llterary supplement to s&b
chrls decker, editor
merry wlesner, layout

Walpurgis Night

The ﬂames rise higher, a mingled chorus

Of mightly winds and screams of madness.
The mangled gnome, who tends the fire

Feeds the flames with blasphemous,wood
That refused to be wrought or bear any fruit.
The mangled gnome, the eternal valet

Waits upon the forms seated about the flames:

Beelzebub bares his serpent’s fangs

To spurt some venom toward the flames.

The fire falters as it hisses,

Sending up smoke ofa sickly smell

From which spring dismal nameless creatures
Which ﬂee and fly into the night.

Baal shifts position, the first King of Hell,

Wrapping his tarantulan limbs beneath him,

Opening his gargantuan mouth, a great gorge,

From which fall ﬂoods of stinking insects,

Which crawl, attracted, into the fire

And burn together to some foul black fluid

Which runs away in rivulets, to be sucked up by the soil.

Lucifuge Rofficalli, Lord Satan's emissary
lnhabits the form of an immense monkey.
Every hour he begins to devour himself

Only to be renewed at the finish of the feast
Amidst terrible thrashings and mad yelpings.

Asmodeus is Clethed in an inverted bishop's r'obe.
Bats and spiders hang strung squirming around his neck.
Che hand holds a potion prepared from belladonna.
The other clasps an aborted foetus foaming at the mouth.

Ashtaroth lies prone and absolutely naked,

His flesh appears advanced in decay and putrescence,
l-Iarboring hordes of small corpsersoavengers

Which are seen as lumps moving underneath his skin.

Ten thousand sorcerors surround these demons
Wailing and waiting for the festivities beginning.

We mustn’t keep them waiting, my br0ther in magic,
Our presence is required at this fete grotesque.

Having had introductions, let us now make our entrance.

Douglas Haynes

A Problem: Variations

”In the course of time there

came a day that closed the last

eyes to see Christ . . ."

>7 Borges
I
The Song

Moon-milk, chilled to crackling, seeps
From yellow swabs. Illumination leaps
Corrosive in a pillage of night;
Cindered lqiuckles stitched in hopeless ﬂight
Flee the child of scorn and unity,
Flee the guardian of lunacy,
In whom will stretch the follicles of birth,
And cloudseams of the failing forms of earth.
A true story crawls; the child uncaring
Regards its dull approach. Now blaring,
A story leaps to wield its power, killing
And giving life; to feel its metal filling
With forms the song of the dim land, born
Of compass and dimension; while foreign horns
Wail wormlike in the dawning final days,
Trace the lines of song in crimson mazes.
In sullied splendor now a storied truth
Lives, and plots at storyless demise, aloof
From regi ides, anonymous but not unheard,
And plots with life a grim death of the word.

11

The Law

Trapped iron sparks in trenches, homes
Where infant laws grow moonripe;
With rumblings from long-trusted border zones,
With drummings from the Warrior’s, still pipe,
With vague far speech from wild raw valley skies,
Faithful to dim distant bugles, pocked
Bh animal tracks; peopled with wolf eyes,
Crouched in bent child claws. Inlocked
And awesome in the living claws of speech,
The law must grow until it cannot reach.

Awesome in the city’s vacant maw,

A law of bone lies limping, now exposed ,
And writhing in the bla ckdrench moonjaw,
Which for the firm of ﬂesh is never closed.

Barricaded in a paper bag, rejecting
With wooden certainty its pounded ledge;
With its brown blimpness regal, objecting
To the perilous shifting of the edge,
A law of finger limps. But hear the man
Awakened from the la ' "The law controls,
With weapons of the mind and of the land,
With armaments of blood and silent soul,
The demarcated song of inquiry,
Controls the coiled clumps of mourning.
Midwife to vast patterns of activity,
The law awakens dead men to its warning."
III

The Eye
The blood eye shrinks, ripped
As the child creeps, as the dead priests
Crawl, and with one body invert
The crouched authority of disfigurement.
Incensed, with borrowed sight smeared thickly
Over mythical limbs, in time repulsed
To dull stumps.

Once more the dark-won child

Cloudborne recedes. the more the naked land,
Grips tight with porous eyes, seen eyeless;
Grips tight with shredded hands, felt gripless;
Laughiessly recedes,

Child~heavy in the amputated dawn.

The Grinnell Cemetery

A very simple cemetery over‘

Looks an Iowa field,

Frosted with ice and snow.

One could almost call it a literary graveyard-
It is so littered with the remains

Of Faulkners, and Stevenses, and Cranes.

This is a land of Lot's wives
Who found
That all lives
Turn round
To become pillars of stone,
And plots of sweet possibility.
Alice Rogoff

 

