FROM DARKLANDS

With his mitts, with the mouth, he was cutting down their suspicions as with a machete. That is,
in keeping with his host’s request, Tans spieled upon a proffered instrument, immortally. Pretty
soon they all loved him. Except his baleful stink was overpowering. Some of the crowd held
sachets up to their nostrils, although on the one hand Neilos, for instance, couldn’t help
wondering whether the scent of lilac, even if it screened the bad odor, would still let through
whatever contagion lurked in the folds of Tans’s corrupted flesh, and furthermore this stink stank
with such rapacious vigor that the most aromatic perfumes were swiftly vanquished, rendered
inert, their employers’ faces just as swiftly slackening, the whole room clearing out within the
space of fifteen minutes or so. Fortunately while she stumbled through the doorway, throwing up
a little, Iz called over her shoulder, “Anytime this smell subsides to where folks can be around
you, I’ll come help you out!” So, we are told, a day soon came when the canny apothecarial
queen swooped into Tanstonks’s tiny room, the image of an angel who carries in her heart a
dreadful secret. The fact remained that under one description, the only one available to Iz, this
man was her honored and talented guest; under another, one that you yourselves could be privy
to but eludes our tragic heroine, she’d rather give him all her hate, destroyer of her brother,
dissonant champion, muezzin to her future dissolution; in a similar fashion, outside the gates of
Otranto, burly people swiped and spat, clashing over the eremite whom that one proclaimed the
image of their former ruler Michael, this one countering he was nothing but a cup-bearer;
“because when one guest came to me unmasked,” the tipsy host continued, “I went out to see
them with my face bare; but as for the zoomer who hid their face, I double-masked myself, and
then hailed them as my sibling.” And she healed somebody she would have eagerly sent off to
his death, just as the wind trucks past angels and gamers indiscriminately, without the least hint
it’s ever gotten mad; the methods that she used verged on the zany, albeit wondrous skilled; do I
dare to lay them out before you? I can only see improving on my source material via a resolutely
monistic procedure, uniting Iz’s analytical underpinnings and material practices in a single
narrative sweep, even if the science might weight down reportage with tedious abstraction, or the
facts on the ground toss the fuzzy-minded an object perilous in its absorptive shining. Let’s start
on the first day: imperious, charming, and rather surprisingly chipper, an elaborate construction
spiced with garlic, cloves, and assorted fruits affixed to her face for olfactory protection, Iz
commenced with a spur to activity; wheeling in a cartload of green malachite jars, she tartly
informed her patient, “I’d like you to range these about the room in whatever order pleases you
best,” a treatment melding obscure notions concerning magnetism with a practical animus
against accidie. And the weeks that ensued featured an impressive array of substances variously
applied to and ingested by that stalwart and enigmatic character: a series of three initial
treatments involved dousing Tans in bull’s urine early in the morning, followed by a midday
quaff of human piss combined with cyclamen and sulfur, left out in the elements to age for fifty-
eight days; taking his darkened eyebrows as a hint, she shaved his head, replacing the hair with a
knit cat-fur wig, affixed to the scalp with generous dollops of riverine mud; was the relief he
ultimately enjoyed the result of smoked wolf eyes and charred horse hooves, mashed into a gluey
substrate and then dissolved in vinegar, stirred with a fig branch, and slathered on the armpits
and groin every other day an hour past noon? Or the smoke from a mixture of beeswax and ox
dung, inhaled through a thin reed; the tablets composed of saliva collected from copulating
snakes; the leek juice, the spelt juice, the juice of Tarentine pears, the nettle-top juice, pearl
barley juice, mallow juice, or gourd juice, the juices of siligo, spring lettuce, purslane, thyme,
asparagus, navew, snails, rocket, mustard, catnip, privet, bramble, songbirds, tamarisk, mastic,
clyster, rose?

John Beer is the author of Lucinda (Canarium, 2016) and The Waste Land and Other Poems (Canarium, 2010), as well as the editor of Poems: 1962-1997 by Robert Lax (Wave, 2013). He teaches at Portland State University.