HALLIBL AND THE THRONE

Hallibl saw the lie that lay at the center of her identity.  Its name was Molok, she thought, for it seemed to indicate that it wanted to respond when she spoke this name, and lay flat and sleepful when all those other words were uttered.  She saw the lie lie in its black sheets on the black bed, light as the mirage of a star in night’s desert, at the center.

Mififlf, a once dear friend from high school, descended from her perches in the hills to visit one precipitationless day, crumpets in her mind and satchel, malice exercising and happy in her heart.  Mififlf had always been irreparably beautiful, velour and elegance, the highest ends of burlesque and musical, a spectacle for the people, a womp of impeccability on the eternal table of lump and stain.

Hallibl and Mififlf had met—as we said—at high school, during their sophomore year, after Mififlf moved from Maf, and they had hit it off, as they say, through an interstice of calculus and coitus, in a Stutz.

Molok hadn’t appeared yet:  there was truth in things yet:  clouds are clouds, as the sages say, and dreams but are dreams.  The clouds of knowledge rain heavy on god’s children.  Dreams of innocence puncture the comforts of the rich.

Hallibl’s memories. Sliced and smoked. Like corned beef. Like chimney plumes in the north in the winter.  In there somewhere, in the munched meat, in the puffy ejaculations dissipating into the belly of heaven.  Nowhere were there kisses, a storybook open on the sleeping bed.  But there was a fire, monstrous in its choreography, its edges high in the obsidian emptiness, and the stars in their routine indifference circumscribing the savagery below. Children shouldn’t wander in the woods at night.  But memories … who would trust them, other than as a stained guide to the architecture of another world?

Mififlf wasn’t born in Maf, but this hardly detracted her from saying that she had been.  It was tattooed on her perineum, the f anusward, the M the other way.  Her Maf morphing slightly as she approached her knocking, Mififlf thought briefly of the crumpets she was bringing and the convenient chasm between heart and flesh, though not in this way.

Hallibl and Mififlf hadn’t discussed the tattoo until some time after the Stutz.  Not simply because Hallibl had been too lost in Mififlf’s muff to read, but since Hallibl was awkwarder than Mififlf in society the former failed to raise the issue and the latter, being used to it, simply didn’t.

Molok bides its time.  It doesn’t really wait for anyone or disclose its temporal fantasies until you’re in them.  This is a poem by the way.  In case you’re having difficulty.  Or a myth of sorts or allsorts.  Set in syntaxes and narrations neither to confuse nor enlighten nor to do anything in fact or fiction but to, like us, to be or become or seem or kill itself—a poem.

Hallibl was hiding in her navel near tea when the knocking started.  Curled around the nipple of her heart, she wasn’t accustomed to unaccustomed visitings, attributing it then naturally to something hiding in her hiding.  She returned to herself—or at least the self or selves or shelves on which lay things that claimed to be or represent in some sartorial wizardry her self or selves.  Yet there they were, still, like almost broken pumps.  The crack of fire and flesh in their sable deserts hardly compared.

Mififlf knocked. The crumpets sang. Those which had—just this morning—risen in their destinies, disks of bubbly warmth, yeasts of promise, on the perches, before perfection, were now singing, as perhaps counterpoint to knocking.

Hallibl and Mififlf had never particularly reconciled after the breach.  Hallibl had moved downstream, Mififlf to the hills.  A missive now and then, wandering between what seemed to be authentic affection or its prefab social simulations and thinly sliced hostilities, as thin as thinned culatello, in harried french baguettes and ambiguous cheese, would arrive, opening dim stairwells in the mind that were, hidden as they were behind libraries specializing in alchemy and other medieval arts, better left unopened.

Molok has a thousand eyes and sits on a talking throne of fire. The throne does its talking and doesn’t see.  How sight and speech collaborate in such a scene might be described in a book, but the text is lost, and we resort to explanations that may be so tangential they might be true.

Mififlf lay a crumpet on a table, not unhot, even butter on its dimples and dripping down its holes.  For you, she said.  And this was not untrue.

Hallibl and Mififlf.  What a team.  As teamy as teams go.  The blackbird and the poet, the hedgehog and the walrus, odd consummations that keep the world spinning on its axis of atramental silence.

Molok has a mouth we forgot to mention.  It unites the language of the throne and the language of the eyes.  Hallibl’s eyes are laid before it, twinkling like the desert, while Mififlf hums massively forgotten tunes, her perfect belly being kneaded by the cat, Minou.