The Infernal Operator
The incubus is having
another rough night;
a bitter bell keeps ringing
between his horns, foreign,
off-tempo, pounding like
the gallop of a three-legged horse,
or the arrhythmic crash of cambered granite
tumbling from a fallen cathedral,
and to top it off
there's an angel in the fire,
feathers burning acrid, ashy black,
dialing, dialing the clouds, asking
the great silence left when the clacking
rotary wheel cogs home: Where is the bird-winged host,
my alabaster birth brothers, the holy
triune fatherspiritson
to pull me out?
The incubus knows the angel
triune fatherspiritson
to pull me out?
The incubus knows the angel
has landed in the wrong fireplace for this,
yet still he wishes
it would happen, to see at last a miracle
not born of tormented flesh
or the familiar's lascivious alembics,
and also so the noise would stop,
the pale, luminous eyes round as blue worlds
cease following him
from window to window as
he tries frantically to let out the stink.
Doesn't it care, this minister of grace, that
the incessant ringing, the billowing smoke
of its rendered virtue, distract him
from his greatest opus?
(50 Shades of Damnation,
to be published next spring.)
Why doesn't its everpresent
compassionate disaster master save it?
Instead it burns and burns
as the phone rings on unanswered,
sweetly smiling, staring at him
as if the lines weren't down
in a world on fire;
as if there was something
he could do.
~October 2015, lightly revised June 2023
I couldn't as yet find any angels to wrestle, but I do have the incubus and his quandary here.(To read poems in this series, click the eponymous tag.)
posted for Wrestling Angels at desperate poets
Images by Salvador Dali, Fair Use via wikart.org
Top:Debris of an Autobile Gives Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone, 1938
Lobster Telephone, 1938
That ending was just "Whooh!", I have no other words, but I mean it in a good way, in a way that it 'positively kills me'. I also really liked the subtle, tasteful and true humor that you have interlaced with other images that deal with something striking, hurtful and really, really present if we just look outside our windows.
ReplyDeleteThank you very much. I don;t know if my comment ever made it through the aether to your blog, so here its again, in case: "That fourth stanza! Really superb--"..the sky is clear, the clouds have melted in the angle’s mouth,/my teeth are sharp and warm/like howling winds of heat and south.." That was almost a physical experience for me, reading those words. I like the pattering on of the rhyme, which holds together the rambling images so well, and thanks for the notes at the end which show this is a conversation of two personalities about love and hell, making a lot of things make more sense...really a pleasure to read, just for the feelings it evokes, as well as the vivid language."
DeleteI love "the pale luminous eyes round as blue worlds." That phone, ringing unanswered in a world on fire, really gets to me.
ReplyDeleteSomething about the angel landing in the wrong fireplace has a kind of dark slapstick quality to it. Like a 'serves you right for expecting the holy triune to pull you out' vibe.The incubus may want to concentrate on his new writing but something tells me he just cannot stop looking in the fire whilst he wafts the smoke. The whole ride is filled with brilliance and I can smell the burning, see the 'following eye' ( like a Jesus from Knock) and appreciate the whole macabre scene. Bravo. Not an Angel for wrestling, this one.
ReplyDeleteAs if. I'm happy to see angel shade at play here, otherwise we get wicked angels who don't know they've tumbled forever from Paradise. Cause that's the incubus, ain't he, the clear-sighted if dark-bottomed sextant of humankind's hellbound animus. Who's calling? And why won't anyone pick up the phone? A dreamer's despair is in this, nailed to that sound like the stink of burning angel. The incubus as I read him in your series (how strange and wonderful to find this wing of the Library hidden in plain sight) goes where angels cannot but they're kin, blessed (or blasted) with infernal, antithetical sense, getting gods right with backward sense: the atheist's Mesphisto. I always thought this Infernal Library was of his design ... Anyway the poem is perfectly structured and trains a path between angels burning and no calvary coming. Thanks for sharing the gem again.
ReplyDeleteCould do or would do! This is rich. Oh, I'd love to read that "50 Shades of Damnation" written in all seriousness by the incubus clueless and infuriated that we mortal humans find it hilarious.
ReplyDeleteThe unanswered phone ringing in the fire and the angel trying to let out the stink are images that reverberate through my mind. I can relate to that feeling of impotence that the last lines conjure up. It's there just below the surface every day now. Poetry seems to offer us a way to craft it into something that will take us forward. Suzanne - Mapping Uncertainty
ReplyDeletewow this is big. the three legged horse grabbed me (my wife has only one) it reminded me of Supper's Ready by genesis at points. and that ending, perhaps there is nothing to be done, and all is the way it is...
ReplyDeleteThis is nothing short of devastating, and yet there are narrow veins of dark humor running through it, too. The wrong fireplace indeed. But that aside, this scenario is a searing, painful, and mystifying as anything I've read. Mystifying because your Incubus is himself mystified. Why doesn't the disaster master step in? I want to know, too. And indeed, that ending is gutting.
ReplyDeleteIt is been a lifetime since I've read your writing...you remain a master of clever lines (that second to last stanza is a joy to read aloud). I need to come round more often (this time thanks to desperate poets).
ReplyDeleteI love “The incubus is having / another rough night” I glad he’s human after all, puts on his pants every day just like the rest of us!
ReplyDelete