Photograph negative her black arm: a diving porpoise, sprawled across the ice-banked pillow. Head: a sheet of falling water. Her legs: icicle branches breaking into light.
This woman, photographed sleeping. The man, making the photograph in the acid pan of his brain. Sleep stain them both, as if cloudy semen rubbed shiningly over the surface will be used to develop their images.
on the desert the porpoises curl up, their skeleton teeth are bared by parched lips; her sleeping feet trod on scarabs, holding the names of the dead tight in the steady breathing.
This man and woman have married and travel reciting chanting names of missing objects.
They enter a pyramid. A black butterfly covers the doorway like a cobweb, folds around her body, the snake of its body closing her lips. her breasts are stone stairs. She calls the name, "Isis," and waits for the white face to appear.
No one walks in these pyramids at night. No one walks during the day. You walk in that negative time, the woman's presence filling up the space as if she were incense; man walks down the crevices and hills of her body. Sounds of the black marriage are ritual sounds. Of the porpoises dying on the desert. The butterfly curtaining the body, The snake filling the mouth. The sounds of all the parts coming together in this one place, the desert pyramid, built with the clean historical ugliness of men dying at work.
If you imagine, friend, that I do not have those black serpents in the pit of my body, that I am not crushed in fragments by the tough butterfly wing broken and crumpled like a black silk stocking, if you imagine that my body is not blackened burned wood, then you imagine a false woman.
This marriage could not change me. Could not change my life. Not is it that different from any other marriage. They are all filled with desert journeys, with Isis who hold us in her terror, with Horus who will not let us see the parts of his body joined but must make us witness them in dark corners, in bloody confusion; and yet this black marriage, as you call it, has its own beauty. As the black cat with its rich fur stretched and gliding smoothly down the tree trunks. Or the shining black obsidian pulled out of mines and polished to the cat's eye. Black as the neat seeds of a watermelon, or a pool of oil, prisming the light. Do not despair this "black marriage." You must let the darkness out of your own body; acknowledge it and let it enter your mouth, taste the historical darkness openly. Taste your own beautiful death, see your own photo image, as x-ray, Bone bleaching inside the blackening flesh
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Attention: On Sun. Nov. 16th through Thurs. Nov. 20th, don't miss the pilot episodes of Unexplained with my good friend, George Noory, airing on the Sci Fi Channel at 11p (ET/PT). Topics include reincarnation, witchcraft, cryptozoology, UFOs, and strange tales.
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