RIO DOS MUTANTES
Frazier
Drift diving the altered Amazon
starts with a siren’s sibilant song.
Is it pressure on my inner ear
messing with my concentration?
These aural imaginings must arise
from my tanks, from a bad mix of nitrox.
Who tampered with my gear?
Too late to nix this flood season swim . . .
My fins drag up a dusky particulate,
a blackboard for the existence of seraphim
that can attract razortails to a blood fest,
or dartworms that hook your heart like bait.
Every diver studies such grim mutations
& knows the layouts of many river beds.
But which way exits this drowned forest?
Or which instead will hasten my demise?
My stick & glide feels so impure.
My handholds slip from my grip.
Above me barbed mosses train
down from branches a maze to navigate.
Immense pink dolphins wink golden eyes.
Is there meaning in their gaze?
& a swelling balloon leech supplies
its road map of fluoresced veins.
Which is the proper course . . . I’m unsure?
I see specters sway on silt stalks.
Each weedy mouth talks my name
& bids me down inviting currents to rest
on glades of writhing gorgonheads,
between stinging red lines of devil’s tears.
So let me defame these grotesque fears.
So let me invoke each sacred river force.
My data recorder can source my route
and divine where this end reboots.
Oh, let me whisper incantate
& confess my fate to the black box.
MUTANT ILLUMINATION
Boston
Rebel saints and stray pariahs,
clever con artists and stalwart desperadoes,
mad adventurers and rogue fanatics,
devotees of all that is outré and fantastic . . .
embrace the transfigurations of this spacious borderland,
this unexpected frontier where individual imaginations
can chance freedom and death beyond
the hermetic wisdom of dome-dweller cant,
beyond the futureless ghetto entrapment
of the unshielded urban sprawl . . .
where it is rumored that in a valley yet to be mapped,
somewhere in the vast interior of this organic labyrinth,
light, the very spiritus lux incarnate,
roams the treetop canopy silently
from branch to intertwining branch . . .
spilling a liquid radiance from the cups of flowers,
rifling the hidden plumage of exotic birds,
peeling an ebon sheen
from the chitinous backs of arboreal beetles . . .
gathering diverse shades and blending unseen colors
to cast an illumination so archly pure
in its dusk light clarity
that it fills the leaves with a rarefied translucence
for miles in every direction . . .
so potent in its distillation
you must smell and taste and savor
its foxfire nectar with every intake of breath,
so vital in the implications
of its visionary promise
that tears will rule your cheeks . . .
and you will know with a certainty akin to madness
that all the unnamed appetites of your questing soul
could soon be sated . . .
STIGMATA
Frazier
Prelude
And everywhere I look upon the Sphinx’s skin,
memories spin; they form from the formless . . .
At the lost horizons of New New Guinea, in the forgotte
highlands of Papua,
the Koranga river tumbles wild as the riprap that fans into
her valley
from the sheerest mountain sides. She spills not far from
the coast, not far
from a world still trying to adjust, yet quite distant in
such a riotous terrain
where fresh growth reaches out and strangles you with its
verdant grip.
Along her banks sits a lone outpost of civilization, a
desperate foothold
of subsistence, and pig farmers, and the miners who crush
gravel for its gold.
There I drowned—in cheap liquor—my memories of a
woman’s brown eyes.
There I bared my torment over the unscalable limitations
of love.
And there I sought Wutai, a man who owned the town
and had a reputation
for knowing every person, every crazy tale that passed
along the Koranga.
In this case, a rumor that a powerful faith had sprung up
in the jungle depths,
a back-to-the-roots religion of animism and rebirth in
nature, a truth
that might free me from the remorseless grip of what
obsessed my spirit.
Wutai and I were destined to bargain, but I knew little
of what I bargained for.
1.
In the Mutant Rain Forest where everything dreams, yet
nothing sleeps,
in its replenished interior that is the shade of the soul,
where ancient fires still rage and sputter dead,
I sometimes see my own death shapeshift before me,
a flashing vision
On the night I found Wutai, with monkey calls
keening through the treetops,
with a waxing moon that sparked silver fire in the clouds
about Mount Kaindi,
and after swelling my courage with shots of Wutai’s rum,
I sat on the steps
of his canteen, talking with him, waiting for a guide
Wutai expected soon.
A seasoned explorer who Wutai would hire out to me for
a price, and who
he guaranteed would lead me to Bulolo—the mad bishop
of this faith I sought.
I watched the incandescent pupils of headlights scythe
through the streets
lined with candy-colored huts, with flaking attempts at
cheer.
The vehicles turned off; always false hopes. I twitched as I
cursed.
Tired of sitting and drinking, bone sore from waiting on
bare façades
in the abandoned outback of No Place. Waiting for my
rapture, my savior.
I knew something had better happen, and sooner than
the next drink.
Inside, the band blasted through another loud, lurching
song of joy.
Thatched roofs lifted, the walls of the building seemed to
sway
seductive as hips on their block pilings. I leaned against
the steel rail,
stretched my legs along the length of the step, and turned
my face to the door.
Strung over the dance floor, Christmas lights flickered
like heat wasps as
the six-piece group segued to a staccato, reggae-like
medley.
Weathered men in stiff chaps brushed their electricity
against giggling Lolitas.
A bar girl named Mani poured Wutai and me a round of
black coffee.
Wutai, sallow-faced, with eyes hollow from smoking coca
paste, slurped his.
I held mine up, hoping to divine my future from its
calligraphies of steam.
Mani lingered at the threshold and stared at me with a
pouty expression,
/>
a smoky emotion that all women here bore like a cross
against their bosom,
a sign that a man must interpret before offering up his
heart to them.
Even in this regenerative paradise, the soul suffered its
cloisterage.
Music stopped in an abrupt decay of drums and guitars. A
brown out.
A woman in a blue top stepped from the shadows and
confusion with a cigarette,
dismissed the girl, and got a light off me with a quick
penetrating look.
When she disappeared again into the steamy mass inside,
I followed her
compact movements with an appreciation born from
years of insomnia.
“You like that one, eh?” asked Wutai. “She’s half native.”
“Just watching for the sport,” I said, half in truth.
“Spectator sport.”
“Good, Mani wants to fuck you. It’s okay. She’s clean, and
she likes it quick.”
He gestured as if tossing off lines to an advertisement.
“And she has spirit!”
“Spirit is good,” I said. “But I like it slow, and with
conversation. I like mystery.”
I stopped talking then. The emptiness had pooled inside
me, pressing to get out.
2.
I sometimes see my own death shapeshift before me,
a flashing vision
of scales patterned in a lambent bronze,
in a stream of rays that runs liquid as the days.
The generator kicked in, and the band leader stepped to a
big microphone.
Before he could sing, the woman in blue stumbled out—
shoved past us.
Three surly men corralled her near a red flatbed truck
with boarded sides.
The woman sank to her knees in the mud of the parking
lot. She swore.
One rancher stood over her, spoke in pidgin that clucked
from his throat.
She laughed like a madwoman, saying something about
paying for drinks.
The man raised his fists and shook them. His words were
unintelligible growl.
She laughed again, taunting him in a voice that I heard as
a toucan’s squall.
The man hit her, quick and deliberate with flat of his
palm.
She bellowed. She wasn’t an animal that he could buy and
sell.
She moved to stand up, but he hit her again with a
sweeping backhand.
His friends tried to subdue him, but he was incensed now.
Drunk enough to rage with mean spirits, to do damage. I
stepped to the ground.
“It’s not your fight,” Wutai warned me with a grip on my
shoulder.
I shrugged him off. Everything had become a struggle for
me.
I slid across the wet earth, wove through puddles with a
sinuous gait,
materialized between the rancher and the girl as he raised
his fist like a hammer.
“You savvy, this stop,” I said. The man dropped his hand
to his waist.
A flash of metal arced toward me, lashed out, catching my
wrist,
and I followed each scintilla of reflected light, each grain
off the blade,
as I swung an elbow up under the man’s forearm and
drove outward.
With the knife deflected, I jabbed hard to his midsection.
The rancher staggered back, a groan exhaling from his
lips.
I connected with a solid boot toe that raised his manhood
six inches,
sent him sprawling like meat against the side of another
vehicle.
He collapsed as might a seaport village under monsoon
rains.
I started to shake, my legs barely holding me as I walked
away.
The girl ran off, cupping her bruised cheek and cursing
along the street
until I could no longer hear her over the drunken croon
of the band leader.
I sat beside Wutai, inspected the long gash down the back
of my hand.
Cut to the bone and gristle, but little blood—as if the
wound grew there,
and the incision had only served to unfold its clean pink
secrets.
Wutai removed a hat banded in grime and wiped the
sweat from his puffy face,
blotting it from his creased jowls with a handkerchief
mildewed by blue spots.
“Was it worth it, Mister? You didn’t even get the girl.”
His irises looked dark as sapphires where the lights
caught on their surfaces.
“And now you must worry about contamination in such a
wound.
Out here, the spores can root through your marrow, seize
your blood.”
Wutai spoke with such sang-froid that it sent a chill
spiking down my back.
Hadn’t he warned me that such a problem might occur?
I felt that he had indeed known the outcome of the fight.
That he prefigured every event that occurred in this god
forsaken hole,
every round of Saturday night seduction and duplicity
and murder,
and every pincer of the rainforest’s campaign against
man’s occupancy.
“Now, what about Mani?” he said. His eyes turned
depthless, indecipherable.
I shook my head. “I’m through with sex. I’m here for
salvation.”
“But my guide will pass through. Tomorrow, maybe.
Maybe the next day.
Your payment will not be lost. And Mani is here tonight!”
I ignored him, discovering that another gash opened
along my forearm.
I accepted pain. Began to stutter. To itch where more cuts
burned
like an unrequited passion. I told myself that I deserved
them.
Wounds of guilt. Of yearning. Of my true caring severed
by a woman’s fear.
3.
It is a Sphinx that lifts the world upon its back and growls.
Its veins are roadmaps that lead nowhere,
its breath a cipher
Wutai said, “Sometimes men aren’t what they seem. But
they are still men.”
He looked puzzled as he spoke, then smiled as he pointed
toward the dark
shapeless canopy engulfing the town. “You know, the
trees are weak.
They have mutated very shallow roots in the jungle, even
the giant kinky.
Despite their girth, a cable and two jeeps can pull them
over.
Ah, a man’s resolve is no different. A man needs love to
carry on.”
My wounded hand palsied. I caught it in my other,
squeezed it hard.
The pain spread tongues of warmth through me,
replacing my destitution.
I wanted to say, “A man can survive on his pain, if he
makes that choice.”
Wutai patted me on the shoulder with an air of
patronage.
“You look pale, Mister. Perhaps we should go inside to the
rum?”
As we stood, I heard a strangled cry from the brush that
bordered the canteen.
A tribesman ran breathless into the lot, tripping an
landing face down.
He thrashed
the mud with his arms, staggered up, and
ran straight
into Wutai, who caught him by a mop of stringy hair,
now caked into muddy dreadlocks across his painted
chest and arms.
A ragged hole remained where the man’s nose had been.
His ears were lace.
The muscles on his face danced as if bees swarmed just
beneath their surface.
The very top of his skull supported a fungal mass that
glistened in the moonlight.
Wutai said, “This is not the guide to Bulolo. But he is
certainly of their church.
Perhaps the forest has brought this one to you as an
omen.”
Wutai sat again with a look of apprehension veining the
slack of his face.
His voice sounded more precise, more educated than he’d
first let on.
“Sit again, Mister. We will comfort this man. And Wutai
will talk.”
“Far at the depths of old Papua, where the river builds her
white anger,
Bulolo keeps a church carved from the heartwood of a
massive kinky tree.
And around it, living roofless in the canopy, his followers
congregate.”
(At the mention of Bulolo, the native slumped forward
and lay at my feet.
He breathed in deep, gasping rhythms while Wutai
continued his story.)
“The novices of Bulolo do much worse than kai kai, than
eating men.
They feast on the forest: edible barks, foxfire fungi, the
rodent-like things.
They drink such nectars that infect them with unnamed
contagion,
or with hallucinatory trances that are the dreamtime of
the forest.
They seek to commune with the virulent growth that
seeds their land.
And in doing so, their fallen spirits may rejoin the
perfection of nature,
may participate in the rebirth of the world through
change and regeneration.”
(At this, the native’s back began to heave, the skin
bunching in cabled knots.
I watched the musculature writhe and seemingly align
anew.)
“And this takes its toll on any zealot,” Wutai said. “For
they are all zealous.
Their skin droops in wattles. Their hair blooms or falls
out forever.
The bacteria swarm in colonies through their pores,
annexing the flesh.
They become something more than a man, and
something much less.
They seek oneness and rebirth, but I am unsure what they
truly find.”
The native’s skin began to alter in hue before me, to a dull
yellow-red,
Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest Page 10
