Aristeas, in Seven Years.
gathering the heat to himself, in one thermic
hazard, he took himself out: to catch up with
the tree, the river, the forms of alien vantage
And hence the first way
By theft into the upper world – “a
natural development from the mixed
economy in the drier or bleaker
regions, where more movement was
necessary” – and thus the
floodloam, the deposit, borrowed for
the removal. Call it inland, his
nose filled with steam & his brief cries,
Aristeas took up it
seems with the
singular as the larch
tree, the
Greek sufficient
for that. From Marmora
And sprang with that double twist into the
Middle world and thence took flight over the
Scythian hordes and to the Hyperborean,
Touch of the north wind
carrying with him Apollo. Song
his transport but this divine
insistence the pastural clan:
sheep, elk, the wild deer. In each case
the presence in embryo, god of the shep-
herd and fixed in the movement of flock.
Wrung over the real tracts. If he was
frozen like the felted eagle of Pazyryk,
he too had the impossible lower twist,
the spring into the middle, the air.
From here comes
the north wind, the
remote animal
gold – how did
he, do we, know
or trust this>
Following the raven and
sniffing hemp as the
other air, it was
himself as the singular that he knew and
could outlast in the long walk by the
underground sea. Where he was as
the singular
location so completely portable
that with the merest black
wings he could survey the
stones and rills in their
complete mountain courses,
in name the displacement
Scythic.
And his songs were invocations in no frenzy
of spirit, but clear and spirituous tones from the
pure base of his mind; and he heard the small
currents in the air & they were truly his aid:
In breath he could speak out into the northern
air and the phrasing curved from his mouth
and nose, into the cold mountain levels. It
was the professed Apollo, free of the festive line,
powdered with light snow.
And looking down, then, it is no outlay
to be seen in
the forests, or
scattered rising
of ground. No
cheap cigarettes nothing
with the god in this
climate is free of duty
moss, wormwood as the cold
star, the dwarf Siberian pine
as from the morainal deposits
of the last deglaciation.
Down there instead the long flowing hair,
of great herds of sheep and cattle, the
drivers of these, their feet more richly
thickened in use than
any slant of their
mongoloid face or
long, ruched garments.
