Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)

Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)

 William Gibson

I hesitated before untying the bow that bound this book together.

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 perfectly 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.