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.
