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- AGRIPPA
- (A Book of The Dead)
- by William Gibson
- I hesitated
- before untying the bow
- that bound this book together.
- A black book:
- ALBUMS CA. AGRIPPA
- Order Extra Leaves By Letter and Name
- A Kodak album of time-burned
- black construction paper
- The string he tied
- Has been unravelled by years
- and the dry weather of trunks
- Like a lady's shoestring from the First World War
- Its metal ferrules eaten by oxygen
- Until they resemble cigarette-ash
- Inside the cover he inscribed something in soft graphite
- Now lost
- Then his name
- W.F. Gibson Jr.
- and something, comma,
- 1924
- Then he glued his Kodak prints down
- And wrote under them
- In chalk-like white pencil:
- "Papa's saw mill, Aug. 1919."
- A flat-roofed shack
- Against a mountain ridge
- In the foreground are tumbled boards and offcuts
- He must have smelled the pitch,
- In August
- The sweet hot reek
- Of the electric saw
- Biting into decades
- Next the spaniel Moko
- "Moko 1919"
- Poses on small bench or table
- Before a backyard tree
- His coat is lustrous
- The grass needs cutting
- Beyond the tree,
- In eerie Kodak clarity,
- Are the summer backstairs of Wheeling,
- West Virginia
- Someone's left a wooden stepladder out
- "Aunt Fran and [obscured]"
- Although he isn't, this gent
- He has a "G" belt-buckle
- A lapel-device of Masonic origin
- A patent propelling-pencil
- A fountain-pen
- And the flowers they pose behind so solidly
- Are rooted in an upright length of whitewashed
- concrete sewer-pipe.
- Daddy had a horse named Dixie
- "Ford on Dixie 1917"
- A saddle-blanket marked with a single star
- Corduroy jodhpurs
- A western saddle
- And a cloth cap
- Proud and happy
- As any boy could be
- "Arthur and Ford fishing 1919"
- Shot by an adult
- (Witness the steady hand
- that captures the wildflowers
- the shadows on their broad straw hats
- reflections of a split-rail fence)
- standing opposite them,
- on the far side of the pond,
- amid the snake-doctors and the mud,
- Kodak in hand,
- Ford Sr.?
- And "Moma July, 1919"
- strolls beside the pond,
- in white big city shoes,
- Purse tucked behind her,
- While either Ford or Arthur, still straw-hatted,
- approaches a canvas-topped touring car.
- "Moma and Mrs. Graham at fish hatchery 1919"
- Moma and Mrs. G. sit atop a graceful concrete arch.
- "Arthur on Dixie", likewise 1919,
- rather ill at ease. On the roof behind the barn, behind him,
- can be made out this cryptic mark:
- H.V.J.M.[?]
- "Papa's mill 1919", my grandfather most regal amid a wrack of
- cut lumber,
- might as easily be the record
- of some later demolition, and
- His cotton sleeves are rolled
- to but not past the elbow,
- striped, with a white neckband
- for the attachment of a collar.
- Behind him stands a cone of sawdust some thirty feet in height.
- (How that feels to tumble down,
- or smells when it is wet)
- II.
- The mechanism: stamped black tin,
- Leatherette over cardboard, bits of boxwood,
- A lens
- The shutter falls
- Forever
- Dividing that from this.
- Now in high-ceiling bedrooms,
- unoccupied, unvisited,
- in the bottom drawers of veneered bureaus
- in cool chemical darkness curl commemorative
- montages of the country's World War dead,
- just as I myself discovered
- one other summer in an attic trunk,
- and beneath that every boy's best treasure
- of tarnished actual ammunition
- real little bits of war
- but also
- the mechanism
- itself.
- The blued finish of firearms
- is a process, controlled, derived from common
- rust, but there under so rare and uncommon a patina
- that many years untouched
- until I took it up
- and turning, entranced, down the unpainted
- stair, to the hallway where I swear
- I never heard the first shot.
- The copper-jacketed slug recovered
- from the bathroom's cardboard cylinder of
- Morton's Salt was undeformed
- save for the faint bright marks of lands
- and grooves so hot, stilled energy,
- it blistered my hand.
- The gun lay on the dusty carpet.
- Returning in utter awe I took it so carefully up
- That the second shot, equally unintended,
- notched the hardwood bannister
- and brought a strange bright smell of ancient sap to life
- in a beam ofdusty sunlight.
- Absolutely alone
- in awareness of the mechanism.
- Like the first time you put your mouth
- on a woman.
- III.
- "Ice Gorge at Wheeling
- 1917"
- Iron bridge in the distance,
- Beyond it a city.
- Hotels where pimps went about their business
- on the sidewalks of a lost world.
- But the foreground is in focus,
- this corner of carpenter's Gothic,
- these backyards running down to the freeze.
- "Steamboat on Ohio River",
- its smoke foul and dark,
- its year unknown,
- beyond it the far bank
- overgrown with factories.
- "Our Wytheville
- House Sept. 1921"
- They have moved down from Wheeling and my father wears his
- city clothes. Main Street is unpaved and an electric streetlamp is
- slung high in the frame, centered above the tracked dust on a
- slack wire, suggesting the way it might pitch in a strong wind,
- the shadows that might throw.
- The house is heavy, unattractive, sheathed in stucco, not native
- to the region. My grandfather, who sold supplies to contractors,
- was prone to modern materials, which he used with
- wholesaler's enthusiasm. In 1921 he replaced the section of brick
- sidewalk in front of his house with the broad smooth slab of poured
- concrete, signing this improvement with a flourish, "W.F.
- Gibson 1921". He believed in concrete and plywood
- particularly. Seventy years later his signature remains, the slab
- floating perfectly level and charmless between mossy stretches of
- sweet uneven brick that knew the iron shoes of Yankee horses.
- "Mama Jan. 1922" has come out to sweep the concrete with a
- broom. Her boots are fastened with buttons requiring a special instrument.
- Ice gorge again, the Ohio, 1917. The mechanism closes. A
- torn clipping offers a 1957 DeSOTO FIREDOME, 4-door Sedan,
- torqueflite radio, heather and power steering and brakes, new
- w.s.w. premium tires. One owner. $1,595.
- IV.
- He made it to the age of torqueflite radio
- but not much past that, and never in that town.
- That was mine to know, Main Street lined with
- Rocket Eighty-eights,
- the dimestore floored with wooden planks
- pies under plastic in the Soda Shop,
- and the mystery untold, the other thing,
- sensed in the creaking of a sign after midnight
- when nobody else was there.
- In the talc-fine dust beneath the platform of the
- Norfolk & Western lay indian-head pennies undisturbed since
- the dawn of man.
- In the banks and courthouse, a fossil time
- prevailed, limestone centuries.
- When I went up to Toronto
- in the draft, my Local Board was there on Main Street,
- above a store that bought and sold pistols.
- I'd once traded that man a derringer for a
- Walther P-38. The pistols were in the window
- behind an amber roller-blind
- like sunglasses. I was seventeen or so but basically I guess
- you just had to be a white boy.
- I'd hike out to a shale pit and run
- ten dollars worth of 9mm
- through it, so worn you hardly
- had to pull the trigger.
- Bored, tried shooting
- down into a distant stream but
- one of them came back at me
- off a round of river rock
- clipping walnut twigs from a branch
- two feet above my head.
- So that I remembered the mechanism.
- V.
- In the all night bus station
- they sold scrambled eggs to state troopers
- the long skinny clasp-knives called fruit knives
- which were pearl handled watermelon-slicers
- and hillbilly novelties in brown varnished wood
- which were made in Japan.
- First I'd be sent there at night only
- if Mom's carton of Camels ran out,
- but gradually I came to value
- the submarine light, the alien reek
- of the long human haul, the strangers
- straight down from Port Authority
- headed for Nashville, Memphis, Miami.
- Sometimes the Sheriff watched them get off
- making sure they got back on.
- When the colored restroom
- was no longer required
- they knocked open the cinderblock
- and extended the magazine rack
- to new dimensions,
- a cool fluorescent cave of dreams
- smelling faintly and forever of disinfectant,
- perhaps as well of the travelled fears
- of those dark uncounted others who,
- moving as though contours of hot iron,
- were made thus to dance
- or not to dance
- as the law saw fit.
- There it was that I was marked out as a writer,
- having discovered in that alcove
- copies of certain magazines
- esoteric and precious, and, yes,
- I knew then, knew utterly,
- the deal done in my heart forever,
- though how I knew not,
- nor ever have.
- Walking home
- through all the streets unmoving
- so quiet I could hear the timers of the traffic lights a block away:
- the mechanism. Nobody else, just the silence
- spreading out to where the long trucks groaned
- on the highway their vast brute souls in want.
- VI.
- There must have been a true last time
- I saw the station but I don't remember
- I remember the stiff black horsehide coat
- gift in Tucson of a kid named Natkin
- I remember the cold
- I remember the Army duffle
- that was lost and the black man in Buffalo
- trying to sell me a fine diamond ring,
- and in the coffee shop in Washington
- I'd eavesdropped on a man wearing a black tie
- embroidered with red roses
- that I have looked for ever since.
- They must have asked me something
- at the border
- I was admitted
- somehow
- and behind me swung the stamped tin shutter
- across the very sky
- and I went free
- to find myself
- mazed in Victorian brick
- amid sweet tea with milk
- and smoke from a cigarette called a Black Cat
- and every unknown brand of chocolate
- and girls with blunt-cut bangs
- not even Americans
- looking down from high narrow windows
- on the melting snow
- of the city undreamed
- and on the revealed grace
- of the mechanism,
- no round trip.
- They tore down the bus station
- there's chainlink there
- no buses stop at all
- and I'm walking through Chiyoda-ku
- in a typhoon
- the fine rain horizontal
- umbrella everted in the storm's Pacific breath
- tonight red lanterns are battered.
- laughing,
- in the mechanism.
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