Songs for the Devil and Death Read online

  Songs for the Devil and Death

  by Hal Duncan

  Copyright © Hal Duncan 2011

  All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 978-1-907881-10-7

  Papaveria Press

  “The Lucifer Cantos” was previously published as a limited, handbound edition from Papaveria Press, 2010.

  “Sonnets for Orpheus” was previously published as a limited, handbound edition from Papaveria Press, 2006.

  Also by Hal Duncan:

  Vellum: The Book of All Hours 1

  Ink: The Book of All Hours 2

  Escape from Hell!

  Table of Contents

  Lucifer Risen

  From the Fragments of Heraklitos

  Wake

  Sonnet 14

  Sonnet 15

  Sonnets for Kouroi Old and New

  Sonnet 28

  Sonnet 29

  Amorica

  Sonnet 42

  Sonnet 43

  Still Lives

  Sonnet 56

  The Rock of Carrion’s Kings

  Sonnet 70

  Sonnet 71

  Sonnets for Orpheus

  Sonnet 84

  Sonnet 85

  The Fiddler and the Dogs

  The Lucifer Cantos

  Lucifer Risen

  The scene: eclipse at solstice, Karnak or Stonehenge.

  I kiss a dagger from a drawer, my wand, revenge.

  Draped in fur, the coat of Joseph, ermine of king Osiris,

  Painter of Miriam’s violets on the naked breast of Isis,

  I breathe life in Lillith’s little shabtis of green glass.

  Outside, birds and mosquitos cloud a moon of ash.

  The bridge between mesas of Life & Death awaits

  a fake druidic march with torches, brownshirt boys as bait.

  The black hawk Horus skims palm trees and waves.

  I see his words, demotic daubs on cliffside cave,

  his face, skull of a leprous sphinx, colossi of Memnon,

  an idol on Mars, empty as ankh, blank as the Aton.

  Wild lightning writes a new stele of revealing sin,

  the breath of all Satanic sleepers, steaming in

  the volutes of a smouldering volcano,

  bubbling mud, blood ruby’s magma flow.

  A tiger swims. An elephant’s foot halts over snake.

  The crocodile’s hatched, the sleeper in the pyramid awake.

  From the Fragments of Heraklitos

  I

  It would be wise to listen

  not to me but to my Word’s division,

  showing each according to its kind,

  things as they are. Most pay no mind

  to how they find things as they are;

  they make no sense of their sensations,

  simply following their own beliefs.

  It is not right to act and speak like men asleep.

  Even the posset – curdled milk with beer

  or wine and spice – will separate unstirred.

  It would be wise to listen,

  Not to me but to my Word.

  All things are one we should admit:

  one and the same,

  the straight and crooked path of carding wheel;

  one and the same,

  the up and down ways of a hill.

  In the circumference of a circle

  the beginning and the end are shared.

  This Word is true forever,

  but is understood as little

  when first heard as if heard never.

  Even though all that occurs

  is in accordance with this Word,

  men, unaware of what they do

  awake, forgetting what they do

  in sleep, act like this is a new

  sense to them, holding court on all

  the words and deeds that I set forth

  and bringing witnesses of no repute

  out in support of points that they dispute.

  The eyes make better witnesses than ears,

  but eyes and ears are both false witnesses

  to men with souls that do not know their tongue.

  The fools hear like the deaf, not

  knowing how to listen, dumb:

  absent when present, the accusing axiom.

  Let us not guess about the greatest things;

  dogs bark at what they do not know.

  II

  Men that love wisdom must know much indeed.

  If knowing much could teach, though, understanding, then

  Pythagoras and Hesiod,

  Hecataeus and Xenophanes

  all should have learned.

  Hesiod’s teacher of most men –

  so sure he knew so many things are they –

  who did not know that night and day

  are one. Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchus,

  with the scientific inquiry he practiced,

  surpassed all other men, and then,

  selecting out of what was penned,

  claimed for his wisdom only such,

  this knowledge of this much. Prince of pretence!

  And Homer? Homer should be ripped

  from all the lists, like Archilochus, whipped.

  For he was wrong in saying, Would

  that war might disappear from gods and men!

  He did not see that he was praying

  for the universe’s end.

  For if his prayer were heard,

  all things would cease to be;

  war is the father and the king of all,

  making the gods, the men, the slaves, the free.

  We have to know that war is shared

  and conflict justice, that all things

  come into life and die through strife.

  Men do not realise now just how

  what is in conflict actually is consensus,

  in a harmony of opposites, of tensions,

  like the bow, the lyre.

  although its work is death, the biós of the bow

  is bíos, life. Men would not know

  the name of Justice if it was not so.

  In Priene, said Bias, son

  of Teutamus, of more account

  than all the rest: Most men are bad.

  But one is worth, I say, to me,

  ten thousand if he be the best.

  Still, the physicians cut and burn

  and stab, and rack the sick, demand

  a fee for it they don’t deserve.

  It is a weariness to work

  for the same masters, work and serve.

  III

  The mysteries men practice are profane.

  If it were not for Dionysus that they march,

  they would be acting without shame,

  singing this hymn to phallus. Hades is the same

  as Dionysus in whose honour they go wild and rave.

  Night-walkers. Magi, Bacchii, Lenai – these

  initiates all defiled, they try in vain

  to purify themselves, bathing in blood,

  as, after stepping down into the sewer,

  they thought to wash their feet in mud.

  And, knowing not the nature of

  a hero or a god they pray –

  if any marked him doing this, they’d say

  he’s lost his head – to icons! As if one

  should talk to a man’s house: Rise and become

  the wakeful watchers of the quick and dead!

  The fool’s heart flutters at each word,

  wisdom unknown because they lack belief.

  The most renowned of them knows but conceits,

  and thinks them sound. Yet this is true:

  all these false witnesses

&nbs
p; and architects of lies,

  these Justice shall outdo.

  Hang these Ephesians, every adult man

  and leave the city to the beardless child!

  For Hermodorus, the best man

  of them, with these words, they’ve exiled:

  We will have no-one best among us;

  if there’s any so, let him go

  elsewhere, be so among others.

  What thought or wisdom do they own?

  They follow poets, take the mob

  as mentor. No, they do not know

  that there are many bad, few good.

  Only the best of them would choose

  one thing above all that they could:

  to be immortal among mortals, feted.

  Most of them, meanwhile, like beasts are sated.

  Although I know it’s difficult

  when we relax over a drink,

  it’s best to hide our folly. Though

  our sodden souls are jolly, blind,

  the drunk trips on his sodden soul;

  led by a beardless boy, he strolls

  wherever. Wiser wits are dry.

  We must extinguish our debauchery,

  more so than any house on fire;

  it is not good to get all that we’d like.

  But it is hard to wrestle with one’s heart’s desire;

  to purchase what it prizes, it pays with our psyche.

  IV

  Wisdom is a solitary thing,

  that will and will not be called Zeus.

  Unlike the way of the divine,

  the way of man, child to the god –

  as child’s way to a man – lacks truth.

  Compared to the divine,

  the wisest man is just an ape,

  just as an ape of beauty

  is grotesque beside mankind.

  Men say this thing is wrong and that thing right.

  To the divine all things are right and good and just;

  the hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

  I have sought for myself; you will not find,

  whichever way, the limits of the mind,

  the measure of it is so wide.

  Of all whose discourse I have heard, though, there’s

  not one comes close to understanding this:

  that Wisdom stands apart from all, aside,

  a solitary thing. The thunderbolt of lightning guides

  the courses of all things, but I am yet to hear:

  it is to know the thought by which

  all things, through everything, are steered.

  Those things that can be seen and heard

  and learned as wisdom are my prize,

  then; seeking gold, we dig up earth,

  and find only a little – nothing

  if we don’t expect to be surprised,

  for it is hard. Man’s nature is his fate –

  to be sought out and difficult.

  Nature loves to hide. It scatters

  and it gathers, rests by changing;

  it advances and retires.

  Each day just like each other,

  we both step and do not step

  into the self-same river;

  are and are not;

  and the sun is new each day.

  We cannot step twice into the same river;

  for the waters flow fresh over and they flow forever.

  V

  With bitter vetches for their food,

  the oxen are content; the ass

  would rather have its straw than gold;

  pigs wallow in their excrement,

  delighting in the mire, as fowls

  in barnyard dust. The water, pure and foul,

  the sea: fish drink it and they thrive;

  men cannot drink it and survive.

  Disease is the reason good health pleases;

  evil makes the good the better, best.

  wealth is defined by want, while – as

  all beasts, with blows are driven to pasture –

  what we find in weariness is rest.

  It is the contrary that gives us gain;

  good and evil are one and the same.

  So the divine is day and night,

  winter and summer, peace and war,

  glut and hunger. Cold things become warm;

  the arid is made damp. All that is hot

  cools down; all that is wet dries up.

  Things as they are, are whole and not whole in duality,

  united and divided in dissent and harmony.

  The one is made up of all things,

  and all things issue from the one.

  It takes this form or that, as fire,

  spiced with incense, takes its names

  according to the scents of each perfume.

  And if all things to smoke were turned,

  the nostrils of souls sniffing in

  the underworld would still discern

  it from the fumes: the carcass

  should be dumped as animal shit.

  Mortals immortal, immortals mortal,

  each one lives the other’s death, dead in their life.

  For, to a soul, death is fluidity,

  as death to flux is to become firm form.

  But fluid force comes from firm form,

  and from the fluid, soul is born.

  This world, which is the same for all,

  no single god or man has made;

  but it was then, and shall forever be

  as now, the fire of eternity.

  Igniting here, there burning out,

  fire lives the death of air, and air

  the death of fire. Fire changes first

  to flux – the sea, half of it form,

  half storm. Flux lives the death of form,

  form that of flux. Liquid fluidity,

  the sea dissolves, measures as much

  again as once, before it was the earth.

  All things, like goods for gold or gold

  for goods, are an exchange for fire,

  and fire for all things. Want and surplus,

  fire judges and condemns all in its progress.

  VI

  The waking have one world they share;

  the sleeping turn aside, each into their

  own world in the night. Dead and alive,

  then, for their selves, they spark a light.

  The sleeping man, whose vision is

  extinguished, from the dead ignites

  as he that wakes lights up from those

  asleep. Just as in slumber all

  we sense is sleep, all that we sense

  when we’re awake is death. But those asleep

  are also workers in the world’s events.

  It is the same thing in us, this that’s quick or dead.

  awakened or asleep, the old or young.

  The first shift and become the last;

  the last shift and become the first, in turn.

  Thales predicts – as seasons bring all things,

  each thirty years a generation – an eclipse.

  The constellation of the Bear

  delimits dawn and dusk, and, there,

  facing the Bear, shining and bright,

  you see the boundary of Zeus?

  Though with no sun it would be night,

  (though all the other stars try as they might,)

  the sun will never wander out of bounds,

  for if he did he would be found

  out by the virgin hounds of Justice,

  the Erinyes. It is law.

  How can we hide from that which never sets?

  It is law, also, to obey the laws of one.

  For all our human laws all come

  from this one law of the divine,

  prevailing as it will, all things

  sufficing for with much to spare.

  The people’s law must be defended, though,

  like city walls. We must hold fast,

  speakers of wisdom, to these
things we share,

  as cities hold fast to their law, and with more care.

  As gods and men revere all those who’re slain

  in battle, greater deaths win greater gain.

  So we must follow what we share.

  Yet many live, although my Word is shared,

  as if their wisdom were just their’s and,

  from the common, universal, constant

  touch of wisdom, they stay distant.

  The lord who rules the oracle

  at Delphi shows his meaning by a sign,

  neither declaring nor disguising.

  There await men when they die things

  that they don’t desire or dream of.

  Newborn, we all wish to live and meet our dooms –

  or rather rest – leaving our own newborn

  behind to meet their dooms in turn.

  The Sibyl with her raving lips,

  though, utters her words stripped of

  all gaudy decorative noise,

  no mirth or perfume; with her voice,

  she reaches – all due to the god within –

  she reaches through a thousand years:

  time is a child playing draughts,

  the power of a king in a child’s grasp.

  Wake

  I - The Prayer (I)

  The jaguar paced the cage of birds,

  The stone vault of a church a-hush

  With bass solemnity of words:

  Our father, which – in heaven – art.

  The blather, rich with sermon’s charts,

  Flapped wings of angels, dreams absurd,

  As murder, cornered in a heart,

  Crouched in the muscled ghost of wrath.

  The echoed still of stifled sneeze

  And shuffling piety, muffled coughs,

  Subdued all flesh’s irreverent sobs,

  But jaguar stalked the pristine frieze

  With snarl of lip, jaw flex and clamp

  Of teeth, nails pricking sweated palms,

  Sprung from an empty chest, a gash

  Of visceral silence, mourning’s slash.

  And – hallowed be thy – hollowed – name.

  No flame lit fury in its grace,

  Just hatred nursed in playground stares,

  Ice petulance of worlds unfair,

  But worst it knew – raw horror faced

  This waking day – was not the way

  The world cuts childhood with despair,

  But how it carves out every care.

  The folderol trips his tightrope stage

  For absent audience to applaud

  Theatrics in the mirror, smoke,

  This clown, this butt of every joke.

  This circus geek, this prophet railing,

  His own Frankenstein’s creation,

  Played his role, puerile romance