The Black Riviera

The Mystic

The Mystic For Chris Buckley It just doesn't occur to you -where there are only skinny palms And sunburn-pink houses and wide avenues and the aluminum plane Of the Pacific that anything is secret. Where are the vaulted elms, the brick Aged like wine, the dreary weather to plaster elm leaves on aged brick? Yet, I knew a mystic there. He worked out of the sun, his one black suit Showing a stitch of dandruff white as his face, and turned his gaze Obliquely to words as true as he could say them. He worked— But it didn't matter. Standing in the lobby of his movie house, beside the little harbor, He lived, as he would say, outside the flesh. Up in his office At the top of the double staircase, he crept through texts, gathering Evidence like a seine net, odd fish mixed with phosphor. He believed there were men whose offered palms produced, at a shrug, Bread or even gold. That all light in the universe, all that we see, Begins in the self. There is no outer light. And, believing, he lived another life. Believe it, he said, there is more. What is extraordinary knowledge But fingers adhering to a talisman essential as their own charm Or what a gaze fixes on in a corner of the ceiling? Take the TV set he owned, its gray-green bulging face that, When the picture filled it like a speechless, readable expression, Dangled a sooty web over the heads of the colorless actors. You saw it, it was part of the picture, just over their heads, calligraphy Of another world encroaching and sending its messages. 10 After World War II, he said he walked past houses wondering how The people in them woke and went to bed and in between went on with life. That was the beginning. Now he knew the hidden was like a parent, thinking She must this second turn off the light in her child's room, Late, the TVtelling its sick jokes, and when she entered, finding The two-year-old ill on her pillow. The occult greets its initiates. That's how I think of him in this world, where the engine block Cracks on the snowy interstate, and the life it held— searing, True—escapes with a hiss. He stands to the side, letting me Ask him questions as the light brooms in, straw gold, tinged With all it's touched in the harbor, the tourist boats and chum tanks And the breakwater's combs of seaweed. We stand in the movie-house lobby, Anteroom to the dark, the muttering auditorium where, on a sun-stroked afternoon, Only a few sit, harmless. I ask about Jacob's ladder, the language dolphins exchange. He knows. And,here is the secret, he knows it is a secret pursuit, the questioning and answering. Under the chains biting the ice and the tow truck delivering the day And the bill, there is another road. A former day fumes Outside, and inside its light lies at our feet. The ocean seeps Under the building, and the pier rats throw their shadows against the screen, And one patron, furious from the darkness, won't believe our disbelief. 11 ...