V. Les filés des étoiles

V. Les filés des étoiles

The river-water was sombre and weedy, full of little shoals of needle-fishes and their shadows, of curling water-snakes and the triangular divisions of flow around peebles and borders. This mild blue, here, was to be seen in that terrain. –A.S. Byatt’s “A Lamia in the Cévennes: Stories of Fire and Ice” from Elementals (1992)

Stations of the lion on assumption of the Portuguese, who tacked the volta do mar before the Low Countries writhed Joost de Hondt’s Leo Belgicus (1611); the mapmaker whose globe rechristens Vermeer’s Astronomer (1688), and as with cold

Currents of sargassum circling the Azores, in highest summer variabilities, the westward rock rose at the bottom of their wells—Rosary of the ocean with hollow beads, to spindrift the Keyser manifest on Hollandia from Texel (1595) and the Mauritius from Madagascar to VOC Surabaya—On board, Pieter Platevoet arranged the Southern constellations dark

To the Ptolemies, and the Welser and Fuggers displacing the Medici from Augsburg, until their counsel, Johann Bayer, lent the Greek and Latin organizing principles for Uranometria (1603) naming deep

Sky objects by magnitude, before Messier and Méchain; absolutely

Breaching the objective of one’s focus, in want of the computation of orbits, sighted the first non-comet anomaly that would be a catalog, the Crab nebula (M1), on the Southern horn of Taurus (August 28, 1758)—One of the clear,

Or at least remaining, alibis of narration, when one went too far away alone, which Edith and Little Bear found in Elementals (1992), is vanadium

Second-most abundant transition metal of seawater, having drawn from the planed cerulean, this, from an index on their shared QM2 transatlantic crossing, with status consideration and the only Planetarium at sea, of five orbitals from the d-block, at niche 23, vanadium—

That toggles electrons among its shells, with color changing the highest virtue among spectators, fathomed as turns of fastenings from one of Cristina Iglesia’s Celosías housed in the Carré d'Art of Nîmes the color of vanadinite reddening when cold;

Decrepitates, due to its lead content, when heated—This currency, principally an alloy of copper and tin, as far from the Gallic mint in the British Museum, a coin of the colony with convenient pig trotters forged in place of the living sacrifice, for its veterans were paid in the seven hills of Nîmes, and pointing to a clear

Fiscal disconnect; the challenger already known by his imprint, Caesar divi filius and then, Caesar Imperator, beyond the decisive naval victory at Actium (2 September 31 B.C.E)—The spring with a dark

Lineage; traced by no less than Gaius Julius himself in the seven of eight books he lived (58-49 B.C.E.), the Volcae (VI.24); Arecomici, like many who supplied the war, who were made citizens for their sensible, on-site well and bronze press, arise from beyond the longest river to reach the sea, the Weser; veisa meaning slow-moving to near stagnation in the deep

Parts as the mephitic, algal mist of the swimming pool in the Cévennes, with glimpses of an alien reeling where harbor water and outdone quinqueremes might have churned; the Romans caring not for volatility in itself, but the result—Absolutely,

The crocodile and palm spray’s obverse with Augustus, the laureate, and waning crescent of the man who finished, the general, Agrippa—Absolutely

Stronger, for the dialogue carried on with oneself, and the cohesive splendor of the poison shirt by which Hercules is turned on his head, at last, into a woman—α Herculis, Rasalgethi, or the Head of the Kneeler; replete with titanium and vanadium

Oxides dominating the M stars; limb darkened, and cooling for their full fusion chains—Of deep

Reading; after the Editor of Sartor Resartus (1836), who may have been Jane Carlyle, in custody of Oceans of Hochheimer, a Throat like that of Ophiuchus—The latter is from the thirteenth child of the Zodiac, containing seven Messier globular clusters as Sagittarius; spearheaded by α-Ophiuchi, or Rasalhague, of the physician equally matched by turns of his question, and his own appetite—Reading Keats’s marginalia of from December 1817 and January 1818 assume a reactivation of tuberculosis due to cold,

Or rather, vitamin D deficiency, for the underlined, That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge, / In the Artic sky (II.709-710) might have been meteor showers from the 23rd largest constellation, Serpens, calumniating Northern skies in July, and pieced by its head and tail as any traumatic birth—Little Bear, in clear

Noncooperation; or is it incapacity, of their principal investigation, has yet to qualify the twelve Bayer constellations supplementing the Almagest, from the South, which encompasses a menagerie—Dark

Workings of the ophis into the symbolic loss, the omphale at Delphi, until all are indebted to the steward’s impeccable fans in their dark

Coffees, in the fashion of Goethe’s Italian Journey (1786-1788) for which Edith Wharton and her consort boarded the steamer, Vanadís (1888)—Absolutely,

There was no wall of water, only a duct in the hot and cold partitioning of sea air, and there they understood the Sasanian reverence for fire; for ritual use, core-molded ointment jars with sulfur impurities later applied to glance the blue feathers in Sun—Followed by a showing of Truffaut’s first real film, Les Mistons (1957) in the Arène Edith won't visit during the day with its live shows—For the reek of iron and sulfur of blood globins, from the same uncombined flocculent of calderas melting marginally above boiling water of their baths synthesized by stars exceeding ten solar masses—Clear

Of patrons, at perhaps at the advent of the Perseids, she might reconsider—Little Bear digresses on what he had learned of the five stars of the Southern Ara, the majority of which are blue-white sequins on the lace-patterned brocade (lacrocade) of the Milky Way; the Thymiaterion, or a censer, and dedicated after the Titanomachy, for it was the Ara of Hercules before the Ara of Peace (13 B.C.E.)—In the better applications of futurity, the contact process forces sulfur trioxide onto the vanadium

oxide (V2O5) catalyst; otherwise fuming and uncollectable, for sulfuric acid depressing the freezing point on Europa, and allowing for the possibility of sub-surface oceans—Arrival is the month of Sextilis; before August 13, 8 B.C.E., when martial sects and below were devoted to the high priestess, the Aventine Diana, along with the immortal laborer, a Golden Hercules of the open-air cattle market, from the Forum Boarium, reputed for its first gladiatorial contests of the abattoir; between birth's most savage incidents of a plebeian or patrician woman’s existence and the fixed odds of the Empire’s unruly detainees—Rome thus planted itself in Nemausus deep

In the hexastyle of the Maison Carrée emptied of its six Vestales, where Augustine monks sometime quartered; echo their teacher from Hippo on the rationes causales of the six days of Creation, himself affected by the original sin of misreading, as the asterism Pavo, the green peacock of the Indies, is included in the text, but missing in Bayer’s labels—The master of cold

Glassware and crockery, Velázquez observed many galleys opening at dawn, among baskets of wet linen to be hung after being lapped in waters too cold

For elvers to rove up the rivers, and to be served as angulas—Las Hilanderas (1655-60) surrounds such priestesses, of Boaz and Jachin, whose mundane instructions for reconstruction of the Temple were now the woolen fiber, in their dark

Atelier over the drama, which the Pope, whose first injunction is heed the uniform, in the marketplace orders the workers onto higher prerogatives unless the marble fascia panels with bronze nails, the tapestry panels not entrusted to women, fall; all voiced from the Latin of Ovid (VI.129)—Deep

Into the hereto unmade emblems, just before the matron cast as Athena sees paternal impropriety fed back to her, a spinner imitating the Sun in its revolutions is swept out, as a household spider—Edith

exclaims, Apus, the bird of Paradise, is without feet; Fernão de Magalhães, who sent back their skins, although their salt-cured feet were received in a separate chest; to the eyes of Europeans, their toy splendor made landing absolutely

Superfluous (1522)—Matisse, often overcome by heat and limping, absorbs the beat-bark cloths of Papeete (1930), and took every available boat’s itinerary for blue-lipped giant clams, or bénitiers, undulating midnight blue at the bottom of clear

Lagoons, where perhaps sighting a speared dorade, or dolphinfish; Dorado, with Volans, the flying fish, enclosing the stellar nursery, the Large Magellanic Cloud, gleaming in its last throes, fixed his notion for the miniature golden carp kept indefinitely in glass aquariums that seemingly coincided with the founding of Portuguese colony, Macao (1557)—Six-banded sea kraits, so deadly and docile, as they were known, Waterslang, for the triangle of Hydrus following β-Hydri to the line of the Southern Cross due south to the 50th parallel of the Antarctic—For many, which is the subconscious, where it is agreed, Wynn Bullock’s frozen Point Lobos Tidal Pool (1957) is a starmap of sorts—A siphon through which the water enters and exits, as the distressingly unbidden fluidity Matisse found in his portrait of a boy, then revealed so much accomplished after staggering effort, in the slow viewing of Campaux’s 1946 film, after the swirling that could be a tunicate, with its microphotographed spicules as stars, incorporating the transition element, vanadium

Dissolved in the +5 oxidation state (V(V))—As the first slung lines of the first seven words and 28 letters, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, combine into fifty, the root of water, where the part-breviary, part-bestiary pages are laid side-by-side form Polynésie, La Mer (1946)—Vanadium,

Pale blue in solution, and concentrated at solstice in stories sped by Amantia muscaris around their hearth fires, of a charioteer aloft in the cloak of his martyrdom, red and white, lead by a herd descended from Eikthyrnir, the hart of the World Tree, which some seafaring Vikings saw as Ursa Major on cold,

Transparent nights at sea, with the forepaw the purple Iota Ursae Majoris, Talitha, who gets up, as if from a dream—Little Bear turns to the page, after he had switched on the underwater lights, which made the water look like turquoise milk. And there under the milk was something very large, something coiled into two intertwined figures of eight (95) for the organometallic eight-coordinated amavadin bonded to vanadium IV, with electrons resonating above and below—Clearly,

this concentration is no less revenant for Edith; instead, she reminds him he is forgetting the mosaic dolphin at the bottom of the pool, which the Greeks thought the closest to humans, and womb of the sky—Darkening,

With essentials of her life, from the 38 poems of Alejandra Pizarnik, whom Julio Cortázar found in each the cube of an enormous wheel,  […] Ella es / su espejo incendiado, su espera en hogueras frías, su / elemento místico or her own blazing / mirror, her spare for the cold bonfires, her mystical / element (1962), and although he is thinking of Edith, who bonds the  moon-silver of Arbor Dianae, they are both deeply

Pleased to find in the anticipated Nîmois bath of Artemis, a former library, as James Wright, contemplating the beginning of one vine leaf there (The New Yorker, January 14, 1980)—From the absolutely

Conjured eel of the retiarii of Roman bloodsport, their steps began with Emilio Prini’s lead paperweights of Weight Driven Actions (1967-1968), remembering as High Priestess (II) to the Chariot (VII) Elizabeth Bishop’s toucans, absolutely containing vanadium,

In traced fictions—For 47 Tucanae, a bright second star cluster to Omega Centaurus, or ω-Centaurus, for the Southern constellation of Chiron Ptolemy remarked Quae est in principio scapulae (150 C.E.) on the horse's back, […] that reads Cirque d’Hiver (The New Yorker, January 20, 1940), walking through blue-glass flurries colored by Paris Spleen, from the arena where Degas sketched […] along the little pole / that pierces both her body and her soul / and goes through his, and reappears below, dark clear

Phoenix, of which the brightest star, Ankaa (2004) is the shining bottom of a boat, and splendid as the nef automaton from Augsburg, in the cabinet of Rudolf II, where Tycho Brahe’s successor, Kepler despaired of matching in dexterity—Until the preceding November; the essence of the scorpion, his calculations clearly established, as the Crane and the Chamaeleon to the celestial atlas, as tags for another day, the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter as found by the Magi at the Nativity—Spontaneous rise of his star, in the left heel of Ophiuchus, Sagittarius cusp, a supernova (October 1604) rarely seen in the dark-illuminated up-to-the-minute days

Despite their cold wisdom, Edith and Little Bear deeply traverse now, where they see their future selves, in the silver gelatin prints of algae-flamed cypresses of the Big Sur coast, on Lace Lichen Path of Point Lobos a drive from the fogged bridge with pilings of Moss Landing, Offshore (1970)—