II. Voir double

II. Voir double

Double sorted, by translations of two nightstand books we are defined

Continuous at their singularity—Fuentes’s The Orange Tree (1994) and Night

Without Day, Billetdoux (1987)—Nostredame tasted a spiced, foolscap texture of sweet

Grass; sweet clover much less so, of coumarin that made the cattle bleed

From their fly wounds—Rabelais moved this reverence for plants; a physician

Piss-taster amounted to baptized urchins in street runnels, so he dreamt of Zohar—

Torquemada rains gore on a converso ancestor; he grafts his calfskin copy of Zohar

Under a plank spotted with pomegranate, which contains a seed of its defining

Eden as an Arab’s naranj grew blood-tinted in Etna’s dust, to pale in atria, or this physician’s

Plot—Michel, who understood Daniel, whose topaz host speaks for multitudes, one night

Marking a flask from Toledo, a flame tree kernel of the grass woman—Death’s bittersweet

Anticipation, Malinalli, Malinche—We know this, slumbering in our texts—Lucas grasps blood

Regarding Blanche—Moctezuma is frozen mid-dice by a beheaded horse god, with bloody

Clots; withered after an uprising in Veracruz—Purplish like cacao, out of the pod’s crooked teeth—Zohar

Tells of Esau’s stretched so to spare Jacob’s neck—Malinche speaks of a bastard maker, Aguilar, who seeded sweet

Oranges in Chactemal, and from whose mouth she drew the roots as Cortés’s translator—Defining

For him, a Nahuatl sapling with pull-out jaws, its scouring resin, chicle—Each subsequent night’s

Encounter of two naked eyes amid the fur that achieve recounting without paraphrase—The physician

Supplements calcined shells with her directions for a herbal-honey confiture, and yet the physician

Queries the animated germ flask, why a flame tree—How, by the pulp of our fingers, the blood’s

Salt and colloid pressed by that sharp word, wife, do we infiltrate the knot of pleasure’s minute, night-blind

Vessels—Malinche’s tree sanctifies the rite of lashing cloak and huipil in red barbed flowers—To Zohar,

Conjugal life is likewise a divine repository—Although she was not the Conquistador's wife, lacking a sweet

Orange crown, she presents him with Sun’s inferior mirage; bent, and raising its breadth defining

Quetzalcóatl, the fifth Sun—Colón’s exodus evaded the moorings of resentment and ship worms defining

An inflamed lunar eclipse (1504)—Grand Hôtel, Cabourg; they are assured of their singularity as the Aztec physician’s

Jaguar bone rasps mankind’s salvage of Mictlan corpses; inseparable shell splinters of the sweetest

Molluscs finished in the briniest estuaries—The Lake Texcoco evaporite distributed on the blood

Highway of Moctezuma’s subjects, or the sidestepping crab’s beard of a trailing comet, for the blind

Purchase of ephemeris; the fermented fruit’s paper double separating into pairs—According to Zohar,

Fish, both terrestrial and aquatic, are open graves; our intimacies palpate valves and fine membranes as Zohar’s

Cave text is redeemed from wrapping fish—Nostredame’s discourse with Malinche, defining

Aguilar’s death by Plague charbons; her submerged grave (1549-50) and mestizo children the Provençal physician

Summons along signposts of Moorish citrus, for all these exiles he assembles his first Almanac—Blind

With longing for the tongue of the conqueror—Five of the Unicorn tapestries (1495-1505) feature sweet

Orange trees; their pips studded Numancia’s southern ramparts ransomed by a Genoese, Colón fleeing Inquisition bloodbath—

Of “to have” or “to be” of possession—Cervantes’s El cerco de Numancia (1582) is the blood of Zohar’s

Meaning, of the basis of existence—Cerco, a Spanish enclosure, or an Italian lookout—Both are the blind physic

Missing your gnawed mouth the ebb tide had opened awaiting the marine birth of a defining, sweet word—