With her disappearance I could not hope to find the Fountain but shade.
Up ahead, after walking longingly, was shade but a curious shade of it: a shade with nothing in evidence to produce the shade, with no shading entity discernible between the shade, which was the darkness delineated upon the sand of one indisseverable grain, and the immaculate golden plate above that served up nothing at all. Save light and warmth unfulfilling.
I stood in this shade shaded by nothing then I lay and then I slept, I must have slept and when I awoke there was no shade but I was under the wide longribbed leaves of another tree. However its leaves, which were generous fronds of palm, provided none of the shade I had so enjoyed previously: the setting of the golden plate proceeded on its natural strength unabated, and it was as if the shards of the plate now smashed on the knife of the horizon had stuck through the palms, had pierced them through and so pierced me too, stigmatic under this element of shade that provided none, having no purpose for any incarnation but its own. An unimpeding impediment. A stumble without snare.
After the golden plate smashed then ashed away to the white darkness of smoke I slept again and did not dream of the Queen, neither of Houri, but instead of an unmanned caravan of approximately let n equal x thousand pregnant camels that was approaching me from afar (the direction from which it was arriving I’d titled Fast, the other I would name Fleet), the humps as dunes dispossessing themselves of earth and moving on always, a sandscape perpetually in motion so as to appear only the same again and again — repetition as ritual, wandering the only, which is favored, method of stasis, the Latinate nunc as Aba always said Whether permanens or stans. What it was was just camel after camel after camel bobbing up and down as if lifejackets made exclusively for the rescue of hunchbacked Ukrainian cleaningwomen down and up on the driest landed sea imaginable — such was my dream of the camels always approaching as if when they’d ultimately approach, finally arrive, then and only then would I finally awake, knowing this to be the Truth of the True as it’s said though it seemed as if they’d never approach, until they actually had approached, arrived and lay down in darkness in no shade just in front of me, in a semicircle around this tree providing nothing for no one, folded into squats atop their spindles, nosing at each other and nuzzling flanks as I struggled, fought against this dream, into waking at the image — not the mirage — at this the image to be found reflected down deep in the deepest well of the mind the recognizance of which should have signified the end of my dreaming, must have and must still, but my struggling, all my fight, was in vain: because I would never wake up, because I wasn’t dreaming, it was never a dream and still isn’t.
The camel caravan had arrived and I was awake all the while for all.
Alef
I am the ass
they whoever they ever are
would pack with explosives
would burden with explosionary material
fertilizer bombs, nail-
packed explosives until
the guards
the security
the patrolling police and the
ordinary everyday citizen
they began beginning and so
they whoever they ever are
instead of packing the explosives atop
me or at my sides in beastlike
breastlike bags
they whoever they ever are
began instead
stuffing
the explosives up inside of me
into my ass and so
stuffing
me full
there is no why
I am relating this
I just am
A Pilgrimage
It would seem simple, it would. You go toward the Two Mountains and the Two Mountains come toward you. As they come, you become. You come toward the man and the man goes toward you. As he becomes he, I become me. Ingathering, he’d honk at the doorway. Aba would make the sound of the horn with his tongue thrust dumbly out of its mouth like a camel’s or bird. Shoes I’d say, I can’t find my shoes. I can’t find, then I’d find them. He’s coming was what Aba would say to the Queen who had Heard it all before. Me too, I’m going, Me three. I was always late for school, I was always the first one home. Then dinner. You eat your beets and the Queen lets you watch cartoons is how it went. Or the Queen lets you watch cartoons and you’ve eaten your beets is how it should go. Should have gone, bath, lastly bed. But I never kept that half of the haggle.
Are you coming? one virgin had said to another Is he going with us? all had said to each other even as I left them and so all of Queen Houri had said to me and even I’d said it too, which is to submit as I set out to seek with the help of a thumb.
Walking I left.
And submissively long.
The way they said it, it seemed so simple, it would. Any direction to one destination. Every cardinality to a capstone. Shoot an arrow then follow it long. Walk on your hands clad in the gloves of assassins. Go down and submit. But exodus is never that simple.
They were the camels. They had ridden me out to the Fountain at which I drank without quench. They had ridden me out to another Fountain, then a third. And still no. Water gushed out my jagged hole, a sprung with no spring. Again and again I explained to them and so to myself what I called just like the Queen called any thousand of hers My Predicament What’s his Problem? What Happened to my Pants? then one camel drew with its foot in the sand a map effaced quickly by wind. Cloven over. And so it drew it again, or attempted to, and then again, each time the map only one-ninth, or one-seventh, finished, then the erasure from wind. Complete. I’m talking utter. Then two camels worked on the map, each at an opposite end, and the map was then one-third-finished, or two two-sixths-whole, then the wind again and then nothing. And so three camels and then four, each from its own gusting quarter until again with the wind and so it took seven of the camels all hoofing it simultaneously to all together complete the map I had by then memorized in whole as I had had it in part. As for why the camels couldn’t ride me out there themselves, it wasn’t ever proposed. Into never, I left.
Having been directed to the Valley between the Two Mountains, I followed. I was to seek the man named Mohammed. There he would help me, It was said he would have to, said by Allah. Transfer me to the afterlife most appropriate to my previous Yes. No questions asked. Having answered none, I went. Having substantiated nothing, I submitted. This man named Mohammed would rectify this mistake — mine, his, or that of no one, none other’s. This mistake as unmistaken as all divine, but a rectification had been made necessary still. Not an apology. A mere reparation. Miser it a healing. A whole. Not on faith, to go on desperation.
How does he know a voice said.
It was a gust.
And know this too. He was scrutinized by the sun. Light and warmth despite day or night were denied him, then granted in showers, in snows the color of ash burnt in ovens. As it is said. And that the sand preserved his tracks as it preserved the trail of no other.