BORNLESS
BEFORE THE LOGOS
I [A]WOKE THE SUN
What bright-purposed
Nature we’ve harbored
For sake of anchoring
T’netted catch’s woe’s1
the man caul’d—blood
yoked fealty upon ’em:2
iron & copper bury
what Pallavicini née—3
Set—umber & Uzzah’s
King’s cauldron wore,4
swiveling on marbled
fountain, the mercury
of their Creatrix. bbb5
Septuagint for a fold,6
Blind the eye of Gaius
Marcellus for what no
Sculptor couldst know!7
“I make Man of Signed
Name in grief leaked, a
Knave in my court—See.”8
Sayeth He, Numbered9
on t’way to a river’s
mount, to breed Elk
from fished trout.
Where Dravidian kid
do pelt; their clacked
foot can make angle
from horned spine to
mosses bred of swine
that bled their stable
ounce of flesh & fat
in musée—Delta knew—10
is where, too, Busca &
a Sun—the manor fell.11
So childe, fungi of a
swelling brook bring
rain to the deer who
sweep the spore to Ye
Tree which gave me
Voice to say: “Can’t Ye
also hear its baubling?”12
1
2 caul’d—blood / yoked fealty upon ’em.
Caul’d operates as a nonce participle—covered or born in a caul—while remaining aurally identical to called. A caul is the fetal membrane that may remain over a newborn’s head; European folklore associated birth in a caul with protection from drowning, binding the image to the poem’s recurrent water, net, fish, birth, and capture motifs. Fealty, through Old French, descends from Latin fidelitas, faithfulness or fidelity, and historically names the sworn loyalty of a vassal to an overlord. The elided ’em may therefore be heard conventionally as “them” while visually and phonically yielding M / Hebrew Mem, traditionally associated by name with water; Aleph, meanwhile, derives from the West Semitic word for ox. The passage can thus be read as an involuntary investiture at birth: membrane becomes net, blood becomes seal, fealty becomes yoke, and the human subject enters existence already “called,” caught, and sworn.
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10
11 Busca & a Sun.
The Sola Busca is the earliest completely surviving seventy-eight-card tarot deck and takes its modern name from the Busca-Serbelloni provenance of the complete painted pack. Its imagery repeatedly joins aristocratic identity, numbered rank, warfare, metallurgy, alchemical transformation, and classical or biblical personae. Of particular relevance here, modern scholarship has interpreted the deck’s card XVI, OLIVO, as a “triumph of the Sun” within an alchemical-Hermetic program. The poem’s “a Sun” therefore remains deliberately unstable between celestial body, tarot image, alchemical gold, dynastic emblem, and the homophone a son: the issue of a House becomes at once its radiance, its inheritance, and the possible instrument of its fall.
12
OṂ BRAHMĀCĀRYĀYA HRĪRAPATRĀPYAVIVEKENA KARUṆOPĀYENA SARVASATTVĀNĀṂ PARAPADAPRĀPTAYE SVĀHĀ
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