Dear Bird Rider

Dear Bird Rider,

Can I call you that? If there were even ground here to stand on it would be shaking. Beneath the air. Wind evidence of air. Then vapor. Sunlight passes for a moment underfoot, scattering invisible particles. Somewhere stones sing, as if coming through the static of the universe. The heart buffers.

You appeared again today. Starved for two days, you escaped from a trash bag, deranged, fully fledged, rising out of a ditch with frenzied flapping. Newborn tossed away. New soul. Abandoned. I wanted to reach through the curtain of factitious light and catch you. Band you with nature. But I’m too chicken and clenched my eyes. I know you’d lash out, peck out my pupils. Instead you flew straight into the past without looking back. Eighty thousand nests incinerated on the island across the sea. “Time is a thief,” a friend wrote me this morning. Her baby had already turned one, while two feet of snow fell and her wi-fi happily cut out. You, you were never wanted, never loved. Out, out.

I’ve been thinking about the signals you’ve been sending me. Why here, why poetry? Can you murmur my past lives to me? And sleep, is there sleep where we’ll be? But I’m leaping ahead of myself, straight across the Vaitarani. Those waters freak me out—I see blood. Question questions. I just know this letter to you deserves a river of verse. The impossibility of permanence alive in unconditional impermanence. It’s the least it can try to be in this state that asks so little of letters and being. Mirage of volition. The dead letter office fills with mail but no letters. I want this to be a reminder for you, too, a remembrance of something more than a pattern of despair. That other thing with feathers, informally. How can I care for you? Your critics who want condolences and not your filthy afterimage. The baddest words in the baddest order.

So I’ve been thinking about you, Jack, and the Songs of the South. You-in-She/She-in-You. How things constellate to make a picture in the sky. The fourfold city. Whisper the word “Golgonooza” and a glass of Moscato d’Asti appears. Content. Bill’s city within a city of kindness and love, of art and friendship. We the people live outside the mandala. Low-ghost or Pre-ghost where rhythm is a matter of survival. Half-ghost. You say, “Like the shaman’s channeling, for my Other to speak, it needs my rhythm. It needs my breathing.” Jack says, “Well, it’s the rhythm between you and the source of the poetry.” The Sovereign of the East sings exactly 2,323 years ago, “Tune the strings of the zithers, beat the drums / strike the bells, wood frames sway / flutes cry out, reed pipes resonate / envision the wu-shamans, virtuous and fine / take flight, azure birds arise / poetry unfurls, to the whirls of the dance / chanting the tones, in accord with the movements / wu-shamans come, shield the sun.” For Bill it was never a game—the messages from Heaven were as real as their poverty, his and Catherine’s. Amanuensis. Demiurge of watercolor. Anagogical articulations.

Jack felt it as dictation. Dictation as an inversion of consciousness. Discovered landscape. Displaced immanence making manifest. Coming in from the outside. Sun-centered. Translating the translation of bird language. Ventriloquize the ventriloquy. The living image unravels and intertwines. Textbook rope trick. A climbing in-between. Bird Rider, can you find a home in the sun? The storeroom of language you’ve been running with Yi Sang, like a den of thieves. Running and running, crumbs falling like snow in the forest. Birds feast. Her-in-Bird and Bird-in-Her running. No-meme. You describe it as “not imitation” but “entanglement.” Put it in French to really pack a punching bag: une technique de l'enchevêtrement. Like a glowing morsel from Lautréamont. Rimbaud tweet behind leaf, Je est un autre. Being inside outside, soaring above the frozen river . . . as if looking at the fish trapped in the ice. Encountering sorrow. Deep in illness the soul takes flight. Body dispersed. I turn on the walkie-talkie and a faint voice comes out, “But what you want to say—the business of the wanting coming from Outside . . . is the real thing, the thing that you didn’t want to say in terms of your own ego, in terms of your image, in terms of your life, in terms of everything.” Reflected back inside. Misrule and failure.

Bird Rider, this word “shaman” is a trickster. Easy to dress up and pose, paste with paper wings. Trapped inside a piece of paper like a coyote trapped in a gallery. Fit a womb inside a pecker. Peck, peck, the colony inside their bellies . . . to realize their compassion and remorse. Mute history. The Worshippers Association say that 1 in every 160 Korean is a shaman in your country. At least the Times reported 15 years ago. For Victory Over Communism. Wu 巫flying to mu 무. Women written out. Persecution terminal history. “Pope underlings” shout: For one woman who writes poetry you need a thousand doctors! Quack, quack, divided state inside the divided states of quackery. The old woman on the island with a mountain of strung-up birds. You speak through her dialect. Birds wailed like the shattering mountain. No way to assimilate. I do chicken dance minstrelization. Eliade defines the shamanic most simply as “technique of ecstasy,” “a religious vocation manifested by a crisis.” Only one paragraph devoted to your country. Crisis proliferates with self. Missile launch.

Gena’s maternal grandfather was the last pagan priest of their village in Chuvashia. Some say shaman; he says ordinary peasant. Their supreme god was Tura, corresponding with the Altaic sky god Tengri. Dangun nation falls from the sky god through Mongolia Tenger, the shaman who mediates the sky spirits. Gena says, “If shamanistic shuddering-shouting awakens something real in the depths of our native poetic sound, the poet must expect to undertake a most painful descent into the forgotten deep places of the Melos-Fatherland—one must hear oneself, and oneself alone.”

Bird Rider, you have made a most painful descent.  

When I hear you I hear the pattern of mourning as well as the pattern of regeneration. The beating of absent wings in transgression. Hope to die and stick a needle in my eye. Listening to your weeping. Seeing your death sentence, over and over. Please write soon. I’ll look for you in the updraft.

Over and out,
Jeffrey