaweed wrapped
around my wrist, trailing
the faintest inklike spoor
across and down to this
end where the poem, at
last, is free and fully His.




WELCOME TO THE ABYSS

2001

Since no animal can
make its own food,
the creatures of the
deeper waters live
a strange, almost
parasitic existence
of utter dependence
on the upper layers.
These hungry creatures
prey fiercely and
relentlessly upon each
other, yet the whole
community is ultimately
dependent upon the
slow rain of descending
food from above ...

-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

Whom filth plenished,
dearth devoured.

-- Finnegans Wake

Here in the abyssal ‘burbs
the roads are paved
by this incessant rain:
brokers and their broken
boats, pirates whose last
word was “whoops,”
victims of exploding
airlines descending
smaller to us from
much higher up.
We eat what we can.
The road through
our small world
is pure defecation and
inedible, indelible bone.
In our hood
it’s too dark to know
a face, but if you could
you’d be sorry.
We all have eyes
like extra-large
pie-plates and
huge jaws for catching
what we can.
Our diet’s
rounded with the
leavings of the leavings
of the leavings, and
less, a bite of
tiger shark, finger
of a gunman.
Oh how we dine
on all perdition.
Not much to see
round here but
the music never stops:
weird moans, trills,
clicks, and clatters
fill our nocturnal air,
a radar for appetite
and procreation.
We breathe the
inkiest of drink,
so dark and cold
and dense to be
the very heart
of the nihilist.
An edible grave.
We descended
seeking a little
elbow room in
a food chain too
tightly knit: grew
strong in our
abysms. We’ll live
forever since
everything you say
eventually falls
our way.
Welcome to the
Final Receipt, resting
place of all, Turd ‘Burb,
last house on the block
where we seize with
hungry jaws the
bitterest of God’s laws.