From Eden Book
by David Meltzer
Maya Quarto Four, Cranium Press, 1969
Four Prologues
from A Book of Concealments
for David Meltzer1
a skull
---
the crystal dew inside it
---
a skin of air
---
a wool beard
---
his force is written on his forehead
---
the eye stays open
---
whose nostrils breathe life
to the world below
2
pepper & grain
---
outside the circle
---
two threads, one side
---
in red
one side in black
their backs were full of eyes
---
three heads included
---
in a single head
a daughter nourished
---
by a son
"I have loved you"
3
"your eyes"
---
"your eye"
from white to black
---
to green
the hairy lord
---
on one stone
---
seven eyes
the whiteness of the skull
---
in the Book of Concealments
4
my head filled with dew
---
seven runners
---
come forth
they lean toward the left side
there is no left eye
---
fire & smoke
---
from the nostrils,
two tears from the eyes
everything is concealed
---
white or pink
---
"she eats & wipes her mouth"
Note: A Book of Concealments is a follow-up to an earlier hundred-poem work, A Book of Witness, with some notable changes in strategy & composition. The title of the book is based, almost literally, on a Jewish mystical text, Sifra diSeni'uta, from which I drew the lines that make up the several "prologues" that open the new work and that appear sporadically throughout the series, not as the mapping of a non-existent god, but as an intimation, like the rest of the poems, of an imagined world imbedded in the real one. The writing of these poems at a time of new wars & new dissimulations -- a notable change since the writing of A Book of Witness -- is another circumstance not to be ignored.
