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
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----

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
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...