So now a new nomination could be heard and came forth, stepped forth as from a lineup, suspect annuitant acquittal would accrue to whose name. Maireq we said and knew at once how and who he was, our deeper trek into quicktrigger Nub with no one’s if not his blessing, the new congregant who joined us now… All he’d say of himself was, “One of the many falsely accused,” no whence, no whith- er, but that we were now, boatless, all in one boat. We were of no book, he went on, if not The Book of Between, heads over its musty pages we’d swoon. All our lives it’d been he we await- ed, the soon to be dead city on whose outskirts we camped lay dreaming, its bed made by forest and fauna long since not there… New congregant ran one with raw recruit in Maireq’s case, messi- anic subtone there though it was, proffer deliver- ance though sometimes he would. On a scratch- pad he wrote himself in, conspicuous conscript, a draft more himself than himself, not knowing better, the office of it all an abrupt revelation. Maireq himself made it so, nominee Maireq yet to reveal Mai- req the Revelator, a circular noodling in prophe- cy’s place prophecy, prophecy’s fulfillment come, the coming of Maireq… A desert feeling stayed with us. We were in the sands of said-to-be. So it was or would be, a circumscriptural noodling, an empti- ness we grew angry with, try as we would not to, try all we could to get right, Maireq’s host and cohort were we to suc- ceed
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My sense of being where I should be grew many- sided the more I thought. I shared Anuncio’s reconnaissance, Itamar and Shobha’s new infatua- tion, with Maireq. He was in on that too it turned out. “Cicada Man knows not what awaits him,” he said, droll, dry as a sirocco… He was a draft more him- self than himself I noticed again, name name’s own and only sake, Maireq’s rollout. Body bid be let go, mo- mentness lay rampant on all tongues, moment or momentariness, lyric expense… All but a few as but bones already, we sifted sand parsing Itamar and Sho- bha’s embrace, empty albeit we thought it to be. Subjunctivity had hold of us as always, Maireq’s pro- mised release no re- lease • (chant) Nub’s low-lying stretches lay at risk, happen- stance no one would have. Multiply put-upon, we called it Maireq’s work, the all-in-one of it be- yond us but for the moment or for each mo- ment, the one-by-one, the one-at-a-time he told of. We stood where we were. Light rain was com- ing down in Low Forest, a light mist. Mist as in missed, mist as in mystery, the abandoned boy was again on point or one was on point to regard him again, borne-away kin so thirsty their dryness got one’s tongue… Willie Bobo extolling neckbones was on the box, the word neck no longer the same after George Floyd. “Gun- drunk Nub knee-happy too?” Maireq mused, fa- therless or his his mother’s brother, bunions and corns on his feet. It was Legba’s limping walk again with grimaces, the all or the aught of it it all added up to, polis poised against an open field, walled- off Elysium. “22½,” rang out in Minneapolis, the judg- e’s unthrown book… Was it he was of the realm of the tiptoe ghosts was a question we asked, bal- loon-suited, philosophically looking on. The Book of the Paper Throne we were calling it, Maireq the first to so name it, a further tome in the multi- volume Book of So. Many were the heads fell in- to it nodding off, Nub nod’s caliphate. “Sleep- ers,” Maireq turned away and said, “be sleep- in’.” It was curt, conclusive and only a start, the lost ground ythm rode us back to, ground gone under, himself the underness tiptoeness ignored… One felt a little lifted by the hot air in one’s balloon suit, look on as though apart from it though we did. What-to-say-what-to-say had its way as well, gone like a Floridian high-rise, beauty and body, we saw again, on loan. So it was Maireq’s time now the naming ceremony said, profane what had been sa- cred, sacred what’d been profane, the accountancy of syllables quick but ascertainable, nominal fortuity ascertained. Sound assailants we were and would be, some vicarage it maybe was, an absorptive lighthouse, a rung bell twisting its tongue. Cloud quench. Crinoline stiff- ness… Crinoline cradle. Crinoline crib. Hoopskirted Shobha imagining Itamar’s rocksteady undulance, Itamar imagining Shobha’s churchical girth. She his lady, he her lord, muskiness of loin what of her he loved he told her teasing her, calling her genital waft unladylike, lady and lord though they were. Such the way he saw it at least, Maireq said, such the way at least it was told to him. Once again it was “The Inch Worm” we were were it a tune we were, The Sonic Assailants were it a band we were in… Whichever, we were taking dictation, Maireq’s amanuenses, a mystico-graphitic scintilla from be- fore
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Call me Maireq an announcement could we have posted it pasted to the wind, Call me Maireq posted on the wind. Maireq had come in cautioning, “When among the blind, be vigilant.” No adding up to anything was a further dictum. One by one by one by one, multi- ple me’s on the tol’you, not our utopic we… Was he its avatar or its diagnostician was Itamar’s question when I told him later, Cicada Man Socratic and a whir by turns. It was all one to him, as had been said pre-Socratic, which… So light lift was the order of it now, the day’s threads a banner, threadbare though it was. “Just another pootbutt human,” I heard Maireq say, sitting barefoot slightly in back and to my left tweezing the hairs between his toes
Biography
Born in Miami, Florida, in 1947, a Californian most of his life, and a resident of Durham, North Carolina, since 2010, Nathaniel Mackey is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and editor described by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation as “one of the most respected experimental writers in the [U.S.] today.” In addition to the five novels comprising From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, he has published numerous books of poetry, most recently a three-volume boxed set, Double Trio (New Directions, 2021), and two books of criticism, most recently Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (University of Iowa Press, 2018). He is the editor of the literary magazine Hambone, co-editor, with Art Lange, of the anthology Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993), and co-editor, with Michael Bough, Kent Johnson and others, of the anthology Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Dispatches Editions/Spuyten Duyvil, 2017). He is currently the Reynolds Price Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University, having previously taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the University of Southern California, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His accolades include the National Book Award for poetry from the National Book Foundation, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry from the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and the Nicolás Cristobál Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.
Competing Interests
The author has no competing interests to declare.