Middle Ear Recitation (a transcription of Cecil Taylor's "Erzulie Maketh Scent")
- Middle Ear Recitation (a transcription of Cecil Taylor’s “Erzulie Maketh Scent”)
1. Introit
entering a cave, you Ascends to where a garden considered heat, terrible sharp grins, ecstatic chattering: three steps down in.
“it’s like” three steps down. without moving the shudder of an eyelid in too much light, or shutter:
rustled, rummed ascent
“it’s like water” (her comment upon hearing it)
Water, when light moves in it, has no corners “like” a mobile fulcrum, coy:
a cave entering you
2. Dance
the sensing of what is most remote. begins in the smallest seed. the smallest fossil. silence before a mirror where the dream strikes a chain of miles. the ear precedes the dance. to hear its way from falling a droplet jostles in a frame of bone. here its way blown from shifting, blown smooth, blown into a lucent way of moving. blown [End Page 771] covert, then, unintentioned ply proves motive, blown with shifting motive. the ear proceeds to dance its water still. before the dance she lowers herself, slender ossuary, down into it. her entrance propped with splinters of perfume. what rises, something ceded to the air. something cut with light and pried up, rummed out. to prepare the ground. blown seeds dance the air like severed ears
3. Salle d’attente
A cave, entering it’s like scent unfurled too much of her sent too close for comfort. water in your blood-
shot eyes
feet tendrilled to find their way from falling. in the air the stench of sulfur, now. tendrilled hair
flung out down your back each dread tendril swinging down for a root each massed arm of hair straining down
to bob and weave the cicatrix of an immemorial divorce
their eccentric orbits glancing down an approach to imaginary points
singeing a romance of the unseen
breath a loony pirouetted descent—— [End Page 772]
4. Mode de monter
—Your right hand is crumbling into dust and blowing away; your left foot implants itself in something that feels like mud but doesn’t smell like it; your left shoulder is covered with plaster which is drying in the sun and hardening; someone has come by with a short sword and gracefully cut your eyeballs out of your skull, you grope for them on the asphalt; you are sitting on a toilet, constipated again, you hear her call from the other room; there is an egg swelling in your armpit, something inside is straining to break out.
This must be dancing.
You balance in the thirst of it, troll for balance, await the inundation of the ride manqué, the ocean’s rhythm and the ear’s corrective
blasts foretold and buffets, and the promise of thighs speaking astride you, and that edge of feeling before the drum is audible: down in the middle, voice’s antecedent is a tuning:
The bulrush is edible. Castor oil is edible. Baneberry and hemlock are inedible. Sloe gin poured over vanilla ice cream is edible. White mangrove will blind you. Wild potatoes are edible. The ashengray morel mushroom is edible. (Under its umbrella, its pockmarked face is like a moon.) Nightshade and bitter cassava are inedible. Black eyed peas and collard greens are edible. Jimson weed is inedible. Horse hair is inedible.
5. Recitative
our hands are pick and shovel enough our teeth are knife enough— languid thing tolling in an invisible bell carve your message into my skin
our hands are pick enough our hands are shovel enough— languid tolling thing [End Page 773]
lash your terrible sweetness lacerate your terrible answer into the back of my throat
our teeth are knife enough— take my tongue ride me with your song
6. Coda (as from a distance)
The dream leaves an instrument behind like a dropping in its wake: a big black piano, the finish scratched and disfigured, the soundboard cracked, strings frizzled away from hammers into the air. Its guts brim with dust like a swamped boat. In the frenzy of the dream someone’s given hell to the action—the ivory’s chipped in jagged shards, some hand has beaten a few keys off. A crazy black cactus in this...
