She maps Iraq. For England and for Empire

and the Man Who Would Be King.

She is Miss Gertrude Bell, a friend of T.E.L.

and Faisal. She knows much more

than all the men around her table, and she knows

they know this and despise her for her

knowledge and her fluent Arabic. They need her though,

and so she maps Iraq. They cannot find

a thing: no well or wall or wildflower blooming

where they all think nothing blooms.

What they know they only say to one another

at their club–conceited silly flatchest windbag daughter

of the Ironworks Bell & Bell. They’d all

sweat their smelting jealousies in Turkish baths.

She maps Iraq. They all take notes. They lean across

her table, light her endless cigarettes.

She was in love with Doughty-Wylie, Charles Doughty’s

nephew who could quote in Persian poetry

that she translated back in 1893 with her lost Cadogan–

Songs of dying laughter, songs of love once warm.

Churchill sent D-Wylie to Gallipoli to die a hero and so now

she maps Iraq for Churchill, too.  And still a graver

music runs beneath the tender love notes of

those songs she murmers to herself, her pencil poised.

She’d loved dear old Cadogan, too, but Hugh

the foundry magnate Bell opposed a marriage with this man

of so few prospects, and she loved her brilliant father

most of all. (The gossips had her now in love with Faisal.)

At tea with Mrs. Humphrey Ward or Jenny Lind

or Henry James she used to say: I know your work, and

I shall go to Oxford.  At Balliol, she was obliged

to sit in lectures on the history of Empire with her back

to tutor Mr. Black, and yet she got a First in spite of that,

and now she maps Iraq.  There was ancient Hit

where Babylonians found oil to light their lamps. And here

was Ukhaidir, her own discovery & gift to archaeology,

or so she hoped, in photographs & sketches, measurements

of every kind. They wrote down in their notes Petroleum at Hit

and made no reference to the ruins at Ukhaidir.

Arabia  Deserta was beside her even now, whispering

archaic Englishes that Doughty drew from Spenser,

whispering his nephew’s name.  She’d lead a gift-mare through

the very room and not a single hand would offer her

a sheep’s eye or a carpet full of pillows on the desert sand.

She maps Iraq. She thinks their nodding heads resemble camels’

and she almost laughs remembering just yesterday

when Churchill slid from his high saddle on a camel’s hump

in front of Lawrence & the Sphinx.  She says that Baghdad,

Bosrah, Mosul should be vilayets but unified by the Sharif

the French drove out of Syria–the French, whose

archaeologists wrote up her finds at Ukhaidir before she

published Amurath to Amurath. The camels’ heads nod on.

She says and here is Carchemish where all the Hittites

watched through their binoculars as Germans

built the Baghdad railway bridge. Had they visited

Assyrians in Kalat Shergat, all the Jewish tribes there in Haran?

She’d wager none of them had been detained by the Rashids

but she was in a harem at Hayil back when Ibn Saud marched

that way before the war. She wonders now how many of

those pills she took. Lawrence would be difficult for wives

of all these men, but she herself was thought to be impossible.

Doughty-Wiley had a wife, and so did Cox, and even

Faisal, although no one ever saw her. They said her own visits

to the sheiks were scandalous where she was treated

as an honorary man. She smoked with them and drank their

bitter coffee and could gallop their best horses

with their favorite sons.  Here were twelve oases and

the routes to them and these were villages one shouldn’t

Horseshoe or dingbat, Sir        oh just the one

he thought, even if a hoarsepshaw brief Cyrillic Ж was altogether

confidential then.  Sadistic counsel goofy as it was to hit

a mark an iron-shod method like an actor on the methadone

for bad habits, pitching his good luck

to brain the brain-damaged boy, altogether his intention

Master Craft, I swear

swore it when he outran a goddamn dawn

a good man reigning through obsessive thought that inning out to bean

him break his neck      Focus on the other’s head

a dingbat or lucky shot                       pitching high and inside

fucking up the outdoors, even fireworks on the Fourth         can’t you

do an elementary task?

However,

He Who Finds a Horseshoe fires a synapse begs a question

but in time bags his quarry by the marsh

even brags about it, flees as far as Moony Lake running

in the tallest grass and crouching down they say

it’s possible to drown in mud and sand and shoreline

stagnant pools in short order, Sir.

I Babel’s unit, Blogmeister Ulyanov.  A thrice- beaten hoarse

without a pshaw is very dark indeed.

In the long run in short it was like this: He stumbled bleeding

into foreign camp where all the officers played

dice with nasty dingbats, bits of backbone lacking, they maintained,

in cowards who’d run off.  Their poet said that what he said

was never said by him.  But also Three times blessed is one who

puts a name in song.  Mandelstam.  Ulyanov.  Babel:

No iron can pierce the human heart with the  force of a period just

exactly in the right place

Aplysia at just that point in time became, like injured campers,

Useful slugs in neurobiological associative tasks.

Aplasia, though, prevented both the classical and operant conditioning.

💣

Iron bomb’s your balalaika too?  And you an anarchist like me?

In this day and age, the pleaЖureis entirely mine.

II

&shhhhhhh . . . sashays to Жay. . . &does shay &

No iron can pierce and so on just a way of betting on the

pen that’s mightier than the sword?  You think

that babble saved him.  All that playing Cossacks was

to chess what Checka was to his submerged cliché:

No one gets the period in the right place. Full stop, Bakunin.

A friend of ours saw him finger-fucking the countess, then

went off to a commune called K’ Klarity.  Stammered it so

long ago at Horseshoe Camp they only managed checkers,

chests puffed up by golly nonetheless in pride. And no!

Not a commune merely but a country: It’s Charity.

And that’s a virtue too, Great Aunt Calamity: tell me Muse

what E flat played as an harmonic on a single string

can say to the amped-up soundtrack rocking the whole square

until the child screams and holds his ears and Dingbat’s

prancing Lipizzaner slips on the cobbled street and breaks a leg.

Then you must put him down.  A mistake: They pitched

their good luck then and brained the brain-damaged boy.

All that rock n’ roll at such a volume it would surely damage

anybody’s brain.  Had you been at the May parade, it would

have damaged yours.  Even had you volunteered as number

one sadistic counselor.  After all, it was a job.

So too the bold advance of Ivan Chesnokov right up to

the gates of Chugunov with his regiment of cavalry.  They asked

him could he read and write,  and could he maybe put some

order in the Orders of the Day.  He took his rimless glasses

from his pocket, but did not dismount.  What he did

was read aloud the leud jokes told at the Second Congress

of the Comintern.  A kind of poetry in that. A kind of horseshoe

thrown with malice at the eyes, the mouth, the balls.

Cousin Klarity, I was only at a camp but you were in camp a.

Rabbi Mordecai was putting into verse the harsh sayings

of the one from Dobryvodka called Inert.

📖

Person of the book, Bookie of the Downbeat.  Dingbats all in order

for an answer to the ringing red &black phones.

III

Picks up the black: Name and patronymic. You think all this

security is just a game?   Interrogation’s terminal.

Means you integrate, and don’t fill out that line on race.

Do fill out the item re your mother’s maiden name. Tartar, no?

When I first went to Paris with the orderly for mess

we asked for steak tartare. Didn’t know the local customs, raw egg

on raw meat.  Nearly barfed, but stayed cool, & ate it up.

Did you clean your plate at camp?  No you can’t phone Mother now.

You’ll answer only to the bad cop at mass.  I hope for

your sake, Soldier, all of this can be resolved as expeditiously

as possible.

Hello up there & looking disingenuous

and fat.  Here’s a joke. Guy goes to a shrink. After a while

the shrink says, Man you’re absolutely nuts. Man says Please sir

I’d like a second opinion. Shrink says OK, Man, you’re

bloody ugly too.  Man says, Mein Herr, but I’m the Revolution

of the Word. Shrink says: Well then speak
He doesn’t though
he can’t. He’s gagged by then. And look at how

his hands are tied behind him.  If he could speak he’d

improvise a panegyric on his old Prof. Then they’d let him off.

For example, Camper Klubnik might begin, speaking as a

prisoner in the nether fields of play: By God they had me walk

upon the water, bored.  That made all of them electric.

The men in protective cover took Aplysia by the tail & shocked

him good, found that serotonin is a modulator and that

neurons form connections where a new protein is required

for growth. Our team, my Champion, seeks out

long-term memory: Your own.  Our mistake in Paris was in

not ordering the snails in white wine sauce.

(If you’ll just attach those wires to his name and patronymic

we can all go home)
Camp A is not ballet in Voronezh,
although it’s true they have a company. The dance we’ll do

together’s called the Nimble Neurons.  Simple stimulation with

the horseshoe, hard.  The Presbyterian (head) Master

got so angry that he cast dung about him, rang the orthodox bell,

☎️

hid the weapon in the tall grass of long-term mnemonics,

left it there to find.  Fend for yourself, my boy, who called him friend.

IV

Picks up the red: Koba Steel here. . . . (No, not a CEO.)

So stop and think. You’re at a high point in telephonic history.

He asks you now about your friend. Wants to know

is he the Big One.  For a moment you are overcome by envy.

Iosif the Georgian – Koba, Mr. Steel – thinks your

friend and rival maybe is the Big One.  He’s waiting for your

answer on the phone. Horseshoe, you know I don’t . . .

So think again. You’re having dinner with some friends

And Джугашвили (-shvili is the suffix meaning child)

telephones and asks you is your rival really great.

It isn’t Harry Truman on the line, not General Eisenhower,

not even J. Edger Hoover. It’s the Ossetian, the herd of sheep.

Yet another name is сталь,suffix -ин You’ve heard of sheep,

but not from Georgia. (Georgia doesn’t border Florida.)

He takes an avid interest in the welfare of the motherland’s bards.

Three times blessed is one who puts a name in song.

Boris Leonidovich, for example.

He says, I think you liked the summer camp we sent you to.

We gave you a dacha all your own; not a day, not an hour

did you spend like some Denisovich.  You know. You’re grateful,

But you’ve got these dinner guests.  Koba, we will have

To keep it short. You’re so frightened now you’re shitting in

Your pants.  Can we take this up another time?

You feel gagged, and look at how your hands are tied

behind you so you have to cradle the contrivance

with your chin. Boris Leonidovich, have a pleasant meal.

An old camp counselor, a bully Boy Scout grown into

a what? A what?

. . . writing for him on Yagoda-Checkist

checker board, black squares and red, king makers, triple jumps,

a bowl of raspberries lodged in each man’s lap, a rasp

in both voices, a rattle then: Were I to take my pencil up for

the supremist praise, I would speak of him who shifts the

axis of the world and call him by his dobrydawnsong name,

Dzhugashvili

✏️

Koba was a nom de guerre, and he darkened eighteen others.

Dzhugashvili only an aubade.

V

The telephone, the book, the pencil, and the bomb.

The horseshoe, the letter Ж, Aplysia, a prod.  Full stop, Aplasia

No codes where none intended.

No modes where all roads lead to home. No Rome.

Beneath her stone,

Arachne spins an Achmeist revival.

Rest with mother, bested brother,

shining on a harvest moon. Frost at midnight, steel

reflecting starlight:  Stella,  Stalin,  Blog-

meister Ulyanov. He Who Finds a Horseshoe

fires a synapse, begs a question, bags his quarry in due time

but fears it was a 💣 Nihilism was your nickelodeon, Clarity

embracing nil, your dingbat more than that

but only half the whole.

The other half in plus fours

Told it as a crime, a time when the brakeman was annoyed

at Nickerbocker, who was there for re-hab

in the -ilitation for an injury sustained to his cerebral cortex

from the wreck of nations on the railroad track that

used to be an outback songline, wrack of notions that were

once all viable ideals, and so he hit him HARD

with what was handy: horseshoe.  He could have put him

In a

📖

or gouged out his eye with a

✏️

These are conventions that you see in

Children’s books.  Child Aplasia failed all exams.

Aplysia could respond. But where exactly in these snail brains

did one locate the long-term memory, let alone the Ego

and the Id? Could they, anyway, be trained by pain, subjective

and unconscious? (No codes where none intended.

No allusions that have not offended. No mimesis. No thesis.)

If you cross synoptic cleft, target ion channel and inject

The catalytic element, you’re under way.  Dingbat is an object

used as missile in the absence of a horseshoe.

Or a gizmogadget with an utterly forsaken ancient name.

A typographical ornament . A silly jerk. A slug releasing ink.

What I’m saying isn’t said by me.

This is your whingding moment: dug out of the ground like gold.