Chronicon:
Dance Lessons from the Bottomless Pit

-John Meador

“Now, Cap’n Smollett,” remonstrated Silver, “dooty is
dooty, as I knows, and none better; but we’re off dooty
now; and I can’t see no call to keep up the morality
business.”
“You’re a damned rogue, my man,” said the Captain.
“Come, come, Cap’n, be just,” returned the other.
“There’s no call to be angry with me in earnest. I’m
on’y a chara’ter in a sea story. I don’t really exist.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island,
Chapter 32

Do metals do the rumba deep in the bowells of Pluto’s Keep? while spinster ores wallflower the benches of sombre caverns, envy scouring their pockmarked complexions, a band of unrelenting Kobolds kicks up a spangled & frisky dust as they break open an old bolero:

‘...At the very break of day
The peanut vendor’s on his way
At dawning the whistle blows
through every city, town and country lane
you hear him sing his plantive little strain
And as he goes by to you he’ll say
Big jumbos, big jumbo ones
Come buy those peanuts roasted today
Come buy those freshly roasted today

If you’re looking for a moral to this song
50 million monkeys can’t be wrong
Peanuts do bop do bop
Peanuts do bop do bop
Peanuts do bop do bop...’

An ancient grizzled prospector older even than Rip Van Winkle with gray eyes glowing like feral coals in the dark, observes the festivity from a shadowed alcove. He lights the last of his Habanas, sighs as he throws back his head, tucks the cigar box underarm and with a suave, debonaire step and rusty hip sway leads his prospective absent escort; blue smoke serpentine in the thickets of his vast & hoary beard.

The unsettling & sudden spectacle of this partying Lawrence Welk from Hell coupled with his own rug cutting enthusiasms had riled the old-timer and moved him deep within his own dark reaches. He farted a roar to rival the bellowing of Thor himself.

The congregation turned as one in arch regard of his momentous halleleujah.

Karys, virtuoso pungi player at the rear of the orchestra, sipped slowly from a flute of phosphor champagne as menopausal moths overhead hovered wistful, recharging their ardor in the xxx rated twilight of champagne TV.

“I caught a bullet in my ass”, expectorated the old geezer. Habana juice dribbled into his beard from the old stogy. “Silver, minted from my own claim. See, my pardner & me had equal shares. He didn’t much cotton to me making off with maybe more than I oughta. I saw the look in his eye, and I took off down the shaft, but that rabid jackrabbit of an old cuss set a fierce hornet up the seat of my worry and thats how I tripped down that hole that landed me in an underground river. Still there, that silver slug. I call it Vlad the Impaler. And dadgummit, one of you’s lucky that bullet weren’t wallerin’ in that sulphurous blast just then . “

The laughter rang like burning sleighbells in freefall.

The impish band leader stepped forward and addressed him: “Mecca lecca hi, mecca hiney ho. Are you from the motherland? Wonderful!”

“Sure thing, Mozart. Now, where’s that rare persimmon among women, Her Majesty Queen Cora?”

At the old feller’s reply, a sudden hush overtook the merriment; echoes fled into the deep.

Pointing the way, the spritely minions directed him to a lambent glimmer reflected off glistening stalactites, emanating through corridors of schist and polished limestone whose myriad primordial windings through a succession of pillared arcades and sparkling mica ceilinged galleries emerged into an immense cavern. The Telesterion.

Approaching the quivering diffusion he could make out a sign ahead whose choreography of luminescent, futterwhacking moths spelled out his immediate destination- ‘Cora’s Cage: Cafe Arcane’, the nekromanteion botanica of the Daeira Avernus. Her’s & her’s alone, this throne to the unknown.

When he walked in she was wiping down one of the small obsidian tables, a blackness devouring the very name of Night; hair done up with her back to him she set down a coffee cup and spoke.

“Ezra Nightingale, what secrets bring you me? Sit, and I will reveal them.”

Hearing the sound of her voice again catapault a glacier smack into his gut. He shuddered at the freeze out.

“Make it a ristretto red eye then, Queeny” shivering still, he resigned himself to the inevitable, impending tasseography “-with a shot of kykeon; that aged Hofmann Reserve if ya still got some...”

Executing its ritual ministrations, the boilerplate serpent hissed and spat out its Stygian venom through brass spigots. The regent barista chanted softly to an old ditty vaguely familiar, drew from a shelf the requested ample vintage draught and with a graceful sashay she sat the ivory cup & saucer before him. Raising the steaming cup in futile exorcism of the lingering chill, he brought his gaze to the brink once again, into the initiation of the haze.

Ratcheting things up several notches, the beverage duly unbridled his tongue, percolating the fountains of oblivion.

“Y’know Queeny, I had my first bolt of steam-press thunder at Dominic Parisi’s place in Greenwich Village- Regio’s- back in 1927. He would let none else touch that machine. He polished it til the dragon guarding the base breathed fire. Old Parisi never took off his hat. He was America’s introduction to espresso, glory be.” Putting his finger on the hummed fragment of her tune, suddenly he remembered an American version:

‘Oh the girls in France
Wear their whiskers in their pants
And the things they do
Would kill a Russian Jew
And the clothes they wear
Could freeze a polar bear.

Do what your mama says
And do what your papa says
But don’t split your pants
Doing the Hootchy Kootchy Dance

Cuz the way the way it shakes
Gonna wake that sleeping snake
If it comes uncurled
In the lonely underworld
Have to kiss it’s head
Til you wish that you were dead...’

O, Little Ægypt! Swept far from the streets of Cairo and the horizon of the Sphinx, where breezes lull the datepalms with alluring masqued patchouli; camels drifting in the moonlight on caravans from Khartoum... The precinct of her virtue in perpetuity abides.

Surveying the gravy stain marooned on his overalls, she made a mental note of the recipe. Nothing quite like a down-home meal.
She sighed. “Nightingale, if I may interrupt the solemnity of your thoughts and relieve the burden of your depleted vessel...”

Putting the saucer atop his cup she overturned it briefly. Arighting it, she slowly whirled the remaining sediment thrice in its own revealing delta dance. Peering into the shallows of its pareidolic abyss, with soft solemnity she spoke:

“Looked have I and read often this cup of yours, how well I have known. The heart’s beloved sleeps in a haunted palace guarded both by dog and sombre shade of soldiers. Springtime’s princess here is sleeping, her chamber lost to waking. He who descends within her garden, to unplait her hair and take her hand is lost ... lost. Nights become the days that were. Far, the light that bids cold cheer...”

After the reading, she commanded: “Azaryahu Uzair, open your heart”.
He placed his right thumb at the inside bottom of the cup and twisted slowly clockwise, licking the plumb tasting of Pandora and secrets of the deep delved earth. A continental drift felt contained within the cup. He shivered as a frisson wriggled up the staircase of his spine, then he also looked.

And there he saw a dance that he’d never seen before. A curtain drew open in a crazy little joint with drinks served hotter than Sahara sands; club the Black Cat Bone, old Hootchy Kootchy Man’s.

Arrayed like never-ending Scheherazade, the cafe Queen, in her mystery and seven veils; zills on her fingers, girt with coin and cowry shells. Incense swirling round barley spears and poppy bud she wound and shook like willow while thunders rumbaed in his blood.

He recognized the pungi-playing snake charmer below from his earlier encounter with the goblin orchestra, tracing her sinuous birthing ritual through a delerious labyrinth of steps as her lithe and supple grace enacted the consummation of shadow and stellum.

Laying down her crown and bracelets and slipping from her shoes, upon a zebra skin she did the limbo til her belly-button bling popped loose.

His heart did a triple somersault as the seventh veil gave way, there: a cowgirl tattoo of Prairie Rose Henderson & Yippy-O Ki-Yay!

Yeah, como esta usted senorita
Come with me to the border...

She looked up into his startled eyes and winked.

Allmächtiger Gott, Lösche Aus!

“Lay up in your heart dreams which thou hast seen and the interpretations which thou hast heard”, she advised. Recovering his composure, he reached inside the remains of his weather-beaten cigar box, withdrawing an object. Closing the lid, he laid something before them on the table. In the wan light of the cafe it discharged a warm golden glow as he spoke.

“One exit visa, your Aureus-Virga.”

The expression that crossed her face was not surprise. Perhaps never again would she be subject in that Kingdom of Surprise...

“Ah, formidable messenger come to us from out of the fog. So, your Société Angélique flexes its wings? Do they reckon the endurance of the seasons no longer up beyond these cloistered gates? There is an age of Winter on us yet and under mighty bonds I’m bound tho its lash sounds but a whisper.”

When the bowels of the world were forced open by men for wealth hidden in the depths it riled the ghosts of hell in an eruption of wickedness and sin. Wasteland. A heavy pall of dense mists enshroud the dolorous realm with embalmed darkness; a sovereign vengeance of disruptions, rents and chasms the resulting work of the seldom seen Lord Undertaker.

Her prescient foreknowledge of his arrival was to be expected, for she was mistress of its realm. The sponsors of his venture, however, remained mysterious as their name, and their purpose obscure.

“Tidings I bear, Great Queen. The threshold of thresholds is upon us all. The ancient ever-young awaits transformation untold. That narrative great work of Time collapses in a confusion of tongues as the singular Tale that lies beyond silence approaches. I’ve fasted, rode the kykeon blasted and been encrypted; from my chest taken vision; the Chronicles’s done, placed sleeping in a casket; and casket back inside my chest.
Borne through the elements we shall return into a Vernal midnight when a Star in glory shining overtakes both the gods below and the gods above. We shall behold the Anaktoron opening.
Cross the bridge Cora, it is time to begin plowing threefold fields of joy where once the frightened flowers fell from your long black limo- jonquils come before even robins dare to hatch the winds of march.”

“Pilgrim of eternity, even here in this dead realm, over your living head heaven bends; your spirit’s sister, this lorn nightingale mourning her beloved with much melodious pain; these gray walls moulder round, on which decay feeds, like slow fire upon a rotting fuse- but he lives, he wakes? Death’s dead, not he? Adonais, manna dew and splendour... Gawain returns with the Graal.”

“Aww Little Nestis, no need to moan those skeleton keys in the rain just to unlock that cherished captive. Queeny, its but a sibilant slippered step between Aidoneus and Adonais; come cease that ageless murmer of maternal lamentation high atop those rooftop gardens where the escaped cock’s evercrow transfixes your Aeon dawning on april’s couch stretched out forever; in lilac and lilies of the valley to the maypole at the crest.”



...................................................

Postscript:
Miranda Ruling

(after William Shakespeare’s Tempest)

Come with me & bless these two
With prosperity and honored issue
Spring come to them at their farthest
Further than the scythe of harvest
With Cere’s blessing so upon you
In Proserpina Prospero’s arts continue-
Even tombs unseal when the eye’s well lit
tho Time hath writ what humbled hands Emit.


7/19/2010