On the Forming Substance of Orishas

Author(s): Will Alexander

Source: Callaloo, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Spring, 1999), pp. 386-388
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3299471 .
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 ON THE FORMING SUBSTANCE OF ORISHAS

by Will Alexander

Like spectral glass

or music in hypnotic palindrome
I float
in measureless unus-ambo
as if
up a flight of refracted shale
I had greeted my own collusion
my quaking appoggiatura
in morose voudanic empyreans
in a darkened gradient ideal
in a treatise on immortal monsoon en-storement

yes
on combined ammonia & sand
by extracting dye from bitter surgical causes
by flames monstrously modified by treason
as if
I threw from my optics
a blizzard of dice
a transformed connivance
& flew
spellbound
into the jeopardous range of dense Judaic gods

who change forms

who variate as monsters
as plagues
as ghosts who block the sun door

so my Orishas
imprisoned
theistically locked

From Above the Human Nerve Domain (Pavement Saw Press, 1999). Reprinted by permission of the
author.

Callaloo 22.2 (1999) 386-388

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 CALLALOO

who advance & retreat

by phantom creosote vibration
by prayer as aboriginal containment

therefore
the sun
a lucid kestrel flambeau
appearing in fictitious scintilla
like a spector
or a draught with both its ciphers missing
again appearing
as a blood drenched duenna
as a life & death rotation
as a quintessential acid

& so my Orishas
with the double throat of a billion ethers
flying across runic withdrawal
flying as obscured pariahs

alive
as if
sulfuric bi-theism were shattered
with its laws
with its manacles
with its phantoms

& my Orishas
with their sputum coloured auras
with their eyes of tortured hurricane moons
as flailing solitary ghats
as quintessential duplicity
part quadrant
& part yellow
&I
with lustrous looking glass pigment
with my roving heretical elixir

& so there is thirst

there are surreptitious muffling powders

& the deities

with their scattered wounding teeth
watch my Orishas turn shadow & vanish

387

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 CALLALOO

& continue to hum within my voice

as in a glass of old veronal brew

Now as dialectical advantage

as high above deistic moral chambers

their winged singular fate

freed to roam inscrutable havens
beyond the fact of an insular neutron thesis
beyond the trait of canonic barrier as reversion

unus-ambo-"... a counterpart, a heavenly 'partner', which partakes of a 'polar', or 'transcendent

dimension."'

388

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