Fortnight, lustrum, jubilee, score. Legends I know recounted in measures like eons and heretofore. When floods preceded the eons preceding the flood. And from them grew strakes of high grasses. Cattail archipelagos. Thistles and mint. Papyrus sedge.
Dishabille among the herblet isles came long wanderers from waste places. They culled hautboy music by the bushel from rushes where it blew. Wove springes for goldfinches. Hoopoe nooses. Funnel traps for doves. Nestled in coracles, by night they listened and learned the language of birds. Days, they chronicled their elders’ vies with partridge feet impressed in clay.
*
Pinchpot cisterns, dung fires, and silt. A starter kit for cities before cities were built. A prior hic, call it. An incipit with reeds. One palace of dry salvages, grosgrain against mosquito mists. Two rivers that besiege a stand of pannier shanties. Snail shells dapple the shallows between them when the tides retreat.
Fishermen witnessed their fellows downstream, buoyed on the shattered backs of mollusks, seemed to walk on water. Strange, they thought, but thought it no more. The terra infirma they nursed had yielded uncommoner things. Miraculous draughts of fishes. Guttering wisps. Girandoles. Flash infernos on the marsh. So when one river broke camp and reversed, it gave no cause for concern.
*
Moonbeam crucibles and bitumen lagoons. Kilns lit the way along the river’s banks. They lit up the midnight, made of midnights noons. Corvée workmen dredged the bed pushing scuffle hoes. Scored it with bayadere stripes. Scissure. They cut mudbricks with oxbone sleáns.
Prone hauteur, their temples were trapezia. Lime white. Glazed stringcourses, rank and rung. And charivari, the implacable weather was their seigneur. They appointed priests to intercede and pay their debts to thunder. Cymbal din. Gruff tympanum. Immolations skywise by altar light. Castrati shook lapis from tambour bangles and wailed to lyres strung of leopard gut.
Inland, emmer in the mizmar breeze, and bees clothed in bittersweet pollen. Seasons of plenty befell plentiful harvests already befallen. Former fishers invented the sickle and began to farm barley. With oxen pulling ards they furrowed the soil. For lily bulbs and sesame.
In the shade of date palms they gnawed dates, ate locust amuse-bouches. Swilled honeyed beer. Bragged between toasts of surplus shored against famine in terra cotta granaries high as ibex horns on a faraway hill. They fashioned styluses from cane stalks and kept crude picturebook accounts. They drew up lists and wrote the writs of kings that time had not counted.
*
Ifs, omens told by sheep’s liver lobes, portents in wishbone splinters. In lieu of summers and apricot days, doomsayers shrieked grisaille, said bleak midwinters. Then came the displaced. Starved vagrants. Outcast charismatics. A brutal speech they spoke. Barked ars and swallowed vowels. Armies followed hard on their heels.
There were cavalry shapes in shapeless dun. Foot soldiers firing rocks from slings. Riddled with shot, the sky collapsed. Legionnaires marched with torches. Smoldering entrepôts. Libraries like roasting pits. Tablets baked in the ashes. Come, said the victors, read us comptes of the routed. Let us make their writing our own.
*
Djebels where trampled settlements were, massifs from rubble, redivivus debris. New kings dreamed mountains beyond the measure of the sea. Up was their byword. Acmes, their ends. Lo, they said. We thumb our noses at the loam’s caress. We will raise our cities to the sun.
So they renounced horizons and revoked their boundary stones. Their fiefdom steppes lay fallow. Carpenters took charge by ex cathedra decree. Come columns, they shouted. Come pillars and posts. Ring around the metropole. Criers traipsing the ramparts proclaimed edicts for steeples. Fiat cupolas. Let there be spires and foreshorten the firmament.
*
Topiary footpaths, tiered menageries, and sidewinding chicanes. An Antaean tower vied for height against towering fanes. Untellable stories climbing. They tapered for aye, a staircase shy of heaven. Vertigo was sweet as ether. The tower’s shadow enthralled the plains.
It told time like a gnomon. And in the time it told, tyrants sired tyrants. They warred for plunder. Quarter withheld. They lavished abuse on biddable men. Have-nots hauled stones on sleds from fro to to. In the heat of the day, prisoners swung picks with their hair on fire. Flourish. Sweal. Caterwauls for mercy. Taller, taller, the tower grew.
*
A thousand thousand chisels struck tintinnia. Ensembles of sawyers sawing muffled hammerfall gasconades. Dovecotes shone with golden domes. Prides of lions trooped around mosaic façades. There were platform gardens hoisted on strings. Quince orchards. Orangeries. Bazaars where usual traders hawked unusual things.
Belladonna and anise balms. Sacks of sugar from an old salt lake. Envois back from vanishing points whispered outlander words. Patter, like plateaux and downs, in argots that told another paradise. And lèse-majesté, heretics dared repeat them. Their bones hung from balconettes in rosaries of thorns. The panorama, it’s said, was nonpareil.
*
Nearer empyrean, farther from divine. Tatterdemalions starved in the streets while princes bibbled ichor with concubines. Clamor erumpent. Juddering crowds and mystagogues canting. Tricksters professed truth, soothsayers lied, and they all prayed to monolith idols with clamshells for eyes.
Over the roar of every revel, over the clatter of sistra and drums. Aves shook the architraves. Blasphemers in taverns slurred sacred hymns and the lame lay bellowing on the steps to shrines where beggars repented prideful sins. Sundry hundreds of pleas. Hosannahs and clasped hands. Cries to deliver us from us, O gods, and behold no one heard.
*
Blight and famine, a zealot’s rebellion, denizens decamping for the caravan route. I hearkened a yarn that was spun from the tongue of a mute. It had every ending. Sudden collapses. Slower declines. And none of them happened. But each one was true.
One spoke of plague and said the sun sent a fever for stealing the moon. Others described droughts. Norias defunct. The shadoofs and sluices ran dry. One told of endless rains and cataracts. Sauve qui peut. A whirlpool swallowed the tower whole. And another said what fortune grants, fortune rescinds. Then the ruins give way to an epoch of winds.
Derek Gromadzki is the author of Pilgrimage Suites (Parlor) and Horology (Shearsman) and translator of two works by Brunella Antomarini: Acoustic Prehistory of Poetry (Boise State Free Poetry Series) and Maiden Machines (forthcoming from Peter Lang).
Photo by Vyacheslav Makodin on Unsplash
