Variations on the Ibis

1

Artists are people to whom coincidence
adheres, filings to their magnet consciousness.
My painter friend Riva points out
a small montage, a hulking splotch
with linked chains and a few squiggles.
“It won some prizes,” she tells me,
“But as for what it means —“ she shrugs.
My eyes reel into its story-window:
I see Prometheus chained, a Grand Inquisitor
in purple robes, and there, the white wings
of the gloating Zeus-eagle. “I can write this,”
I tell her. “Take it,” she said.

Another time she shows me an etching,
a crinolin’d ghost shape a-dance
before a barren landscape. It sits
the bottom-most discard in a bottom drawer.
“That is the Empress Carlota!” I cry,
“And that is Queretaro where Maximilian died.”
So off I went and wrote a play.

On a graveyard walk she stops, leans down
and picks up a squashed shard, some scrap
of one car’s fender run over by another.
“I’ll make something of this,” she told me.
I carry it home in my bag, then place
it absent-mindedly on dresser-top.
Months later, she visits and spies it,
atop a wood frame. I pick it up
to hand it back to her. Our eyes dance
upon the seeming-shapeless object,
and then to what’s inside my glass-framed box:
the Indonesian fruit-bat I nicknamed “Claudius.”
The shape of the found object precisely fills
the silhouette of the preserved fruit bat.
We smile. This is how the universe works us.

Small wonder, then, that I am reading Egypt,
the lore of Thoth and Hermes, his totem
animals the Lower Kingdom’s lordly ibis,
the Upper Kingdom’s wise baboon,
when tea with Riva reveals a water color
mystery, a scimitar shape emerging
from a blue-gray mist, a river fog,
a scythe, perhaps, with a hand to weild it.
“No!” I said. “It is upside-down.”
And there, in lordly solitude,
stood the Egyptian ibis. I have it still.
Riva is gone, her mind first, and then her body,
the ka and the ba on out-of-kilter journey
across to the Land of Reeds in the West.
So now the ibis panting is in its place
at my compound shrine of Hermes-Thoth:
the ibis with kneeling scribe before it,
the ibis-headed god himself in sculpture;
the sacred baboon;
the head of Hermes; two small pyramids,
a hippo, and The Book of Coming Forth by Day.

2

I asked a Greek who’d been to Egypt,
an Alexandrian admittedly, about the ibis.
“Don’t mention ibises! Those filthy birds,
worse than the legendary Harpies, be sure.
Not just the stately water-strider
you see in those temple scrolls — no!
Packs of them in every garbage heap,
fish-trash and butcher dumping place.
They eat what jackals would scorn to swallow.
They eat anything! They gorge themselves
until their innards can take no more —
guts forty yards long, I can assure you —
until they’re fat as a pampered goose.
The ibis knows no repose from gluttony:
stuffed full, they go off to the water.
Then, cheeks and bill blown up,
they give themselves water enemas.
The stench amid the reeds
is not to be believed.

No one will eat an ibis, I tell you,
and fishermen at night have seen them
beak to belly in oral copulation
(You can look it up in Strabo, too!
I’m not making this up.)

Now what this says about the priests of Thoth,
those ibis-headed ministers
and their mystery rites
is best left to the imagination.
Would you eat at table with a man
who had such habits? One cup
his lips had touched could fell a village.
I’m not one to leap to conclusions
but I prefer my gods sunny, Greek, and clean.”