‘Landing of the Pilgrims’, Michele Felice Cornè (1807)
Heard them singing: We’re Good Christians, Good wanderers, we eat foie gras, Taste the sea salt.
They’ve let my pig out of the garden; It snuffles, snuffles still As they roast it. Was eating apples in the alleyway.
Sometimes you simply let these things happen. The ground is dry and roiling With a hundred beetles as The greatest among them walk on two legs.
No winter this year. No summer either; The seasons brawl and melt into each other’s arms,
They weep — Muddy wandering men Spring from them — What the seasons flee from Only God knows.
No pig in the garden, And the loudness, The metalness of pans And barrels clanging, Biting each other.
Fish eyes and Pig bellies And dogs With ribs like bellows, Clovenhaunched; All these are good men.
A nose peers Through the wooden Slats of my fence towards the bushes.
Let it grow wiry arms, pick blackberries. /// An alicorn led them. / He was lopside shaved and blooddyed, /Bloodeyed: / The enemies of The Lord had taken his head in their hands / And bit from him his hair, / Scalped his neck, bent his legs / As bows firing backwards, / Made a chimera of him, left only / His mustache as a hint at dignity.
Then they gave him his horn. A maypole. / His head a head suspended between / Two interlinking trees of branchless wood, metaltipped.
In the summer months, in the years there were summers / Whitegarbed pagans would approach the caravan / From the dull woods / With dull eyes, all black, to try and dance around him. / Heads garlanded, faces like children / Or so many shaved apes and bison. / In this way the pilgrims led the enemies of The Lord / Into many brutal ambushes, / Holy wars which served to pay for rounds ‘round dullflame / Taverns.
I met the alicorn drinking — / He was attended by two dogs, / Or men like dogs — / And this he said:
“I was a mercenary. / I am a mercenary and my price / Is eternal salvation. / There are / days I fear I have already been paid. / Drink warms me, I hear the songs of friends, / Remember those who tried to touch my horn / My shame and were cut down, and all my head throbs, / Expands: it enwraps the taverns and the lights of distant / Cities in whorls of my flesh, the flab of my neck: the whole / Of Europe is a great slab of me like that stripped from my / Neck. Is this not heaven? / In seeing this, am I not damned?”
I did not answer. He sipped his drink
And laughed like rushing water / From a gargoyle’s mouth. As I / Rose to leave, / Overturning a rustred stool in my haste, / One of his men took / Dogteeth to my left hand and tore it from me. / I walked home alone. /// I came to know what they were fleeing, Three days after they had left, Though none among them had said they were fleeing.
He walked beside a horse: The world was white, His clothing black, A charcoal-funnel hole in his abdomen.
Each part of him was distinctly man; He ran his fingers along the hole And traced out constellations. In the bowels too is sky. I cannot remember his face — He would not let me.
I offered him a bowl of soup From a pot lay fallow in the kitchen, For in those gray days I had no livestock to slaughter. With it he fed his horse.
And in the holes of his cloak And in his eyes, Bored deep into his nose, his toothless mouth; Each echoing that stomach that took in all light. The horse whinnied, He did not Speak: I heard him.
