TLex

First Canto

Ad Io exodus Zersionylladaru tiliar
ideorhesaleotia nines melos e artes
ipsi mes æ depreccata burrasca subios Dudu lacuna
ad Atta as est alæ ene kore ktar tre ulna Tradition has it that, during his sojourn as ambassador to Babur’s court in Kabul from spring of 1505 to autumn of 1506, Poldavian dragoman Patrolius (1464–1559) nightly sought succor from diplomatic travail by submitting to such charming administrations as a particular court houri was bid by Babur to sanctify bridally for our paradoxically monogamic polyglot — and I say paradoxically, as it is known that plurilingual ability charts most commonly a promiscuous path from cama to lit, from yatak to takht, but such inconstant firasht-hopping was not, so it is thought, our faithful author’s way. To think that such thalamic duty could pardon omission’s sin. Morality making stupid custom. Though any unspoilt vision of this singular bondswoman’s triangular nostrils flaring with passion, moist full lips ditto, and khol-dark lotus lids squinting two-thirds ditto must always, in truth, stay lost to us in a constant shadow of onomastic obscurity, in a manto, you might say, of anonymity, rumor has it that Patrolius’s orphan succubus was fruit of a Norlo-Tagmic cross known throughout Kabul as Nirusa (a sort of apricot-plum hybrid growing only in Nuristan) da Norlia, or simply Nirusa, though, oddly, in that child of Ishtar’s fistful of Patrolius’s journals still privy to us, as Norlia. Complicating scholars’ ability to plumb this rhapsody’s lyrical mirror’s origin is Patrolius’s account of hunting oryx with Babur (1483–1530) in a location known as Nur-i-lah, Oak Mountain, from which bosky hillock — now a suburb of cosmopolitan Kabul — Patrolius, mistaking lah for ktar, acidic oak for basic basswood, thought his handmaid must hail, but historians insist that abundant circumstantial indications confirm that Patrolius’s Nirusa’s Norlia was in fact high in Hamiltonia and that, by combining carnal praxis with oral prolixity, this wanton child of Ishtar inhabiting lord Babur’s court would, whilst busy applying, usually by skillful hand but occasionally, it is said, by simian foot, various soothing and invigorating potions and lotions to Patrolius’s drooping, court-worn soul, this ravishing minion would also chant a lyrical improvisation or two or four or six, in this way concomitantly inflaming with syllabic instars sprung from a rich tributary of custom and tradition, a rich corpus, in fact, of schizomythia, whilst his palpitating soul stood to, sumptious and compliant — in this way inflaming Patrolius’s spirit — a spirit hungry for agglutinating grammars and thirsty for stray words bristling with diacritics — forcing his own hand to dart forth, as from a turbid cloud of haptic distraction, and claw haphazardly among tumbling books and folds of silk for a sharp moanzy quill, clutch it at last, thrust it sighing into a dark pot of gastropod ink, and with its drooling tip jot a cryptic transcription of Norlia’s orphic idiom, just as his soul, now turgid with plum sap and sticky with apricot pulp, sonorously burst, and Nirusa’s glottal locution was dissolving, dissolving in a slurry of aphasic moans and sibilant gasps of asyntactic inarticulacy... Prior to which doffing of all formality, though, Nirusa, donning a corybant’s mask, had sung of dark moon’s transformation from swart Atta’s growing luminosity to waxing Io’s dancing sigmoid horns, tauroral wings matching in form that bicornous ktar (a sort of oud) capo to which Dudu, avatar of Saturn — that nomadic astral body taking thirty of our world’s solar orbits to accomplish a singular orbit of its own — had strung his trio of twanging ram’s guts — an allusion to how, on cold, dry, limpid, mountain nights, it looks as if Saturn is flashing or vibrating as a kind of play of light against rapidly strong ringing in bright crimson, lapis, and ivory (Skt. guṇa = Nr. dudu, ‘ring, strand, string, sting’) — so as to sing of wayward girls baring torsos and limbs and gamboling lustily, on nights of gibbous (gravid) and full (promiscuous) moon, among thick stands of tall hardwoods surrounding that city on high, Norlia, that honors not virginity, that awards not constancy.