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
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
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—
