Agrippa (A Book Of The Dead) Read online

  Agrippa (A Book Of The Dead)

  William Gibson

  William Gibson

  Agrippa (A Book Of The Dead)

  I hesitated

  before untying the bow

  that bound this book together.

  A black book:

  ALBUMS

  CA. AGRIPPA

  Order Extra Leaves

  By Letter and Name

  A Kodak album of time-burned

  black construction paper

  The string he tied

  Has been unravelled by years

  and the dry weather of trunks

  Like a lady's shoestring from the First World War

  Its metal ferrules eaten by oxygen

  Until they resemble cigarette-ash

  Inside the cover he inscribed something in soft graphite

  Now lost

  Then his name

  W.F. Gibson Jr.

  and something, comma,

  1924

  Then he glued his Kodak prints down

  And wrote under them

  In chalk-like white pencil:

  "Papa's saw mill, Aug. 1919."

  A flat-roofed shack

  Against a mountain ridge

  In the foreground are tumbled boards and offcuts

  He must have smelled the pitch, In August

  The sweet hot reek

  Of the electric saw

  Biting into decades

  Next the spaniel Moko

  "Moko 1919"

  Poses on small bench or table

  Before a backyard tree

  His coat is lustrous

  The grass needs cutting

  Beyond the tree,

  In eerie Kodak clarity,

  Are the summer backstairs of Wheeling,

  West Virginia

  Someone's left a wooden stepladder out

  "Aunt Fran and [obscured]"

  Although he isn't, this gent

  He has a "G" belt-buckle

  A lapel-device of Masonic origin

  A patent propelling-pencil

  A fountain-pen

  And the flowers they pose behind so solidly

  Are rooted in an upright length of whitewashed

  concrete sewer-pipe.

  Daddy had a horse named Dixie

  "Ford on Dixie 1917"

  A saddle-blanket marked with a single star

  Corduroy jodpurs

  A western saddle

  And a cloth cap

  Proud and happy

  As any boy could be

  "Arthur and Ford fishing 1919"

  Shot by an adult

  (Witness the steady hand

  that captures the wildflowers

  the shadows on their broad straw hats

  reflections of a split-rail fence)

  standing opposite them,

  on the far side of the pond,

  amid the snake-doctors and the mud,

  Kodak in hand,

  Ford Sr.?

  And "Moma July, 1919"

  strolls beside the pond,

  in white big city shoes,

  Purse tucked behind her,

  While either Ford or Arthur, still straw-hatted,

  approaches a canvas-topped touring car.

  "Moma and Mrs. Graham at fish hatchery 1919"

  Moma and Mrs. G. sit atop a graceful concrete

  arch.

  "Arthur on Dixie", likewise 1919,

  rather ill at ease.

  On the roof behind the barn, behind him,

  can be made out this cryptic mark:

  H.V.J.M.[?]

  "Papa's Mill 1919", my grandfather most regal amid a wrack of

  cut lumber,

  might as easily be the record

  of some later demolition, and

  His cotton sleeves are rolled

  to but not past the elbow,

  striped, with a white neckband

  for the attachment of a collar.

  Behind him stands a cone of sawdust some thirty feet in height.

  (How that feels to tumble down,

  or smells when it is wet)

  II.

  The mechanism: stamped black tin,

  Leatherette over cardboard, bits of boxwood,

  A lens

  The shutter falls

  Forever

  Dividing that from this.

  Now in high-ceiling bedrooms,

  unoccupied, unvisited,

  in the bottom drawers of veneered bureaus

  in cool chemical darkness curl commemorative

  montages of the country's World War dead,

  just as I myself discovered

  one other summer in an attic trunk,

  and beneath that every boy's best treasure

  of tarnished actual ammunition

  real little bits of war

  but also

  the mechanism

  itself.

  The blued finish of firearms

  is a process, controlled, derived from common

  rust, but there

  under so rare and uncommon a patina

  that many years untouched

  until I took it up

  and turning, entranced, down the unpainted

  stair,

  to the hallway where I swear

  I never heard the first shot.

  The copper-jacketed slug recovered

  from the bathroom's cardboard cylinder of

  Morton's Salt

  was undeformed

  save for the faint bright marks of lands

  and grooves

  so hot, stilled energy,

  it blistered my hand.

  The gun lay on the dusty carpet.

  Returning in utter awe I took it so carefully up

  That the second shot, equally unintended,

  notched the hardwood bannister and brought

  a strange bright smell of ancient sap to life

  in a beam of dusty sunlight.

  Absolutely alone

  in awareness of the mechanism.

  Like the first time you put your mouth

  on a woman.

  III.

  "Ice Gorge at Wheeling

  1917"

  Iron bridge in the distance,

  Beyond it a city.

  Hotels where pimps went about their business

  on the sidewalks of a lost world.

  But the foreground is in focus,

  this corner of carpenter's Gothic,

  these backyards running down to the freeze.

  "Steamboat on Ohio River",

  its smoke foul and dark,

  its year unknown,

  beyond it the far bank

  overgrown with factories.

  "Our Wytheville

  House Sept. 1921"

  They have moved down from Wheeling and my father wears his

  city clothes. Main Street is unpaved and an electric streetlamp is

  slung high in the frame, centered above the tracked dust on a

  slack wire, suggesting the way it might pitch in a strong wind,

  the shadows that might throw.

  The house is heavy, unattractive, sheathed in stucco, not native

  to the region. My grandfather, who sold supplies to contractors,

  was prone to modern materials, which he used with

  wholesaler's enthusiasm. In 1921 he replaced the section of brick

  sidewalk in front of his house with the broad smooth slab of poured

  concrete, signing this improvement with a flourish, "W.F.

  Gibson 1921". He believed in concrete and plywood

  particularly. Seventy years later his signature remains, the slab

  floating perfec
tly level and charmless between mossy stretches of

  sweet uneven brick that knew the iron shoes of Yankee horses.

  "Mama Jan. 1922" has come out to sweep the concrete with a

  broom. Her boots are fastened with buttons requiring a special instrument.

  Ice gorge again, the Ohio, 1917. The mechanism closes. A

  torn clipping offers a 1957 DeSOTO FIREDOME, 4-door Sedan,

  torqueflite radio, heater and power steering and brakes, new

  w.s.w. premium tires. One owner. $1,595.

  IV

  He made it to the age of torqueflite radio

  but not much past that, and never in that town.

  That was mine to know, Main Street lined with

  Rocket Eighty-eights,

  the dimestore floored with wooden planks

  pies under plastic in the Soda Shop,

  and the mystery untold, the other thing,

  sensed in the creaking of a sign after midnight

  when nobody else was there.

  In the talc-fine dust beneath the platform of the

  Norfolk & Western

  lay indian-head pennies undisturbed since

  the dawn of man.

  In the banks and courthouse, a fossil time

  prevailed, limestone centuries.

  When I went up to Toronto

  in the draft,

  my Local Board was there on Main Street,

  above a store that bought and sold pistols.

  I'd once traded that man a derringer for a

  Walther P-38.

  The pistols were in the window

  behind an amber roller-blind

  like sunglasses.

  I was seventeen or so but basically I guess

  you just had to be a white boy.

  I'd hike out to a shale pit and run

  ten dollars worth of 9mm

  through it, so worn you hardly

  had to pull the trigger.

  Bored, tried shooting

  down into a distant stream but

  one of them came back at me

  off a round of river rock

  clipping walnut twigs from a branch

  two feet above my head.

  So that I remembered the mechanism.

  V.

  In the all night bus station

  they sold scrambled eggs to state troopers

  the long skinny clasp-knives called fruit knives

  which were pearl handled watermelon-slicers

  and hillbilly novelties in brown varnished wood

  which were made in Japan.

  First I'd be sent there at night only

  if Mom's carton of Camels ran out,

  but gradually I came to value

  the submarine light, the alien reek

  of the long human haul, the strangers

  straight down from Port Authority

  headed for Nashville, Memphis, Miami.

  Sometimes the Sheriff watched them get off

  making sure they got back on.

  When the colored restroom

  was no longer required

  they knocked open the cinderblock

  and extended the magazine rack

  to new dimensions,

  a cool fluorescent cave of dreams

  smelling faintly and forever of disinfectant,

  perhaps as well of the travelled fears

  of those dark uncounted others who,

  moving as though contours of hot iron,

  were made thus to dance

  or not to dance

  as the law saw fit.

  There it was that I was marked out as a writer,

  having discovered in that alcove

  copies of certain magazines

  esoteric and precious, and, yes,

  I knew then, knew utterly,

  the deal done in my heart forever,

  though how I knew not,

  nor ever have.

  Walking home

  through all the streets unmoving

  so quiet I could hear the timers of the traffic lights a block away:

  the mechanism.

  Nobody else, just the silence

  spreading out

  to where the long trucks groaned

  on the highway

  their vast brute souls in want.

  VI.

  There must have been a true last time

  I saw the station but I don't remember

  I remember the stiff black horsehide coat

  gift in Tucson of a kid named Natkin

  I remember the cold

  I remember the Army duffle

  that was lost and the black man in Buffalo

  trying to sell me a fine diamond ring,

  and in the coffee shop in Washington

  I'd eavesdropped on a man wearing a black tie

  embroidered with red roses

  that I have looked for ever since.

  They must have asked me something

  at the border

  I was admitted

  somehow

  and behind me swung the stamped tin shutter

  across the very sky

  and I went free

  to find myself

  mazed in Victorian brick

  amid sweet tea with milk

  and smoke from a cigarette called a Black Cat

  and every unknown brand of chocolate

  and girls with blunt-cut bangs

  not even Americans

  looking down from high narrow windows

  on the melting snow

  of the city undreamed

  and on the revealed grace

  of the mechanism,

  no round trip.

  They tore down the bus station

  there's chainlink there

  no buses stop at all

  and I'm walking through Chiyoda-ku

  in a typhoon

  the fine rain horizontal

  umbrella everted in the storm's Pacific breath

  tonight red lanterns are battered,

  laughing,

  in the mechanism.

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: 6013bd1a-6c07-1014-a0ff-d028f5d03f91

  Document version: 1

  Document creation date: 02.06.2008

  Created using: Text2FB2 software

  Document authors :

  traum

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  William Gibson, Agrippa (A Book Of The Dead)

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