Harry Houdini at the Gates of the Underworld
I. Rosabelle
believe.1
[Antarctica, 50,000 B.C.E.]
Not long ago, this was all open sea.
Then, of a sudden, this little to-do, this dust-up on the water.
Raven sat upon this, and spoke.
Gamburtsev, ruptured and rapturous under
glass, a groping
of broken teeth, the Ocean
its errant tongue. Under
miles of Eastern Antarctic
Ice Sheet the ghostly slopes sleep, dream
of erosion. Ladies and gentlemen, we are
blind. We map the scars
of tectonic disruption on fingertip,
with radar and magnetometers. We stroke
the ice for fissures, trace cracks and sound
out the mountains' roots, and the Ocean
sings.
Raven will take you now,
to the dead, to Memory.
You must understand, however,
Raven is a liar, a trickster, a shapeshifter.
And what is the heart?
If you are to understand the heart,
You had better understand the chest,
the muscle, the skin, the ribs and intercostal space;
the aorta, the vena cava, bullet trains through the empty city;
Frank-Starling (the more you fill, the greater your capacity to empty); the sino-atrial node, the Perkinje fibers; a tin can, some string; the heart is a Raven, a liar, a trickster, a shapeshifter,
containing no secrets
(All secrets are written on the skeletal muscles, in striations, in movement)
The heart will take you now,
to the dead, to Memory.
II. Rosabelle
believe.
Did you
hear me?
[Knickerbocker Hotel, Hollywood, CA, October 19362]
Bess watched
for any sign
of Harry
: trumpet
slate
planchette
floating
table
distention
of electromagnetic waves, disturbance
in persistence of vision, variation
in the luminance of the raster, sheeted
tumescence in the pixels, (umbra) in (machinam).
Green ghost of a distant dead star.3
These common coincidental alignments:
Thought and Memory, black wings close the circle,
and looking lunge into the world to pick the carrion of
daily news. Father, one-eyed, waits anxious lest Memory not return
Upon his death, she settled, a raven, on his shoulder, like ash
He asked no question.
He answered, I shall perish. Read more. Of
the body. Of the phantom queen, the war
goddess, the raven. Of the tongue, clench
it, as a carrion bird.
Tear the word
like it was meat. It was mute. A gristly
after-dinner shimmy, a bob and a
thrust, she seems to say,
Read the eyes (they say—
still tree-tops against still later
against and under white, they say—
I will try to catalog the ghosts):
III. Rosabelle
believe
[Jakarta, Malaysia, October 2011]
There was a boy
in Jakarta, a child, pissing awake the revenants of an ancient
mahogany tree, who appeared to him thusly:
pocong ('poah·chong) n. the heart bound
and shrouded, seeking
release
kunti: (kün·'tē) n. the heart dead at
birth become woman, opens
your belly, devours you
After, hundreds
lined up to be
possessed, as they had in Lourdes
or Fatima or Chicago, where
the Virgin appeared as a salt-stain cunt
on the underpass. The town fathers cut
it down, and announced The spirits
have moved to the other
tree but we cannot
cut down all the trees.
And so it was. These kinds of things they
say cannot be seen with
normal eyes, especially
in afternoon. Should we
therefore
believe?4
IV. Rosabelle,
[Niagara Falls, New York, March 2010]
you left a crowd of voices, indistinct
from the shuttle and shush that weave
the falls, where lovers fail, until
we pin the probabilities like moths,
collapse and resolve them with
our attention
::
one or many, a shadow,
flesh, a tongue, whispers,
a rose bleeding against the chest
of a baphomet, a violent end
::
another, in glass, a
smoke feather. Touching it is
just like touching
you. I mean,
it goes away from me.
V. Rosabelle?
[Someone's London, England, sometime ...]
Raven, often accompanied by Wolf, loves
a war as a banquet, or, wings clipped, alone,
locked in the Tower, holds the safety
of the kingdom
VI. Rosabelle. Listen. Here's what happened.
[Lake Texoma, Texas, August 1931]
After the apple tree blight.
After the Children's Hour.
After the map-making. After
the graph, and the swoon. After hand released
throat. After all revisions to the suicide note, after
the Saxon blitz, the Live Nude Girls, the return of Jack and of Sam, all a bungling Sherman's March by rail,
the fires tiring,
aging to ash
in the rear view.
After
drought lifts
the skirt of the lake and
reveals the exhumed
burial mound between
its legs. Three hundred
husks, hollow eyes
averted, broken at treacherous
angles, naked, ashamed.
Evicted from the earth It was
devastating. They had
no choice.5
Go. Go out of you. Live.
VII. Rosabelle
believe.
[Cleveland, Ohio, January 2011]
You were here, but I could not find you.
Could not hear you or see you, just knew
that you were just out
of reach, infinitely separated. Fog flowed
like spirit bodies, a crowd
of the damned bent upon
itself to fill a channel, runs like a river
in which we swam, or drowned.
In which you and I swam, or drowned.
In which you, and then I, swam, or drowned.
Notes:
1 These were the code words the spirit of Harry Houdini was to give to his wife Bess, should a ghostly afterlife and communication with spirits prove real.
2 This was the time and location of the final séance Bess held to try to contact Harry Houdini.
3 Lifted from the title of a post on Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog on Discover.com, “The green ghost of a distant dead star,” Nov. 22, 2011. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/11/22/the-green-ghost-of-a-distant-dead-star/
4 Ripped off from an article in The Jakarta Globe, “Ghost Sightings Spark Scenes of Hysteria in Indonesian Capital,” Dec. 2, 2011. http://jakartaglobe.beritasatu.com/archive/ghost-sightings-spark-scenes-of-hysteria-in-indonesian-capital/
5 Appropriated from an Associated Press article, “Depleted Texas lakes expose ghost towns, graves,” Nov. 20, 2011. http://news.yahoo.com/depleted-texas-lakes-expose-ghost-towns-graves-182124788.html
Jeffrey Babbitt currently freelances as a writer and researcher from his home in Mattawan, Michigan, and works at his local public library as a marketing assistant. A former psychiatric nurse, Jeffrey is an advocate and fellow traveler of people struggling with mental illness.