ubixic [ubi’∫ikʔ], n.: the “reading” or signification of a sign
(Quiché Mayan)
Diviners are semioticians by profession; they start from signs (etal), in this case signs that take forms other than those of spoken words, and try to arrive at a “reading,” as we would say, or ubixic, “its-being-said” or “an announcement,” as is said in Quiché.
—Dennis Tedlock, The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), p. 132.
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Black boughs etch the nightblue’s magnet fluid. A fleshed lithograph: how wasp-star veined our eyes.
The photographs of undeveloped cities still lie in wellwater’s black feather-silt. Compost of river-birds and what of river they managed to take with them. This is a linguistics: etymon was water cutting through the continental shelf, and now syllable will molt, and now vowel’s bone or system of cartilage locks will spread out the homology of wing drowned in the meat of different hands.
Depending on acoustics of the stone, the raw earth if we’ve dug down far enough, the crushed juice of kingfisher, wren, and heron if even further. You wouldn’t know it only to smell the rot. Less a smell than an architecture, a definite set of struts stretching green noxious gas across the floor of the dead city. As Venus-green would bleach the houses through a night of her direct light from the west, as to wrench the new sun out of white’s contagious spectrum, replace the higher chroma-mass with the color of hungry plants.
So that dying will be a turning-green, as brass acquiring verdigris, as compound metals scattering the single-fleshed disease to rust in symptom of a glossalalic plague. The many tongues. Their stitching left to darken, crack, and flake.
So afterward, what needles and thread have sealed might only be a scar. Accidents of cicatrix to blast such clotted silence from the hurt side of the crescent moon. And they go on looking like accidents, for long enough that Venus’s year comes and goes the ten times, the thirty, the three hundred. A separate count of centuries for math lost now in feathers stapled to the foreheads of the dead. For rubber trees and the sap-exchange.
Unwilled transfusion, bartering some ounce of future-ghost blood for the current buildup of the dead, a noise for noise, though one still shivering in its muted atom, one well cracked, long bled against the capillary action. Translate the tree and tree, the spine’s and jungle’s, and establish some long baseline of price. When heartbeat and the overheated brain fall back to that metabolism, a charcoal-constant index to the wasp perched in the fountain of the spine, then it’s time for dying. Men’s or industries’.
Or only cities’, where they seem combined but really lie out through such long nights with such senselessly close press of chest to chest and rib to rib, phase-canceled solar plexus beating on either side of night’s blue breath between them like the live wings of a dead moth, the nerve still sputtering syllables of dust though dust-receiver in the thorax has gone dark. They seem pressed together, and they are. But not forever, and not without the medicines that sever. Scalpel comes as a lesson to geographers,
who will soon know us by Latin names and in a year that Latin kings develop. Soon exile their own time of no months, the eye-white blur before the greater star-mass of the year comes to commencement in named March. Soon dial back the temples’ expiration for white subtleties of god:
That the oracle can scratch his alphabet by fingers’ stir among the opened gut of any bird;
that the long E he claws, sleeping violently and thin like hummingbirds in hippo’s mouth, onto the white stone can be borrowed;
that any speech receives the bones of Greek. And if it doesn’t, these are barbaroi, and a merciful god would come relieve them of their excess face-flesh. The death’s-head is meridian between one world too wet and low and plosive, one world too dry and lifted and no letters on the tracheal page, only a diacritic for the ozone’s throat-box damage. Where it’s scraped black patina off the pharynx-iron and deposited the talon-script of silver.
Black branches silvered with the moon’s cognition. This we are aware of; this we see. But that’s not the focus of the night. And green breathing from the canopy, and green film of the jungle-floor, continue, meeting somewhere near the top notch of the spine. Cervical ganglia are seedpods of their conference. Are the commission of the wet tree drooping and the dry plant straining undeveloped tendons toward the rain that trees conceal. So the Adam’s-apple mysteries cohere in voicebox frenzy. So respeaking is the complement of Eden. The heat lost from a system past our seeing, though we have our hands wet every night with the constant forest-floor dew, a primal morning livid with the dragon’s recent coding into worm.
Fish-mouth gasping all to all, that sea may sleep on microscope, encrypted till the touch of eaten heat. That, till first stars metabolize, the ocean-language guards its bone-reserve.
These are the accounts. And we knew or didn’t know them; and we feared what we were doing, or did it past fear, in a body-scene where something further back than instinct burnt us. Instinct can be broken. In peace or in violence. Soon men will start leaving their houses open when the green star, Venus, entry-point of wasps—the scorched-gate bleeding stingers’ exit through worn papyrus of night-wound—shines down hard. Direct light on the balconies of temples. Directly down into the open courts on the western edge of the city, where in wartime we’ve held strange men’s heads and cracked their skulls to see what would breathe out. What decimal resin of the lung sticks black-green to their brainpans.
Skull’s cup to frost over when alembic thins in winter, a ringing fragile bell of uneven glass. And to overgrow when spring brings back the entry-points to Venus. When her city gate and ours align, a sour wind battening on flesh-wound’s ichor spooling, the iron wire thin as veins that’s sculpture of dead music. But not dead beyond recall. It’s only hibernating in the season of white light. When the season’s opposite is only blackness, and the negatives implied from proton’s soaking flood the night.
Black wax through the granary when day had paled its gold; black soot breath from deep in throat of future machines’ passage, where the ancient white ones drone high on their palates by the shore. As cicada mating mammoth, as the oxen gelded in the city-center with a locust-singing scythe.
Bull’s wounds shut across an insect marriage to warm blood. Aorta’s liquid oxygen suspends the panting carcasses of fleas: flood-treatments proof dry language-gouge from unbound sheets of lung.
There should be time: pacing the peninsula in tighter and tighter circles, from perimeter where sea informs this land to western-facing informations of the dead, who’ve seen the second ocean and can breathe the dusty oil of its black data.
Till the Yucatan’s a single drum, a climate of half-crescent slits in stretched hide, evidence of fingernails we’ve lost while clawing underbrush. And at every step it’s going to breathe. Though probably not where the stepper is. The one leg has its own statistics, distant from femoral growth of sound. Though of course bone keeps the music. Whether we want it to or not.
Some years ago, and an ocean backward, they turned the antistrophe once the chorus was done giving solar image. On sun-side of sound’s photograph, you spoke in walking-meters, twos and threes, a graft of syllables designed to fit the feet. But the song also included motion’s negative. A diagram of spent heat, just spent, and where it goes once the bright half of the song is finished humming. How Greece now breathes like lung-disease beneath the thousand tons of locust-shells. How Egypt, even plague-years, can sop solar map from out of the pest’s meat. Geography of epidemics: the first and starkest kind.
Once, human disease drove them from the Garden, according to that tribe who called down plague. Since then a map has been a record of the pestilence, and to discover a new country is to swap the old catastrophe—third partner, snapping symmetry of simple light and darkness: strophe, antistrophe, and catastrophe, the rabid breastbone frothing mantis-input from the ribs—for ones unlearned. Because you haven’t seen them yet or because what you’ve seen has been forgotten.
Just north of here, a few people are dying of the Black Plague for the first time in however-many-hundred years. It probably won’t spread; it probably already has, and antibody-clusters, among fixed stars of the vein, recount a saint’s activity in static brass tableau. This is a demon already driven out. The stained-glass sheath of artery knows how to dissect this contagion’s light.
Bacillus already named down to its colors; germ shown the ancient carvings of itself, where they’re piled up in cratered sand with all the other discarded gods, where they own only desert-reaping. Which is something. Alongside fractured plaster limbs of Baal and El and Moloch:
they lived too long beneath the shoulders’ mantle not to blacken some root-city in the lung /
too long not to burn their names’ dry proton matter—not the names themselves, but the dust-concentrate, the frozen seeds of their inscription-weather—layers deep in any flesh that still receives the rain.
And which was rain’s god, and which fire’s, and which the sea’s; and had they even seen the sea, or was it a mistake of the horizon, an image placed at limits of the eye to show how everything elapses into water, how even landmass is torn down when you mistake the iris-grasp for the prime-numbered rainbow (pupils are the killing-agent, secrete a paralyzing juice called sight onto the prey, and then contract until its frail antennae shatter and are lodged to fossilize in the front-brain)—questions somebody will answer. Probably after a lot of digging and a lot of treaties to allow the dig; after a lot of negotiation over who has rights to the dead and
who hangs as rapture’s spores from the wing-feathers of the great god Greed. He, like any murderer, clears off the surface of your land, until the air mourns in its atoms for lost throb of limbs that cleft it. Like any murderer he blocks out the sun and wraps his tongue around the dormancy of stars, expires as heat-shield for each one, a flesh to bury detonations in. He tears down the idols with excuse that temple walls were black with ancestry of gore.
Which they were. Which it isn’t his to understand, and if it were, he wouldn’t take the chance. This was ancestry. Where we came from writ in viscera’s mosaic cognate with the fissured stones. It’s nothing like an accident that sheetrock slides, that bracken-seed amputates the reproductive organs of the stone. That green heat bores into the cell-body, exposes nucleus to paralyzing light, rewrites the membrane as a catatonic skin. The last hundred speakers of an extinct lipid-language. The last hundred left who can mishear the old acid-script: close enough to its origins that they know what they’re not understanding.
We don’t even know that there’s anything to understand. We run tongues or fingers through what look like glyphic animals on a sun-disc filed in storage-earth of Crete. And wonder if they spoke,
and what contamination-text they planted in the lower jaw,
stamped hot on the palate,
built in broken air when mandibles let out the bone-drowned histories of bee. The dental mathematics sipped from permafrost’s molar-hive.
Yes, there were great dry patches of human blood encrusted on the floor. There were ‘savageries’ in practice. We did to dead men or to living ones, sometimes, what you do to cows in a steel building. And we let them set, coagulate in sight of the god’s statue, to watch decay’s spilled rubric teach the old texts for new sermons. Where you polish off the metals and you wipe away the spit. The shit, the sweat, whatever came from skin and blood and eyes. All the hundred million pounds of stripped-bull waste, gristle and horn and bone and inedible organs, carted off and burned somewhere outside your borders, since burning trash is illegal within them. Since you’ve still devised nothing better than their burning, only outlawed getting caught.
We burn too. But with a dry acetylene of time; with an ozone-bloom as lightning pricks the spine’s stung-open flowers. We burn when the pistils gulp at white flash in the torsos of the dead. A carbon photo, monochrome to print the black results.
The territory’s being erased from the south upward in a blizzard of chafed film: desert-emulsions leaking, an alkaline tide, where muscle slips from bone to feed the graft-roots stolen vitamin.
The Federal District, overmillioned, populous with human heat enough to flood their indoor skyscraper zoos. Leopards prowling with pricetags dirty and curled between the neck- and shoulder-fur. An exact conversion: Fahrenheit of panthers into money. The Arab numeral’s clean bone-math for this stone-ground blurry Mayan cipher, dependent on whether Venus rises in west or east, morning or evening star, and how the cities with the corpse-stuffed wells have been abandoned or rekindled.
Ignition from the question’s grammar, developed like first insects behind the lymph-sheath curing virus come post-mortem, a language-infection swiped away with tape-dross of their dead black skin to get to the real interrogation in the teeth.
We dressed them with feathers to attract the shoreward birds. We made them memorize a ritual of stimulus for every feather, a line or two of cadaver-code, as introduction. Fingers in the holy water stoup, broken legs washed up to splintered kneecap in the font. Mortaring the young dead into walls of once-white brick, now brass-dark with hard-water deposit, the chemical inscriptions of the river.
These they learn first, muttering through basic phrases of death-rattle, as close as nearly-living lung can come to exhalations in the underworld. A facsimile Canopus, black jars’ photocopy grime.
The organs haven’t actually been printed into clay yet; the heat’s still ebbing off the flesh, which is still warmer than room temperature, brighter on the microscope than the surrounding air. Or darker and cooler, or dryer and more distinctly veined, a better map of wood’s biology, somatic trees, than even the trees are around here, in a country of such sweat. However it may be. Different, anyway. When the xylem spreads wasp-liquor and even the anemones are ripe with recent vein-splint of the bee, a just-dead man, and even dead of fever, may be colder than the grave you plant him in. Even if that grave is a well of cold water, wrenched still colder by the distance from the star, so cadavers can receive the light that takes a mile of subterrane to die into our eyes. So the cornea can split, cracked glass on pollinated violets.
On irides, the rainbow’s separate organs. Where the nations are now separate with a corrugated tin rainbow, barbed-wire for excess light, blacker coordinates caught in glasses of the border-guards.
Once there was black stone lodged in the temple’s aperture, aorta of pyramids, vena cava ziggurat, syringes for the dead host’s blood to blend with stellar plasma.
Now there’s black glass clean and dead-reflective as obsidian altar in the Yankee eye. An artificial dilation: how to make the pupil larger than even their sunken eyesockets can swell. How to flex the dead receiver open further than allowances of skull. Pierce him in the eye and he dies like a molting locust, series of dry sheddings around the constant damp cool of a small black stone, a household god of ebony or oilslick quartzite buried between layers of wool in a back drawer when the inspectors came. Or saying it was San Juan Batista, or saying it was the Lamb, a chunk of the old altars under rain:
the eastern edge of the Middle Kingdom—this too is a middle kingdom: narrow bone-process, North America the bony pathogen above distending marrow-bulbs from foreshore of black pebbles to the Black Plague’s relic house—and you consecrated your shoulders to El, since the rain hits them first. And you opened up your fontanel to El, since the birth-rain first got in there.
This place also has an El, the He of God’s convention. Article left out of speech, as empty chair and extra plate of flatbread in case Isaiah comes back down. Which he does, every time,
in the presence of the carnivorous ghost, trained out by Dead Land’s famine till the hunger is a skinny flaking wire and everything is meat. Not that he’s learned different appetites among the dead; not that there’s a lesson, exactly, in starvation where the House permits only dry bones’ talk. Only vegetation, microscope-blooms from the split femoral artery. A sheet of lesion-cuneiform unrolled from the long bones.
