My Personal Crone, and the Blue Monk

Scissor Dance: My Personal Crone

THE BLUE MONK

 

At 3 o’clock in the morning,

the blue monk wakes up,

and lights a lamp

in the whitewashed stone box

of his cell.

 

the blue monk leans nearsightedly close

to the page of the incunabula

left open on the slope

of his book littered desk.

 

The blue monk makes owl eyes

at the miniscule scribbled

in the wide margin,

graffito of one of the book’s

former lovers,

and he gives the page a little kiss,

sucking on an omega

like a bone for its marrow.

 

The blue monk licks the page

for he likes the taste of vellum

and begins to read.

 

The blue monk feeds his eyes

to the ants crawling off the page,

the heavy book held against his face

like a pillow, like the dreamed bosom

of a succubus.  His Prussian nose

snorts up the musty pismire

like cocaine, as the long sentences pass

like an army crossing

the last bridge over the Rhine.

 

The blue monk takes the book

to bed with him, and falls asleep

in the middle of a sentence.

 

Nodland uber alles.

 

The blue monk has no need of flagellation;

the cat-o-nine-tails hangs unused

on the same nail as his crucifix;

a silken counterpane is not too smooth

to gnaw the naked mumble

of his dreaming body;

a goose down pillow is not too soft

to kindle the slurry

of indistinct syllables

drooling from his mouth

like smoldering goaf

to scorch his cheek.

He flays instead his tongue

with wine stored ten thousand years

or more in the catacombs

of his great and numerous family,

the fat harlequin tongue promised a taste

of amontillado,

while under the dark habit

a silver trowel is poised to slap brick

with wet mortar.

The blue monk begins to snore.

 

The shades of his ancestors

draw close and join in coyote chorus

as he gibbers like a midway geek,

his open mouth like a tosspenny target

for rube philistines.  Slack jawed,

eyeless in Gaza, word shorn Samson

gobbles his one vowel,

the vowel not chiseled into the hieroglyphs,

the vowel left out of Torah by Moses,

the vowel the Queen of Sheba

brought on her lips to Solomon.

 

The blue monk exhales the warm vowel,

and it floats like a bubble

of mutagenic fire

over the unfluttered pages

of the book’s saliva stained vellum.

 

The blue monk wakes up.  Blinks.

Begins to read.

 

Today is 12.19.16.8.3 1 Ak’bal 1 Tzek

1277 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.

Mrs. Dr. Omed and I visited one of our local big box bookstores last Saturday. Between us we own as many books as a branch of the City Library, but we’d had a lovely dinner featuring excellent tamales at Leon’s, she had a gift card with an unknown balance, and I needed a new Moleskine notebook. I rarely buy new books–my myopic eyes and manic brain being absolutely marinated in fresh texts via the innertubes–but it’s nice to visit them occasionally, like catching up with relatives you don’t see much. Especially when you need a new Moleskine. In fact, the last time I entered this particular big box bookstore was in search of Moleskines.

Not an interesting old book.

Most of the books I now own I got at thrift stores, flea markets, estate sales, and less often, at used book stores. I don’t so much buy books at these places as adopt them like ancient homeless waifs or old stray dogs. The best time to hunt for interesting old books is in the late winter and early spring, because this is the time of year when old people tend to die.  Old people who loved their books die and their heirs and assignees more often than not don’t give a rat’s ass for the musty old things and dump them, at Goodwill, the Salvation Army…at the closest local charity drop off that will give them the presigned blank income tax donation form. Or the private library is trashed–tossed by the loved ones into the alley in the general direction of the nearest dumpster. This is where many of the books on sale at Flea Markets come from.

This book has its pull by date on the front cover–A nice convenience.

I prefer thrift stores and flea markets to used bookstores.  The people who price books at thrifts and fleas generally do not value books. Consequently prices are low.  Often their sense of what makes a book valuable is exactly opposite to my own. I rarely pay more than a few dollars and sometimes less than a dollar for books that the proprietors of  used bookstores would price at 20 dollars or more.  These independent booksellers are people who think books are worth something. I agree but I’m afraid I don’t provide much support for locally-owned bookstores. I’m a dreadful cheapskate.

Notice a theme on this shelf?

I am drawn to old books the way I am drawn to older women. I like to touch them; old books and older women have more interesting and satisfying textures than the new and the young; I feel their history in their dimples, wrinkles, and folds like a blind man reading braille. Old books are impregnated with the history of all the hands that held them, turned their pages, cracked their spines, and passed them on.  The inside text is often enriched with the underlinings and scribbled marginalia of former lovers; old newspaper and magazine clippings, lists and notes folded into their pages; and the polish of  many readings and rereadings on the printed words themselves, like the patina of use on much-handled old wood or metal.

That is not the kind of book you find in a big box bookstore. The images posted above are of that kind, books I found on display on the shelves in the “New Age” section, next to the “Christian Fiction” section. I snapped the pics with my ever-ready digital camera because the authors have all jumped on the Mayan Long Count skytrain hoping to ride it to the bestseller list before the end of the 13th baktun in 2012, since I also have an interest in the Mayan Long Count (detailed here), and use it as sort of found countdown not to Judgment Day but a day on which a dark roast realist might possibly make a semi-informed judgment as to how our collective and personal Judgment Days will play out in the next few decades.  But the above pictured books are not the ones I consult on the Mayan Long Count, the future, playing tiddlywinks (Does anyone still play tiddlywinks?), or any other matter. There are of course many shiny new much more desirable and worthwhile books in the big box bookstore, but as I said, I’m a dreadful cheapskate.

Moleskines old and new.