(in memoriam John Heath-Stubbs, 1918-2006)
Was Babylon less monstrous, delaying orgies until famine’s end?
Babylon of mud and gold, fat rivers gliding into
less voluptuous bodies, Isabella’s own silhouette of
monstrous gold made sacred with promises of unchaste reward.
Delaying our return we hallucinated Granada’s harbor, composed ripe
orgies of slaughter for depaison and gamba, praying that
until our lust gave out, Catholic skill might outmaneuver
famine’s catlike creep. Our duty was a music without
end, Moorish eunuchs nestling sisterwise beside our conquering Queen.
Ours was the burning world of Christ and gold.
Was, and ever shall be, the bitter Almirante and
the laughing navigator, done to dust with the dogstar
burning high above Turbuco, Arawak ashes withering his mouth.
World-weary in their beardlessness, the Pinzon brothers’ conspiracy
of shadows, witches, and naked girls, eaten alive by
Christ Redeemer, erect and towering His fury, white armor
and iron the color of Spain, Europa’s thirst for
gold a plague measured against Isabella’s limbless pyramid.
We failed in the chase of God and gold,
failed to worship meekly, choosing to bind bright bees
in mint and foundry. Altars rumbled down, squat beside
the quarantine of waters, ossuaries swept by the sirocco,
chase of Actaeon and autochthon, hounded to a spit
of golden sand. A blur of angels, their centaur
God gone native and clean shaven, bizarre with solar
and astral wanderings, his light within that conquering blur,
gold as a stunned bee, hive held for ransom.
We lusted for red skin, cursed our white reflections.
Lusted after by leeches, we were the unfit vessels
for Love in any but the grossest guise, eyes
red, tongues blackening with Cantabria’s pox, sloughing off old
skin like a serpent fresh to that Caribbean Eden.
Cursed as less than slave, the winds called Ariel
our brother, the better to wound us, batter the
white waves into foam and mist. Starshift caught our
reflections, tears like petty crystal drenched the looters’ net.
We howled in silence, pleading as rain poured down,
howled back to forth a wretched wordless prayer, hulked
in upon ourselves the ram of Castilian-speaking ghosts.
Silence sheered to the size of jungle, simian armies
pleading mercy in return for pain, clapping savage palms
as if the spoils of paradise deserved such comedy.
Rain rinsed bloodstained soil in canals of seething green,
poured down an ocean’s wealth on my sad brothers,
down to one ship, thirteen souls, new world ruins.
We tasted faint blood, light as any wedding night,
tasted coppery water, seasalt dreams, vinegar’s bridal homesick pinch.
Faint at first, then lordly rottenness stained our world:
blood, urine, breath. No more could rituals drain the
light from the moon than these rosaries remake us
as lambs of passion, eunuched willingly away from them,
any one of whom we’d sooner rape than wed.
Wedding sin to sin, flesh hanging on snowwhite bones,
night reaching from the abandoned east to smother us.