The Caravan
By Frank Delhomme
A caravan of singing smokers
Alights
Beneath the greenish desert sun
Onto sand
And hums songs to the vultures
Sonorous and tired
Cascades of stone
Replace the waterfall
As the drought flows
With violent absence
1200 wildebeests drop dread
Lions too tired to eat
Burrow into holes
In the roots of baobabs
The sun rains down rays
Which coalesce into snakes
The snakes coil, green and spiteful
Cortisone injections into the temple
At the behest of the cab driver
Who used to be a shaman
And I forget where I was going
(was that really cortisone)
I ask for another injection
Of whatever is necessary
To dream more vividly
As we drive to wherever we were going
In the first place
I’m guessing
Corinthian columns line the alley
That has become desert floor
Where lilacs once bloomed
The caravan hums tunes from ancient Syria
Billowing smoke hugs the colonnade
Flowing in and out of riders’ orifices
Tiny snakes crawl up camel legs
Falling midway up
Hissing quietly, in rhythm
Borax sculptures in the home of the priest
Slowly fractured over years of neglect
Faces devolved into tablets
Scrawled with unknown languages
And arms turning into spikes
All reaching for the entrance
The pilgrim wanders from figure to figure
Peeling away snakes
And tracing the writing on the faces
With dry, weary fingers
The priest sits on the altar, eyes closed
Perhaps dead
Turning into borax
The pilgrim turns his gaze to him
Imagining melancholy dreams
Shuddering in the heat, nestling into his wildebeest-skin vest
Condescending melodies rain down from the mountaintop
Infiltrating the prideful ears of the caravaneers
Penetrating their smoke like moonbeams
Concrete enough to touch
The riders fitfully attempt to wrap them around their fingertips
But ensnare only snakes
The camels blink their dried, blind eyes
At the mountaintops, shriveled goats
Bleat their melodies, they recall
From processions progressing to Babylon
Looking east to where they expect a tower
And their lucid dreams tell them
It must still stand
They knock stones down
Causing melodic rockslides
They stop only to strip bark from dead trees
Masonry falls from the temple
Trapping the leg
Of a faithless seer
The oblong fragment
Presses him with marble
And he cries tears
The color of jade
He dreamed of eating in youth
The visions he prophesied gulped down with them
How solemn he must feel
Ponder the travelers
Unable to imagine his ending
A rider hops down
And pours chamomile water
Into his cracked lips
The seer moves his mouth
But speaks only platitudes and riddles:
“The goats are higher than mountains
The bark is more alive than the goats
The music coils you like snakes
Stones move more like sages
The faces speak more as statues
Than I had spoken in trances
I live only in you
And your water suspends you
The camels are ageless
They survive the desert
Your eyes are forgetting
Your feet are a book
No treasures await you”
They left him there babbling
For they knew he would die
And rode off, in a fog of smoke and lucid dreams
But they were wrong;
Birds came to feed him
And he lives beneath the stone
To this very day
What became of the caravan though…
Frank Delhomme is a poet and artist who lives and works in Los Angeles.