late late Fri night (harvest moon) reading J. Irwin's great & marvelous book, Mystery to a Solution. . . about the function of the mirror labyrinth double axe design of nature (the two halves of the body & their disequilibria) & Jorge Luis Borges. . . has anyone noticed the Minotaurean-monstrous (a)symmetry of Borges' own name? I'm sure.

"The idea of a house built so that people could become lost in it is perhaps more unusual than that of a man with a bull's head, but both ideas go well together and the image of the labyrinth fits with the image of the Minotaur. It is equally fitting that in the center of a monstrous house there be a monstrous inhabitant." (Borges)

Irwin describes how Borges' ambition for a South American literary origin shaped his design, his ambivalence/attraction to Poe, a fellow "Southerner"/military/alien from the "North" - yet a Northern (American) rival. . .

the amazing thing is the finesse & subtlety with which Borges played these games. . . & Irwin's ability to discern them. . .

my own affinities (as a North-Easterner from old New England North Star State military family) despite these glories tend toward Walt Whitman and Abe Lincoln. . .

but No-body in Maliceville will notice.

- some star - like the articulate
ghost of my fathers and of yours, who
could not speak in life, but in the owlish
afterlife - Ba, Ka, Crow, Lamb. . . tracked

 
upstream to Ethiopia, the truth of it -
manuscripted messenger, papyrus
Pappy or Osiris sire, Moses ripened
in the wilderness).  Mountain oak-tree.

 
Cedar.  Pitch-black tar (for
mordant).  Bebi, General of the Asiatics.
Quick-runner, wasp.  Pharaoh's taxi-
driver.  He Who Controls The Rat-

 
God's Offspring.  Latecomer,
fast-talker.  Journalist for Delta
Crescent.  Walker of the tiled
ink-paths, typesetter.  Market-

 
rent-collector, solitaire, free-
speaker.  Literal, exact, exacting
horsetrading slavestealing tax-
gathering figure of a reefer-

 
man, fearful, a-feared.
Goes down ghost-trails
under live-oak lairs
of rattlesnakes. . . adrift

 
in jagged eddies of nude alphabets.
Murmuring to himself, saliva-
white, spume-frothing blanched
avalanche easily frozen, baffled, back-

 
stabbed - easily beloved, won-over.
And adhesive through the crane bone
into the gravity waves (nacreous
mob of carnelian nouveaux

 
baubles all around the funereal
sunken canopy of maudit covenants,
rumors, glittering knives - 
ressentiment scripted into feral runes).

 
                        - from July