One of Only Two

 for Rory Gallagher

I was saying your name, saying your name backwards that day.  Like a contour map of your brain.  It kept coming out monastic transplant on a hill.  Then, fourteenth Irish rib.  Then, peaceful pineal acrimony.  Then, where are you? where are your shoes?  You gifted me a riff about a “Laundromat.”  About some woman swallowed in tattoos.  Bee entrails as a form of flight?  The ink blue blood of squids as what’s strong in my vein?  I’d thought you alive, secreting my salt, till Ray told me—your liver bloated from pink to black to gold, like a carp dying then recanting the bruise.  Strange draggling release of one’s color into the luminous texture of the next life.  Rory, you played the blues as if they were inked indelibly into your skin.

Actually, into the liver.  Compound, ventricular, versicle gland acting in the formation of blood.  One of only two human organs with the capacity to self-regenerate.  Beneath your red flannel plaid something was sallow, as if all the ink of your world squid-pressed into your shy and your almost, into the well-depths of your smoke-throttled voice. 

It lodged there, spilling dark pearls backwards, each after the other, that shook like fierce maraca seeds against the gourd, that said extreme nutation and one way, do not enter and ask my name backwards but do the asking gently and in one of three separate voices.

From the alphabet, rare chemical dust.  Interplanetary.  Diurnal.  As if the left foot of the goddess Kali firmed your chest and retracted from your duodenum  each of the fifty-one letters of Sanskrit script into the garland of letters hung as skulls around her neck.  I heard you wail with Taste on the Isle of Wight recording, stalk across the coals, blind yourself on each blurring seed.  From within each sound, I heard the world dissolve.  From peaceful pineal gland, I touched a little ground.  From as though a dreaming electricity, a habile view.

There’s beauty, Rory, in the amber lamp, the one you leaned against and held as you steadied yourself for the bed.  The thrips at the bottom of your gut release strange thriving sounds we all know, but never speak, like tribal dust dialects of Upper Mongolia, untranslatable.  Like keeping the night in a bosk.  Like shad scum from that gland, we’ve all camped in a thanage on the heath plain of your brain.

You did me right since I was sixteen.  Did us all consistent with your plight, as if you’d paddled yourself from Ballyshannon County, Donegal, up the Mississippi with a bullfrog in your pocket and let it swallow insects along the way, stinging the blues.  I was saying your name today, saying it backwards.  It came out Irish fly swat.  Then, Delta sunset hue.  Then, pineal gland of crudely bottled pain.  Then, where are you? where are your shoes?