digital gothic: a spellbook for the new sorcerer (new work 6)
How to read the pieces from this book:
1. Click on the embedded link to the [music] in the title of the poem.
2. Listen on repeat while reading.
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Fig. 23: Wrecked: [Playlist: Atha, Voices in the Stratosphere]
adrift
in deathsleep
in skycavern
a ship
unfolds from deepest black:
femur masts bear
ulna spars lashed crosswise by glistening coils
festooned in ragged dregs of cloth that
sleek and luff in silent draughts
she sails
illumined by a pale blue flame
that dyes the shrouds:
aurora borealis
a solar wind aglow in death collisions
of magnetic dust
or noctiluca scintillans
a host of tiny animals
whose lantern organs light a liquid night:
scouts, drawn to your
foundering pings
in the crow’s nest the vampire squid
flash their photophores
ghost crabs go barber-poling deckwards
and all that was camouflaged as wreck inhales
a swim sac full of brine a fleshy embrace
of cuttlefish and eels
disguised as slack tatters fatten
into a living interlocked rigging
propelling this vessel on dissolved wind
billows of squidink
boil to port and starboard swarms of ice-blue pinpoint animals
churn in a wake of unhinged stars:
a sorcerer stands behind the fiddlehead
on his shoulder
an anglerfish casts
her glowing yellow lure
into the blackness
hung to
reel you back from wandering the
nowhere in your nothing
the sorcerer
reaches with both hands to fold your wings against your chest
and gathers you into his coat
into a soft nest built amongst his empty ribs
heed the yarn he says
but mind the toothy maw
behind the watchlight
in answer
the mizzen topsail uncloaks:
a giant manta kites in slow spirals downward through the forestays
to offer a wide white ventral surface
onto which the anglerfish aims her lure:
5 4 3 2 1
projects and then
fade in through murk:
the sea floor empty featureless
a stirring in the foreground
clouds of sediment rise into a bed of swollen pulp
mounding, shivering into deadfall backwarding
into half-digested hulk
right-angles drawn in pale, lifeless crusts
of brainworm and gooseneck seafan skeletons
a graveyard of hard reminders adhering into ship shape
a scaffold on which now burgeons an undeathing:
decks unsplinter cracked halves of hull
swing to like a closing clamshell cohering into seamless ellipse
two horizontal lines appear in the debris
bulked degree by degree by aggregating matter
until masts abloom in algal furs
lever upward into perpendicular bonds
and spars condense from drifts of silt
javelining true to crosstrees and yards
decked out in a bunting of wilted jelly
that rallies into orange anemones, violet nudibranchs,
soft life hungered forth from bones
a palace of innocence
recomposed of her route reversing
filter-feeders vomiting gusts of gorge
great fish coughing chunks of fins and scales
which implode to live silvery streaks
and spasm off into the choke
of eel grasses full lush then battening down and reefing in
and on and on and less and less
until a trapped whisper
a mayday cry
appears from above
a bubble descending toward the wreck
shrinking as it speeds
to the empty throat of that
lost wax lodge of bones
the sorcerer emerging from his drowning
his barren hand casting
from the pocket of his seaworm-eaten coat
a sodden mess congealing into tightly creased papers
from which unknots a twine garland
that reeves itself through the cathead
and steeves the groaning timbers of the bowsprit
and the wreck begins to lift
answering the pull of rumor
on an anchor line reeling upward
one trembling string
one spider silk
one sounding line
one thread of tale
the yarn that always dangles:
(we are deep-shifted now
spun into the spiral of music
gone gate crashing with ravens
shuffled our coil
on a deathtrip
stripped to
a stray signal
picked up by ghost ship
rescued
by death itself
who builds a nest
of an empty chest
and makes of us
a heart
together we mind the toothy maw
projected by the light of a lure
on a manta belly
the flick in which all present company
myself included
star)
says death, our sorcerer
just as the last frame sticks and rips
and the projection on the manta’s belly flips flips flips
with a sound like something being wound up:
a pocket watch a music box
a windlass weighing-in the bower
a bird’s heart racing in a ribbed locker
with each click and beat a glossy black feather is plucked
from your body and sucked straight up his windpipe
erupting from his mouth and promptly swallowed
by the waiting anglerfish who smiles smiles
it’s all above board death says
watching the thing yet trapped in the watch
until you arrived my windfall
he unfolds one of those crisp papers clutched in his fist
holds it tight to his chest so you can read:
W
hen lost or unsure of your position, ships shall release a caged crow.
The crow will fly straight towards the nearest land, thus giving the
vessel some sort of a navigational fix.
come, lend me your wings death says
and lets go his charts
casting himself overboard
the waveson treasures of his hold
spill up toward the light:
pearls worn down to grains of sand
gemstones roughing back to rocks
glass bottles burst to living dust
a great shudder wracks the strake treenails squeal free of the ship’s planks
and the hull distintegrates in spinning trunnels
among the dreck his cap his coat
his skull and two femurs form, briefly
a waving jolly roger
lost from view as the ribcage sinks with you inside
every last feather tornadoed loose
that damned anglerfish following behind
and gulping down everything
until with a harsh shake and a push
she grasps the cage itself
and cracks you loose
bites off each of your plucked wings
and glutted, sinks slowly:
a shrinking yellow glow in the undernight
what’s left of the ship pitchpoles and breaks apart
leaving a wake
of fractured ribs
a wrecked raven
and a choice:
the dangling yarn
the sinking lure
