XVIII. Meniscus

XVIII. Meniscus

Much less apparent by their blending, my parents were born twenty-three

Days apart—June 23, married; and by December, without any real descent

At all, I was born—A bastard confounding modes as when the meniscus
Compensates for a defect of the column—Introduced distances amass
An island somewhere a blew-eyed Sycorax set off, which standard glosses
Entrust to Cyprus—If not Caliban’s dam, an exactitude then, of pia mater—

Blue modernized to eye circles—Onto the invested brain and spinal cord, pia mater
Projects its shadows—Further into involutions and inducing factors of twenty-three
Enigmas, scuttled meridians of presacral vertebrae—Their fused sacral plates glossed
To yield up the un-twinned, odd prime—John Dee required exact timing of the descent—
Otherwise, the Sun’s fuming charcoal is not Cancer ascendant, but Leo amassing
Great Hyperion’s loci—Taking his mobility into account, it is precisely a meniscus

Of mirror-polished obsidian like full moon eclipses—It was a concave meniscus

Girding the lake empire Tenochtitlán, which fell to Cortés in 1521—Pia mater,
Making gold of that—Anatomists would have been completely beyond the amassed
Acquaintance of William of Stratford—As an unperfect actor, from sonnet XXIII—

Being receptive for the hallucination to enter—Perhaps, it was a bookseller’s descent
Into fire—Vicary’s Anatomy of the Body of Man misadded by a censor’s short gloss—

Retrieving a flame-curled text among the flinted purge of plague carts—Glossaries
Account, no less eliding the subarachnoid space that they might alter replenished menisci

Of cerebrospinal fluid—One of only 15 to have survived the Spanish conquest, and descent
From a Jesuit’s irregular blocks, the Dresden Codex’s vigesimal scale, with the pia mater’s
Tight junctions between capillary endothelium, permeate impenetrable frames—Pages 16-23

Of the Dresden Codex, brought to Europe with John Dee’s obsidian mirror, amassing

The Mayan lunar series, the death-bringing goddess of that satellite; known for amassing
Water damage from firebombing, such pages adhere to glass, in the manner a nativity glosses
To win easy praise—In front of a human work—Full turns of the DNA helix occur every 23
Ångstroms—Where can the event of my birth claim such priority; though cartilage meniscus
Wears away, terrors of one’s own lack of substance—Emma Bovary’s eye color, pia mater’s
Constrained ventricles of the blood-brain barrier—Fill the superior part—In descending

Hours, we search shattered registers of books; abjure trodden thistles as our descendants.

When the Spanish hoisted anchor from rock and nopal-strewn Tenochtitlán amassing
Gold, volcanic mirrors—All the cast of Aztec conjurers used a fated book—Pia mater
Overlays three of Shakespeare’s plays, and the only satisfactory meaning lies in his gloss
Of anatomical texts—Customers thrown the divinatory kernel, deferral of a bowl’s meniscus—
You have come to see yourself in the mirror; you have come to consult the book—23

Latin letters, expanded to 52, transcribe it—Descending Bebelplatz, site of a book burning, 23 Temporal divisions gloss the hour before reckoning familial incongruity with pia mater—Flamed barks, at the three-way intersection of a meniscus between you and me, all of the amassed manuscripts would be drowned.