The Blindfolded Ammonius, or the Blindfolded Apemantus

THE BLINDFOLDED AMMONIUS,
OR THE BLINDFOLDED APEMANTUS


Now, the apparition
With the beautiful bones
Returned. But she was
Wrapped in mummy cloth,
As if she had been buried in Egypt.
I could tell it was her
By her shape
That formed the contours
Of the mummy wrapping.

She tore off a scrap
Of her mummy cloth,
Wrapped it over
Ammonius empty eye sockets
So he could not see
What cards I held in my hand.
When alive I hated poker,
Thought it a trivial pastime,
A waste of life,
The pleasure of the living dead.
But here, I had no life to waste,
As I had
When I was alive among the living dead,
But still poker playing
Seemed a waste of death.
Jejune living beings waste
Their lives in trifles and trivia.
When Ammonius, the Neo-Platonist,
Was blindfolded,
He enjoyed being blindfolded,
For the mummy cloth
Over his empty eye sockets
Shut out the sensible world,
Thus he could contemplate
Without distraction the supersensible,

I tried to explain to Ammonius
There were no sensible
Or supersensible in this
Spaceless-timeless region
Where we the dead existed,
He quoted Socrates
That after life people become pure forms,
For all souls in all people are the same,
All souls bend in the universal soul,
Or else there would not be
Enough space to contain
All the souls of all the people who died.
I said to Ammonius,
Can you see, there is no space here.
Space is a concept of the living dead on earth.
You are dead now, there is no space.
But to show his contempt
For my comment,
He stood in the Yogin
Tree position, placed
A finger in the middle
Of his forehead
And proceed doing
Parnayama, but he
Soon stopped, started
Talking, with much
Paronomasia, about
Hegel’s pantology.

Then his bones
Completely changed,
Changed from the bones
Of Ammonius, the Neo-Platonists,
To bones of Apemantus,
The Cynic philosopher.
As Apemantus, he was silent
For he could find
Nothing to criticized
In the nothingness
Of this realm of the dead.

As the change
From Ammonius to Apemantus
Took place,
The card players,
Who exactly resembled
The card players
In a Cézanne painting,
Disappeared.

It was then I realized
That on earth
In the world of the living dead
My name
Was not Cruson Ronn,
It was Carson Annerson,
And I was a clerk
Behind a car rental counter
In the Tampa International airport.

It was a boring job,
But I amused myself
By an intense concentration
On the inhalation
And exhalation or my breath.
Also, I observed intensely
The bending back and forth
Of my fingers.



Duane Locke

Posted over on Ditch Poetry