Last week, I shared one section from a long poem, “Magonian Latitudes” (from my second trade edition, Ladonian Magnitudes), that rimes with another section from my treatment of the Phantom Airship Mystery of 1896/7.
Here, I share the entirety of the poetic sequence, an attempt to wind together the notion of the myth-as-myth and allusions to ancient (and medieval) aliens. It has six sections, the beginning of each indicated by the bolded, upper-case first letter of the section’s first line.
Poetically, this sketch for a part of Orthoteny (my work-in-progress dealing with the myth of things seen in the sky in its totality as explored here at Skunkworks) draws on a catholic sampling of the poetics of international, Twentieth-century poetry. It ain’t no doggerel!
Magonian Latitudes
…there is a certain region, which they call Magonia, whence ships sail in the clouds…
A change of dimension
not just locale
Like lungs for gills
or water to air
Horses, bison, mammoth, ibex,
numberless others unheard of
Rendered on cave-walls
palimpsest thick
Yet on the ceiling alone
in threes and fours
Flying Saucers hover
over their occupants
The Cabalist Zedechias
in Pepin’s reign
Sought to convince the world
Daimonas Sadaim
Neither angelic nor human in kind
inhabit the Elements
Required the Sylphs show themselves
in the Air for everyone
Which they did sumptuously
in the Air in human form
In battle array marching in good order
halting under arms or magnificent tents
Or the full sails of ships
riding clouds
When winds rose and blew
black clouds overhead
The peasants ran to the fields
to lift tall poles
To stay the ships
from carrying off
What rain or hail
culled from the crops
Called up by a tempestaire
for a tithe
Which practice persisted despite
the Capitularies of Charlemagne
The Sylphs saw alarm
from peasant to crown
Determined to dissipate their terror
by carrying off men
To show them their women
and republic
Then set them down
again on earth
Those who saw these as they descended
came from every direction
Carried away by the frenzy
hurried off to torture
Over all the lands countless tested
by fire or water
A marvel in Cloera County
interrupted Sunday Mass
It befell an anchor on a rope
caught in Saint Kinarus’ door-arch
Where the line ended in clouds
the congregation saw some kind of ship
One crewman dove and swam down
as if to free the flukes from the keystone
But they seized and would hold him
but that the Bishop
On grounds terrestrial air
may well drown one celestial
Forbade it
and freed
Quick as limbs can swim he rose
to hands on ropes and ladders
The anchor rang and cut
the line coiled down about them
The cave is a long way in from the mouth open to the sky
Generations there stare straight ahead on haunches
Higher up behind a fire burns
A wall before those hurrying past between
Both ways up and down the track there
Their burdens their shadows
One over her share
the water over the earth
The other in the firmament
the water over the earth
The air a mirror
Whose face is an ocean
waves electro-magnetic
There they stare dreaming
A quiet blue eye flickers
Skunkworks 