Four Acts for a Daughter Borne by Austin Harmon
You have a daughter. She has not the eyes of you or your lover, or of dear mother, but of a woman dead now forty-seven years named Esther Terry. She has not the lips of you or your lover, or of your dying father, but of a man dead now one-hundred and fourteen years named Harold Black. She has not the legs of you or your lover, or of your immediate progeny, but of a woman dead now twenty-seven years named Sarah Umbra.
And I’m leaving
On a jet plane
I don’t know when I’ll be back again
Your daughter promises she’ll come home, lashes you to her young eyes so packed with love. She does not return. A man fetters her against a tree that will, in seven years time, appear as sudden as an apport in the garret of a young couples first home. A Mr. and Mrs. Calley. This is after you hear news of your daughter, so bedraggled by the stranger’s bastinado, and all the time that has weighed her skin down from her bones. Phthisic muscles like a still ship’s sails. They find her on the forty-first of November among a carrel of fauns that bolted when the men came out from the forest brush. The fauns had painted upon her carrion symbols that read thusly:
- A historic day that has come and gone without a hand to note it.
- A beautiful goddess who waits in a secret room at the tip of an obelisk that has yet to be exhumed from its place beneath the Atlantic.
- An ancient chalice that is said to hold the power of some empyreal city.
David and Svetlana Calley make love in their neighbor’s garden as the moon lights their flesh a sallow flaw. David and Svetlana Calley make love on the hard wood floor of their garret as the dust rises tidal about their pleasure. David and Svetlana Calley make love against the front door, on the staircase opposite, against a window for their vicinage to espy, and dream of a drowned obelisk when their concupiscence is sated. David and Svetlana Calley make love on their newly purchased dirigible as a tree blooms up from the soil in their garret floor, shatters the roofing and pierces my throne that hangs over their home. Their home that resides among others, all of them the same as David and Svetlana Calley’s, none of them blessed.
And I’m leaving
On a jet plane
I don’t know when I’ll be back again
David and Svetlana Calley’s dirigible at that moment of transmogrification is so reared up in the tree’s branches; the collision forms a collusion between their copulation and my on my throne, upsetting the old 60’s song I’ve always admired, bereaving my lotus stance among the clouds above my exhausted, broken mythology, and we together, she and he and I, bring about the world’s end. One of my many forms watches from the upset throne, dances to that 60’s song, as David Calley is born to a woman named Martha Umbra, I born to a woman named Joanna Black, and Svetlana Calley born to a woman named Eleanor Terry. We are a trinity beyond time, spread about its flow till our collusion bears petals in the form of a girl with bodily vagaries that we shall bequeath to her by way of the fauns who have long since defied the equilibrium between man’s mythology and mine.
“Such a darling girl. Such a darling. With a smile, a smiling quim. And o, your thighs clap and sweat; we’ll have them in a moment. And your beautiful gams, yes. Here…just here. Let those lips around me, let me past those, your lips, yes, yes. Look up her you darling girl, that’s right. Show me those eyes.”
The fauns negate man’s railway system. The fauns, for one protracted morning, invert the sky and sea. The fauns asserted dirigibles made long ago obsolete unto man’s reality, replacing automobiles, replacing staircases, and they know naught that through this shift of reality the Beast is born. The fauns awake sometimes in a child’s dream, sometimes among Odysseus and his men on the tattered boat that leads him home. The fauns cannot exist without me and I cannot exist without them.
And I’m leaving
On a jet plane
I don’t know when I’ll be back again
The fauns played a dirge for her that lasted all the days and all the nights before those men came out from the forest brush. With quills they painted symbols upon her body that have been regarded previously. In this environment that is not their own, among these people whose recognition of they fauns becomes beastly and rends the fabric of that reality. My children’s mythology cannot be shared with those living in my mythology, and so my children are reset to naught whilst the fauns belly up to another corpse hidden away. The symbols upon this one’s body shall speak of the follies they’ve toiled about: the abandonment and resuscitation of the calendar system in a new form, the tacit destruction of the division between our separate planes, the transmigration of dreams and reality; follies I cannot myself toil over in reparation because my many forms are hindered by that 60’s song where its signal tumbles perennial through the sky.
The Beast as a young boy writes his Grandmother a poem:
Dearest sunshined Man
White horses in the long field
Please, pass me that pencil
I’ll write for you of the beginning
You, mother, martyr, soon will swallow these doleful days, depart your daughter’s strange countenance for it can only reach you tears. You, mother, destroyer, will soon sleep forever and know not the deeds done beyond your swift life. You, mother, betrayer, shall leave for the city just as the symbol of man’s ruin comes upon the station of his infernal destiny, and that station is your death. You, mother, beauty, are verily a portent for the end of days.
And I’m leaving
On a jet plane
I don’t know when I’ll be back again
You drink from an ancient chalice, wrought to form in a time so long ago that it may, at this moment in history, be viewed as an alternate present. You think about your sweet daughter, with her eyes so packed with love, with her face a mess of roses. The chalice reads thusly:
I love you, Mom.
