Читать книгу Banana Palace - Dana Levin - Страница 5

ACROSS THE SEA

1

We used our texting machines

to look up the definition of soul

in the middle of class—

thumb-joints at work

above the stitched paper

of actual books in which

we’d been reading

poetry

about a Prophetess,

one of the human cave-bound Time Machines…

She had traveled a long way through the four dimensions

to be with us.

From someone’s mouth to someone’s ear.

Someone’s hand

to tablet, papyrus, parchment, paper, the liquid crystal light

of our computer screens—

Liquid crystal light they’d really

called it that,

the inventors

at Marconi Wireless.

“See if you can hear anything,

Mr. Kemp!” Marconi had cried, the day they sailed the letter S

across the sea—I loved

the synesthesia of that, See if you can hear, they’d coaxed some radio waves

to propel the alphabet

through the air—

Was that Marconi wishing

he was a liquid crystal light and not a

break of bones

that had to fear the future—

2

A human-headed bird, the Egyptians said.

A butterfly, an innermost.

A Web site

I was afraid to enter: wewantyoursoul.com the students

laughed and laughed—

soul-adorning, soul-afflicting, soul-amazing—

soul-and-body-lashings—

They really called it that, the ropes they wound

round oilskin

to keep out sea and storm, our sailing men—

who sent the cheeriest message you could imagine

to usher in

the Telegraphic Age: Thanks

am well—

The soul, it was an ellipse in white, it fizzed,

their chaplains said, with God’s

CPR,

“breath of life”—

So they could travel

through length and width and depth and time and

man a ship—

where someone

in a small room

would tap out a message—

to a far man on a far shore, and they

would understand one another…

3

He shared all roads and he braved all seas with me,

all threats of the waves and skies is what the Hero says

of his dead father—but it sounded like soul to me.

Guide companion—Captain

of the ship of flesh I had to ride, where “I”

was a third thing in the closed grip

of the body’s vise—

Marconi, he thought he’d hear

the agony of Christ

with a sensitive dial to help him sieve.

He trawled

the frequencies—

for eli lama sabachthani no song lost—

no impress of tongue and teeth that made a sound, ever lost—

if you had a receiver—

a virgin say, in a mountain crag, or a brain-bot

from the tnano-future, did it

matter which—

You’d have a house

for a god’s mouth

and it would message you

your rescue…

Rescued from what is what I’m trying to mean.

Rescued from what you have to fear the future

more than you used to which sounded like the soul

waving a series of flags at me—

4

We wanted arrival to be instant

because we didn’t want to be separate

from what we loved.

Wireless, weightless, and omniscient is how we

refined our machines—

We had a dream

that we could smash the bans

of matter and time and

still be alive—

Was that the soul, wishing

we would invent the body

out of existence,

so many of us now

enthralled by doom…

The students peer so deep into their handheld screens they

look like Diviners.

Each one

a scrying Sibyl at the world’s

end—

scribbled-on leaves thrown out of their caves

and into the wind—

The only part of the Epic

I make them read, just after

the crew is borne ashore, but before

the walk amongst the dead—

The part between.

Where there’s a body, agonized by light.

And someone lost.

And a query—