Doctor Dee consults his Mirror
Steve Sneyd
It is no wonder my angel has
no word for me here.
Here is all freaks,
grotesques, madmen, chancers,
charlatans.
How could the blessed Enoch enter,
risk
contamination, Fall, loss
of selfhood, enforced enrolment
in
Satan's ranks. I have tried so hard to
explain
to the Emperor how truth
as revealed to me alone
coded
for which I require not just end to
furred beast-men,
humpbacks, two-heads, three-breasts,
cease frightening,
waylaying, dark-lure
draining eggblownlike assistant
on
whom I depend to record message
in Enochian
tongue while the I of
I be set aside as absent in
no-place
so self-gap be partial for
voice of beyond-sky space,
but also expulsion from whole
mind-maze castle
precincts of all horde
of troublers of God's peace.
He will not
listen, spares seconds only to cast
complaints
of my excuses, delays, cost
of my keep to no result,
before
turns back to being folly-painted
as fruit
or fish or books or leaves by
one more trickster,
eye-blinder, skilled of
brush but bad of mind as those he loves
so who
cadge of clay and parchment scraps
and wires are
blatant to all eyes but
his, our paying master's,
creatures,
golems, homunculi, he still stays
convinced
will soon grow vast, tower twice
fortress-palace
height, march to his drum
across all Europe, globe,
immortal
army of one soon to be set next
to God, His left-hand man: my task, as
has been
assigned, through Enoch's channel
to pave that way,
as others have been
tasked by cut and thrust of brain
and knife
upon prisoners before during
after torture
execution
to discover extract perfect soon
to
apply irreversibly to
him himself night-knowledge
ruler that
formulaic essence will make him
one who lives
forever fit consort
ideal as Plato's Forms for Three-in-
One
is rightly set above us all.
How can I serve such
madness, such all-
ensnaring blasphemy? I whose Art
is
mine alone at price of serving
the High Beautiful
Good, never that
Other. And yet, and yet -- the challenge!
(c) Steve Sneyd 2001
Published here
for the first time
Go to Meet the Authors: Steve Sneyd