Research: Journals

The Journal, Issue 30.2

Poetry: "Memo: As If Written Somewhere, Say, at a Place Unknown, and, Perhaps, Never to Be Known (to Ambrose Bierce)"

by Mark Svenvold

As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination.

—Bierce's last known communication, December 26, 1913

Everyone's looked for you in Mexico,
or, to the north, in the West Texas scrub
some graveyard the wind and sand erased

to nub
& thorn

the wind a kind of lovely,

emergency music

broadcast, tonight
in the oak antennae clicking in the wind—
in the single cone of light,
scuttling along the ocean floor

of Nevada—

in the backscatter of stars, migrating eels,
the endless nod tuned to God,

whole civilizations having risen, vanished,
declared themselves again under the ancient
star-light of the plains—

No grave, then, no convenient spot to ponder,
no setting, no quarry found,

just a quandary—

just the gleaming premise
of Walker Percy Chrysler,

in chromium,

in a blind chrysalis, a sun-torched flare

of Empire, shining with a power and a glory,
in fugue (Gold to Silver, Silver to Bronze)

—just the fusillade

of city buildings assembled and gathered
over the orchestral blat of horns magnificent,
persons and titles important, who maketh

not a thing on earth

but add to the pitch

their own shifty weight in fine cigars—

—only a sweet rumbling overhead,
over tenements and the hall of echoes,
smashed glass and staccato

counterpoint

of semi-automatic weapon's fire
—the singing bride

of the fireball,

the soft whistling of someone stepping

casually into the crosshairs

—for the Zoans and Ephesians are at it again,

as is their wont,

and the Nophs are deceived in the bulrushes,
and the Twelve Tribes of Israel want a snack—

something to tide them over the onset
of the in-coming,

something to wail once the whelming commences,
someone to render the sundering—

on the Jericho Turnpike,
traffic stacked up from Heshbon to Nimrim

—It's not the wreckage, only the actual,

oncoming wreck itself,

Ladies, Gentlemen; Friends, Romans—

are you with me?

—all the personal poets of America
toughing it out like old Boethius in his cell,

out of favor

with some Ostrogoth or other, 524 AD

darkness closing on the City of Man....

How strange to have seen the momentum of empire shift
into overdrive—God invented war, you wrote,
to teach Americans geography.

You're right here,

of course,
though your bones were never found.

The Alleghenies this time of year,
befogged in patches,
are good for ghosting, don't ask me how I know.

I just do. It's no great trick. I'm half-dead already.
And that's half of what joins us two.

Just glad to have found you, sir, finally,
though where that is, of course, I haven't said,
& won't, other than to offer the kind of hint
that gives it all away: if you want a secret kept,
hide it in a book of poems.