Van der Leun

TERRA COGNITA

Of Rwanda, April to July, 1994,
and all that went before and will come after.

Gerard Van der Leun
December, 1995 -- June 2004 | New York City | California |

1.
This rusted field, these shattered skulls, this stained and ancient road
that runs beside the bleached river where carp fatten on brown dugs
and shoals of human offal until, sated, they drowse above the slime.
The place of iron dust expands, and downstream shallows roil
choked with the crocs' warm morning meals -- the flesh-flecked bones
glued with rags and gristle, caught between the pointed teeth
like some vile floss of torn tendons, all breathing flesh consumed.
Upstream our evening's dinner entertainment continues....
Unspeakable acts involving children and machetes
unfold repeatedly until the thin hacking arms cramp,
and fingers are flung into the stream like feathers plucked from birds.
In the still and baking heat, the ears of women, dry and crisp,
whirl in the disinterested wind...and so one turns to go, but still...

They all drift down, they all drift down
            (not leaves in an autumn breeze,
            not in some lyric poem of windblown lace,
            nor Japanese trifle of dank moss and leaves)
drift down like chunks of poaching pork,

until the brain is singed, burnt bare,
flayed open and exhausted of all care,
all sense of rage -- until the phrase
Can you imagine? is answerable
only with one word, No,
and the single image that might impinge
on drowsy lurkers in plush cave chairs
is a jet of blood erupting in a syringe
plunged into an eye, that the seeing beast
blind itself at last with sleep,
and away, turn away, turn away.

Terra Cognita Part 2

2.
Where the silent flame's parabola
sinks to rest on burnished dust,
we wear a golden mirror set
into a sphere of silvered white
wrapped around a skull and kept
so that the mirror hovering low
above the lunar surface might
reflect the Earth that rose against the night.

The blue-black globe breathes with sparks
of light at night, by day is slashed with white
over green and umber swathes which are,
upon closer circumspection, seen
as the familiar edges of our continents.
And so our land becomes landscape.
mapped, measured and made flesh,
forever frozen beyond touch.

The storm-swollen Red Spot of Jupiter
and the swollen iris of a dead man's eye
in the backwash shallows of Lake Victoria are
-- each seen from a proper distance --
the same cold circle shut
to any possible meaning
we may wish to assign to it; a metaphor
without resonance or consequence;
a frame of no fixed reference,
a grid on which we dance as if death
was something perpetually happening to others
on some sound emptied of actors,
and run by robots on the dark side of the moon.

Terra Cognita Part 3

3.
Let me say this again

      To know is not to hold.
      To hold is to release.
      No hands can close on any light,
      nor any light illumine
      what lurks behind your brow.

      Look close, look deep within.
      There is only dark on deeper dark.
      It is obvious. Manifest.
      You are but purposeless matter.
      It is not one. Never one.

      Always it is always,
      now and forever, Zero.
      Your inventions, holy icons
      and philosophies of air,
      will not avail you.

      The machete hacking the child
      into chunks of screaming meat
      is the actual, is the real.
      And this sweet lust lives deep in you.
      without meaning, memory, or care.

      And you know this to be true.

Terra Cognita Part 4

4.
Between our small hands grasping for the light
and our gnarled hands closing on the dark...
we know nothing, we learn nothing.
The dead eye reflects the moon rising
over the waters of Lake Victoria to no purpose.
Our delicate chamber music, our greatest Symphonies,
are spewed over the shore of Lake Geneva,
over the vaults of gold, to no one's benefit,
signals to the deaf who have neither signs nor hands.

      O Beautiful for.....
                  For what?

For the garroted cellos of Bosnia?
The jigging afternoon cabaret of wounds?
The circus of snipers? The shattered girl
whose head is a nest of gnats and bullets?
The singer whose throat is home to maggots?

(And then She rises in the rose light.
She knows the old songs.
She knows the ancient, chanted spells,
the tempo of bones slammed on taut skins.
She knows the patterns etched
in shadows on the caves' walls
by a million campfires.
She knows the hot must of the tents
warm with sleep in deepest winter.
These things are her dowry, her teaching,
her legend and legacy.
            And so she dances
            with the shadows of the dusk
            until the ages turn to rust.)

Terra Cognita Part 5

5.
Behind the golden mirror
that frames the rising Earth
above the mountains of the moon
is the skull beneath our skin.
And it chortles and it grins,
and stutters without meaning,
"Within your golden mirrors....
are but bags of rotted dreams."

Seal him up in tight white armor,
and place him tilting, inflated with wet dust,
on the sifted stuff of space, frozen in fine drifts
on the sealess surface of the moon.
Wrap a mirror made of gold about his face,
around that white helmet that seals out space....
and make him lope, loose upon the grit,
bobbing like some inflated toy, to stand aslant
beside the flag fixed on a stick
that it might for some time seem to flutter
bravely on an unclaimed airless world.
And call the Earth from its dark deep to rise
within that dread mirror until it, gravid, looms
above the pumiced dust that never lived,
above the razor teeth of mountains
raised beyond the hands of rain...

            "What are we doing here? "
            Making this record, this snapshot of the times.
            Scrape up some dust,
            climb aboard the flame,
            depart -- depart forever,
            that only prints of boots remain.

Terra Cognita Part 6

6.
In the shadows by the seawall, if you look quite closely,
you will see gleams of dental gold, some shards of heart,
of flakes of bone that once were smoothest pearls,
reduced to shreds, the merest scraps of oceans' meals.

Life waiting its turn in the deepest fissures
            far down in the Marianas
            in the billowing fumes of submerged volcanoes
where whole continents are disgorged,
            and animals on stalks waver in the dark,
            their valved mouths gaping to feed
            on the plumes of pumice and ash.

"Que sera, sera.
Whatever will be, will be.
The future's not ours to see.
Que sera, sera."

Terra Cognita Part 7

7.
The patient indifference of scavengers
stripping a fetid carcass on the veldt.
The torches in the night that have come with the rope.
The stone steps leading up between the squat legs
to the swollen belly. The marble face, the flint lips,
the teeth of steel honed to perfection with a file,
in the place where they sacrifice to an iron sun.

Deaths derived not from fear or thirst, gain or glory,
but for an entertainment, merely for the fun.
The flayed skins that frame the abattoir.
The spotlights swirling to announce
the unveiling of the icons, the symbols,
the arms raised in salute...the sign over the entrance:
            The Triumph of the Will.

Terra Cognita Part 8

8.
Aerial bombardments seen from far out at sea.
Dawn's early light.
Rockets' red glare.
The ships slipping beneath the burning oceans.
The hissing wall of flame.
The storm of fire.
The sun released on Earth.
Shadows burned into stone.

Shadows dancing in the ageless cave.
The magnification of the face into visage.
The smirking triumph of imago uber alles.
The shells of daughters' ears scattered on stone.
The deep architecture of the chimp.
The thought that thought is but a program,
that dreams themselves are cathedrals
of software, echoes of wetware.

The engine.
The airfoil.
The disassembling of matter.
The "secret" of the atom.
The reading of the endless code
buried deep within the body's vaults.
The final solution
to all evolution.

The long laminate nails.
      The oriental smile.
The sealed indictment.
                  The van ride into the dark.
                        The plane ride, naked, far out over the ocean.
The sedated slow walk to the howling door.
                                    The plunge without parachutes,
                                          awakening with your final screams.

Terra Cognita Part 9

9.
The constructed photograms of the self,
faces that never age nor fade.
Motes from the morning in the slant
of the light in afternoon ballrooms.
The slow drifting swirls of the sea
as seen from high Earth orbit.
Slabs of raw sky stretched over grids of green.
Roads of rippled steel across the wastes of Antarctica.

Slim soldiers, sunken into torpor
behind the concertina wire.
where trees dance without the wind.
Far-off sirens slash the sleepless dark.
Nails scribble love letters on stainless steel walls.
In the room of crystal walls and burnished floors,
our fetishes hover behind slabs of glass:
soul suits woven of dried weeds and reeds
sewn by leather fingers with strips of dry skin.

Aluminum tubes packed with chatting meat
shot like bullets deep into the dark flesh of dawn.
Pillars of poured stone. Buffed sheets of bent metal.
Songs injected in the ear sanding dreams as smooth as glass.
Signals always arriving from the clear and endless air,
while at the South Pole a white eye stares
without blinking into the deep, blank silence
where our signals go out and go out but no answers echo.

Terra Cognita Part 10

10.
(Then I woke and saw your body bright
against the buildings as a silver jet slicked by,
lined out against the sunset sky like love's true arrow.
And the golden clouds bloomed above the night
against the jadegleamed wall of trees.
And the gull pirouetted down on evening's fade.
And your wine was cold upon my lips.
And your touch sparkled electric in my breast.
And I wished to live the life of the body forever.)

The corpse lolling among corpses
in the brackish back waters of Lake Victoria.
The eye of that corpse among corpses
stained white as dirty snow.
The iris of that eye surrounded by blood,
            and rising in that dead iris
                  our single dead moon
                        daubed pale upon the bright noon sky,
                              reflecting everything we are.