XXXIV. An obsidian burl

In the ladder gyre of the Age of Broeudhe-bas:

Grimm's lawyer gains the heir to a corpse of hardened ash—
His first voyage of spiritual apocalypse will be undertaken upon
The tipping point of ten thousand tons of monastery burnt black;
His psalms of revelatory verse, lacking pain and fevered speech,
Grinned without color, discount his claim to lyrics of fire.

Brittle monstrosities surface in data from scientific journals,
From skeletal pages fragile, faintly yellow and nearly
Transparent.
Asymmetrical bodies, earthen and nightmarish, emerge from
Paper folded
In unquiet thirds, rashly unearthed from extinct sediments.

Disrupted small light begins to swirl within an obsidian burl
Separated from the good and secretly buried under soil
Once the ruins of a winter empire in the valley of the sun.
    

XXXIII. Three Silences

In the second gyre of the Age of the Recluded Star:

The infected hermitage looms over exiled roofs,
An island in a sea of wide chimneys crumbling,
The heated metal edge of its the ridgepole steaming
In sleet rain falling, sifted by winds, while shadows
And doubted apparitions root themselves in water.

Three silences dowered with outside properties,
Three ghosts obedient to outside laws, each carrying
All their owned disbelief: a woman protected by a shroud
Of flinching caterpillars, her right eye is blue—

Two malign green eyes carved in the upraised hands
Of a stony saint—and a child prodigy skull-split
With ink-dark blood braided into an imperial coat.
    

XXXII. The red-masked summer

In the gyre vaunted of the Age of the Tilpimultuk Truce:

Strife in the skittish beginning of the red-masked summer—
Several hooded, whispering devils appear on the eclipse;
They stand outside doors of imminent peril yet never enter,
While odd and discordant young frogs overrun all the land,
Crying loud and full-throated, for two hundred and
Twenty hours.

A wise and subtle advocate suffers a transformation on the
Fourth day
After the first volumes of his monumental work are published
By virtue of his office. He is led by a string of sudden and
Desperate crimes
Into brotherhood with pirates, abiding day and night in
Their ships.

Within a small empty village a white-soled girl hallucinates,
Her tears astir with joy and hope, dreaming from perilous
Heights,
Winged as the sunbird, in circling flight above a twice-blest
Realm.
    

XXXI. A map of midwinter stars

In the seventh gyre of the Age of the Shielded Immaltant:

The eighth man laid upon a rough table is the largest object
Within a single niche lighted by wax candles carved
With a red crescent moon and a map of midwinter stars.
This spare form is dressed in ragged and torn cloth,
The raiment of those that are slain by their own hand.

His banner is a yellow sycamore leaf torn and caught under
The wooden haft of a knife sunk deep in a gentle heart.
His feet point towards a door low in the western wall,
Towards a destination that must be reached by discovery.

His head rests on clay bricks stamped with the edge
Of finger-rings.
His legacy bequeaths the stilled heat and light of day,
In four mismatched jars, to forty-four thousand children.
    

XXX. The king's niece

In the dialected gyre of the Age of the Yequirthed Crisis:

Three sons and a daughter of a northern king,
Exiled in silence—
Nothing known of their unexplained crime and shame—
Are harassed by the fearsome army of the king's niece,
A warrior much renowned for her great malice, cruelty of will,
And the thick veil shrouding her forehead and left eye.

Pity her, this gnawed figure of strange vibrant power
Wrapt in clouds of catastrophe half like blood,
Half like fire, forever in the shadow of her white brother,
Who died at ten years, his tongue thickened with poison.

By cause and reason of pain, and by reason of guilt,
She will endure the continuous suffering of one accursed;
Only to strangers in battle does she ever seem fortunate.
    

XXIX. To the wife of Goats-for-Horses

In the fourth gyre of the Age of the Sinquel Memorial:

An interpretation of a wild dream half-remembered:
The stones of the pit cast out of your stripped grave
Will be trodden under foot by your foolish beloved,
Who will emerge from middle bones and other books,
Waiting for the sky to break over lost deserts, lost islands.

Your husband's spirit-stirring drums will speak fear
To a god in a crest of birch-trees on a gray-clouded rock.
He brings forth the roaring of the seawall taken down,
Decimating a becalmed population steadfast in its refusal.

All those who have come before will ascend soundlessly
Upon the abdomen's third mute breath. Thus cleansed
And lightened, they fly to the Dome of Intermittency.
    

XXVIII. A battered limestone head

In the clauted (cleated?) gyre of the Age of the Good Remainder:

After feigning death, the secondary wife of the white
Moth pharaoh
Provides part of the key to unlock the wooden shrine
Of the mysterious occupant of the Dessoae tomb,
The faceless hero with a battered limestone head
Sheathed in pearls, his skull pierced with a gold arrow.

The noble face on the unstained coffin had been broken
In the notorious century following its discovery,
Needlessly mutilated by the hostile scrutiny of scholars
Seeking clues without the holy quality of mercy.

Forty minutes before an unequalled storm of rain and fire,
Earthquakes and gravity halted the discredited work;
Two upper spans of majestic high-ceilinged rooms
Were obliterated.
    

XXVII. The penitent coward

In the fifth gyre of the Age of the Middle Gohlguanarchy:

A bone-linked pair of poets die without heirs in year 13.
Their unrhymed words strike bronze upon a secret chamber
Beneath a vacant labyrinth: two royal monuments
Carved into the skull shape of mummified fetuses
With four miniature faces of goat, ram, boar, stag.

The penitent coward who was never a killer,
A conqueror, or a liberator, finds himself far from his goal.
He becomes the blackskin companion of a hired archaeologist
Whose knowledge of his monstrous subject is unique.

They unearth the abandoned book of a heretic coregent;
This burned and scratched object of temporal power
Seizes weak minds with dreamless sleep and early death.
    

XXVI. Agot's piteous error

In the hooded gyre of the Age of the Bunin Kings:

First introduced under obscure names and disguises,
The Fool with a narrow forehead and one subdued eye,
Cloaked within a foxskin hood with tail dangling,
Will confound the throned monarch wrapt in pease-straw,
Whose cold wounded hand grasps two fatal aspects.

At the hastened hour of the forthcoming Sun,
Malice in the blood whips the summer sea high.
With all dread ramifications of Agot's piteous error,
Floodwaters shatter the immense vault of the quarry fortress.

The burning children of Anterrabae and Shukimanu
Walk in the master's footsteps, house to house,
Village to village, clothed in unapproachable light.
    

XXV. Three silent virtues

In the itinerant gyre of the Age of the Sinquel Memorial:

The clouded child marked with royal wounds and
Grievous wonder,
Born in subdued circumstances to a wedded pair of captains
During the ice-locked border-war between winter nations,
Will unshaken bear the assault of glorious engines,
Their rude throated noises become his summer lullabies.

When twelve years older, the boy will meet with much
Injustice;
All quality, pride and circumstance becomes counterfeit.
The narrow line of ambition fails with unlucky deeds;
Faith nailed down hard to a well-worn place can yet be lost.

In solitude, with tranquil mind, fate recovers the gentle skill
Of three silent virtues felt along the heart of the man,
Immortal richness greater than the tribute of all his tribe.
    

XXIV. Lightened by one alone

In the gyre eclipsed of the Shielded Immaltant:

The congregated powers of heaven's antique empire,
Built on eldest faith, tainted by cruelty, stained by blood,
Will make garden cities into a lampless unpeopled world
Lightened by one alone, whose fierce reproach and
Reluctant prayer
Hurls up a tinge of gray in the void world.

Thirty witnesses will return, with thirty infants,
Nameless vagrant dwellers in houseless woods
Walled with witchcraft and flower-inwoven jasper,
Green to the very door of the long absence.

Seven common names of the unextinguished fire,
Stamped onto the frame of twelve windows in one form,
Usurp the codex vigilans of the unremembered throne.
    

More doodles from Tsitao-utna's pencil

    

    

Tsitao-utna's pencil

The smallform of Tsitao-utna is invisible, but her herald, her sigil, is a small blue bowl. When she wishes to speak to me, I take the bowl from its place in the cupboard and set it on the table and put a pencil beside it. Her voice comes from a place 14 diumalks above the bowl. A diumalk is approximately a half-inch, according to Tsitao-utna.

Through a period of trial and error, I discovered that Tsitao-utna prefers a Turquoise drawing pencil with a soft dark lead, 6B. With this sort of pencil, she seems to converse longer and more naturally, with less distraction. She often seems hurried when she speaks and I believe I can perceive a certain tension in her voice. I think she is intimidated by Ga-ukogomen. Sometimes when she speaks to me, I imagine her looking over her shoulder, afraid she will see the na-awult. I imagine her as a young woman, with long dark hair, very straight and waist-length. I have no real reason to picture her this way, but that is the image her voice sounds like.

One day, a few hours after she had spoken to me, I picked up her pencil and began to doodle. The marks I drew are represented below in figure 1. This has happened to me many times since. I don't know what they mean, just as I don't know what the ecteiroglyphs mean, but I have ideas. I think the first doodle represents Tsitao-utna in some way. I believe figure 3 is a representation of Ga-ukogomen and figure 4 is about Nihr Avna-attu. I don't know if these doodles are their names in written form, or if these figures tell a part of their stories, like a lineage or a history. I have to conclude that these forms are for the future to decipher and are not for me to know. I am just the stenographer.



The forms that are closed are filled with yellow color because I feel it is somehow important to emphasize that those forms are closed. The forms that are unclosed, that have gaps between the lines, have a different significance than the closed forms.

XXIII: Books of a feather-robed sage

In the sixth gyre of the Age of Four Wandering Moons:

A new mood stirs under those yellow leafed boughs
Which shake
Within the impressed abstraction of scrolls from both
17th centuries.
A spring of words overflows the closest drawn goal in steel—
Poetry generated in a wide range of free-given street noise,
Raising delicate hopes for the strength of the resolved city.

The first two lines of the books of a feather-robed sage
Written on a thousand rolls of silk kept for all good:
Elusive time immediately experienced is frequently unfair.
Question or believe, but light travels slowly within the grave.

From the tale of the count who has not yet named a successor:
The countess arrays her daughter in her most resplendent robes
Clear-cut as laquered satin, gently shaped as the lining
Of a seashell.

XXII. Illuminating the lotus spirit

In the fortenth gyre of the Age of the Nascent Vaunthald:

The hooded frog, a great silver boss on its iron forehead,
Stands above the red cedar temple for seven hundred years,
Guarding the imperial headdress wrapped with silk wires.
Granite clouds coiled and dusky loom over balanced pools
Illuminating the lotus spirit before the perception of every eye.

A rough devouring entity with no rules or principles
Will live unknown and dominate the hollow crown;
According to true etiquette he had vowed his constancy
To an allegiance lost not in fire nor earth but in water.

Black rain sickness will lay siege swift as a shadow,
Livid outlines forming round the mark of measuring metal
Stamped in the reddened throat of the secret usurper.

XXI. A fatal child

In the ladder gyre in the Age of the Bunin Kings:

Behold, in a field thick inlaid with yellow patines
Of summer roses,
The flower of men, a fatal child driven by the deep power of joy,
Indifferent to restless violence surrounding the pendant world,
Ignorant of the bright sunset gold of painted pomp and blind
To the glare of glass thrones charged with mystic change.

A long entwisted circle of allies bound by sympathy in blood
To this Queen, will stand in her proper greatness and hold out
Against great thousands, when monarchs play the tyrants
In the barren mile of the Mediterranean's common age.

The Kindly Race, never-resting, with gentle work
And endless care,
Diffuse the false art of ancestral sermons wreathed
In golden theaters,
Unloosing the chained foot of cold winged Oumesan.

XX. The ironic peer

In the second gyre of the Age of the Glass Council:

The herald of a hideous winter, careless of what he brings,
Comes with stout rage strapped hard to the locked thunder
Of heavy machinery lumbering under the inland sea.
His rude marshal counts random correlations and predictions
In a given splatter of yolk, wine, grain and gravel.

A seafaring force from the cavernous island of adamantine
Confounds him with news from all emerging nations
And a patriot's blood well-spent in a blinding landscape
Of milk-white sand overflown with the divinity of myth.

The ironic peer, drawing a line of natural light
And simple color
With a cart map and tripod compass, will guide the flagship
Through unwilling sleep, driven outward into godlike hardship.

XIX. The fall of Nagarjuna

In the gyre vaunted of the Last Gohlguanarchy:

Eighteen thousand watch a stark dorsal cross rise
In the sky behind the toxic brim of Jirreshnag's moon
Fallen in dim eclipse, air shorn of disastrous twilight.
The sole ruined shareholder of an isolate empire
Sends them forth into serried ranks of horizontal mist.

Their passage through air begins with a pair of hours
When the broad sun new-risen weighs heavily between
Two slaves.
The second one in the light of a double-edged threat
Cuts and binds brass and stone to blunt the lion's paws.

Against the wreckful siege of battering days,
Nagarjuna's gates of steel in rocks impregnable
Are no stronger than summer's honey breath.