The uncertain, but assured
My bones, so well-preserved, appear pearl-surfaced
As if a chamois-cloth polished ivory from an elephant’s tusk,
Mirror-surfaced, if ever dug up,
One could see reflected their eye color and their countenance,
But these bones are all mixed up,
Not arranged to form a human skeleton.
I cannot observe and tell
If I were tall or short when alive.
These bones so well preserved
Were found inside a wicker basket
Buried in the desert sand, near Nag Hanmadi,
The place where the Gnostic Gospels were found.
This discovery of my bones in Egypt
Puzzles me, for when alive I never
Was in this location. My name was Pimpinelli,
A mayor of a city in Italy, a Bel Signor,
Who left the management of the city
To my less glamorous subordinates,
I did all my law making with campari, chianti,
And soubrettes, like Casanova,
Every night a rendezvous, la, la.
I cannot understand why my bones were
Found in wicker basket, my tomb
Was grand, copied from the tomb
Michelangelo designed for Julius.
But instead of a statue
Of a horned Moses, there was
A statue of a naked Venus,
On the four corners there were
Not saints, but naked nymphs
All reaching with slender arms
Toward my entombed body.
Why, were my bones found
In Egypt, haphazard in a wicker basket.
Could it have been I was not
Who I thought I was when alive,
When alive we are not sure who we are,
Could it have been the same
When we are dead. It is that
We never know who we are,
And spent our lives
And our deaths fantasizing.
But I recall very vividly the
Naked body of a girl named Bella,
A chorus girl, I poured campari
Over her body on an eiderdown bed.
But I also remember being mayor
Of a plague city in the Netherlands,
The white streets, scrubbed constantly
By slaves were immaculate white.
But when the plague came
The streets, crowded with
The pressed-against each other,
Bodies of rats,
The white streets became grey.
I was not mayor then, but I
Answered the riddles of the phoenix
And the plague disappeared.
I was the first blind man
Ever elected mayor of this city
Whose name I cannot remember.
When I died, it was said
In the eulogy my name
Would live among the names
Of other famous blind men:
Homer, Oedipus, Tiresias, and Spider,
The Anansi’ trickerster god.
But now I cannot be sure
What my name was,
Could it have been Pimperelli.
Bella, where are you?
I remember Bella. You were a Slavic-Teutonic blonde
With the palest olive-colored skin.
My death certificate found
With my beautiful bones in the wicker
Basket said my name was
J. Wellington Wells, a seller
Of discounted occult books
And discounted spells. I was
Described as a charlatan
And quack who lived in London.
Thomas Caryle mentioned me
In his famous tome on quacks.
It said my son ran away from home
To become a shaman
In the south of South America,
And discovered by collecting bones
The theory of natural selection,
Darwin stole the theory
From my son, the South American shaman.
Wallace knew about the theft,
T. H. Huxley bribed the blackmailer
To stay mute about the truth.
The death certificate also said my wife
Was an actress named Sybil Vane,
Who spent her days in a white room
Crowded with white orchids, while
She drank whisky sours. She was
Often heard to utter as she looked
Into a mirror lines from Oscar Wilde,
“Beauty is superior to Genius.”
I do not remember any of this
That is written on the death certificate.
All I remember,
Eiderdown,
Campari,
Bella.
--From
Duane Locke’s Soliloquies from a High Wall Hidden Cemetery (Differentia Press.)
