He wakes up with one leg under the other
in the shape of the number four,
like The Hanging Man on the tarot card.
Upside down he waits for a world made new.
The Hanging Man knows a portal where the unknown enters the beholder,
about things that convey and conduct,
imaginary bridges smoking,
a mandarin finger pointing at the moon.
With his cape and cane, he strolls the Piazza Di Poppolo,
reciting Orphic verse and Chinese odes in his own rough retellings.
In the reflection of the public fountain,
he is the Seafarer on the long boat’s prow,
reading the currents and the scrimshawed stars.
The long boat is becalmed in the doldrums,
sails still, the great oars shipped.
The sky dreoseth and fealeth.
He almost ends up hanging by his feet,
wrapped in barbed wire with his puffed up patron,
who would swing by his heels in the square in Milan.
The Fortune Teller will languish in the rain,
in a U.S. Army’s iron cage.
The sky droops and decays.
He writes poems on toilet paper with laurel leaf designs,
to be left at the mouth of the cave,
imagines that his breasts grow and his eye sight fails,
that he will take up new rooms on the left bank
in the Saint Germaine, when all of this blows over.
He lectures to inmates, guests and friends
in the Chestnut Ward of St. Elizabeth’s.
Sometimes he soothsays and finally, he refuses to speak.
Why aren’t you answering my questions, asks the reporter
at the interview after months of silence.
Words no good, he says.
I’m a prisoner in the prison house of language.
The words dreoseth and fealeth.
He remembers the long boat becalmed in the doldrums.
Amulets rattle and carved runes click on the deck.
He sees the three norn runic spread—
“Wyrd bioth ful araed”; “events go as they must,”
in the name of rocking the boat,
of making things new, of all that has been done
in the name of smoking love.
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“Wyrd bioth ful araed…dreoseth and fealleth,”: The Seafarer, Ezra Pound
The prison house of language: Walter Jameson