Divination

          The wind licked the gray caul of sky over Hob's Lane. We hurried with our sacks deeper into the moor. My name was Chalkman then. My brother was a thickheaded lad whose sole gift was this horrible method of interpreting the universe. He was cursed with a lesser talent. He could find gold by divinition. Under marble threshing floors and barley fields. Tiles would be chipped up. Crops would be yanked up. Anywhere he sensed the presence of  forgotten coin.
          Far and wide his notoriety spread. The greed in men's souls caused him great pain. In his wake, civilization grew even more corrupt. It festered like a plague victim.
          Once he pointed a thorny twig toward the sea and fools dove from the summit and were smashed.
         When ever he felt that hot tugging in his brain, his blue eyes rolled like robin's eggs, and he would cry a garbled complaint. Then, within minutes, he would recompose into his familiar idiot self. Hard to believe, he found coins from civilizations no scholar from London, Paris or Rome could trace.
         Some 20th Century entrepreneurs got filthy rich off him. But that is a story for another time.
        


                                                                                   *


         Darkfall caught us midway. The peat fires were burning and the will-o'-the-wisps were dancing beneath a horned moon.  We were carrying a load of manifacture from the glassblower to Magister Mundanus. The glass globules reminded me of innards. Able to hold and to drip liquids. Delicate membranes, yet brittle. Each month we would deliver them as requested. He owed no explanation. However, he told us he was seeking Veritas of a most ancient variety. I never laughed.
         "Hello to camp!" I shouted as we approached his starblasted place on the moor.
         Fumes from his rough lodge reeked of transmutation.
         Legend told of his coming. He arrived in a black stone from space. The impact killed flora and fauna within a mile radius.  Even today the air about him remains wild with phantoms of both beast and vegetation. Ghostly odors and mushy earth. Now, to these I attest, simply because a septic river flows beneath his ground. Toxic chemicals and raw sewage. His industrial and personal wastes are astounding. Science marches on!
         "Good evening, Chalkman," he responded. "Greetings to your brother too."
         He was a tall gaunt man with unshorn oily black locks and beard. Dark sad eyes. Too long had he been bound to our earth. His name was Zedek, Sadeek, Siddi. Something like that, hinting of magical powers and perhaps holiness.
         He had seen much pointless suffering during his stay among us. The rigmarole of appelations seemed to amuse him.
         Tonight he wore a mauve cassock and a burnoose the color of desert dunes. We could only imagine the world of his origin. Were there pyramids and sphinxes? Temples and oracles? Lighthouses and colossi?
         The avatar thanked us for our punctuality. He paid us in exotic stones. Stones that grew like plants. Crystals. Most of them refracted sunlight and when properly placed upon the human body they cured dissipation. There were others, not as clouded or opaque. Special ones my brother called Seer Stones.
          My brother fashioned a leather cap that would position a Seer Stone over each eye.
          "You look like a fool," remarked Magister Mundanus. Although he preached compassion, he poorly abided  idiots, fools and precocious children.
          "Give him a chance!" I bleated. "He has odd genius. Why, once he designed woolen slippers that massaged the soles of troubled feet. Soothing as well the internal organs of the body."
          "Reflexology."
          "They still sell well."
          Just then, resembling a giant bug, my brother tittered. "Tee-hee-hee."
          "So what do you see?" asked Magister Mundanus. He was beyond sighs.
          My brother gazed about, eyes magnified to a silly degree. His face fell slack-jawed with ecstasy and rapture.
          


                                                                                      *


          It was a balmy day. The Siberian gales had retracted from my lovely green land of chalk and sod. Sun warmed my neck as I labored with scythe, rake and hoe. It had taken a whole hillside for me to complete my new work of art. I etched pictographs, huge ones. This one was of a robust man with an erect engine.
          "'Tis Nature, my lovelies!"
          My lovelies all laughed, and ran off to play.


                                                                                      *


          I found my brother atop a windy hillock beneath a sentinal oak tree. He was watching two frisky bullocks gamble in the high grass. Together we could see fertile land undulating with hills and dales toward the fresh horizon.
          "I have met a woman," he whispered. Brown-faced and strong now.
          "Is she wise?"
          "Very much so. Not book-learned, but wise."
          Did I ever say my brother was thick-headed?
          "I am glad to hear this," I said, ruffling his thatch of golden hair. "I am pondering a far journey to an unknown country."
          "Oh, I wish I could go with you. But I love this place. Its very elements flow within me."
          "I know."
          "When will you depart?"
          "The day after your wedding. How's that?"
         
         
   
     

The Gypsy and the Virgin

          Grandda used to drink the fetid soma of his own brewing alchemy at the edge of the old royal aerodrome lawn not far from our camp in Somerset. Holding court alone in a wicker peacock throne, he refilled his crusty pewter mug and laughed at the folly and misery of mortal men.
          By the time the sun was a mere ember in the western trees, his was a fool's paradise. The lawn was golden in the sun, mauve in the advancing shadows. Here the blades of grass once welcomed home the Spitfires and Tempests, supercharged demons of the air.
          That was when young scholar Hestia Wilcoxen visited him with her texts, mimeographed lessons, and an occasional cheap sensation from popular occult writer Doctor Manly P. Hall, known mainly to us sygany as the minister at one of Bela Lugosi's nuptuals in Hollywood.
          "Hello, my beauty!"
          She squatted in the style of her Indian and Asian neighbors.
          Poor Grandda thought she was about to piddle in the heather. This posture had been common in camp for two thousand years, women urinating rough-out, and always caused a wheel to slip a cog in his brain. Hestia's pale knees bobbing up from the abyss beneath the waves of her blue plaid skirt was a sight to behold!
          "What are you gawking at? O Pan of the Woods?"
          "Ahem."
          "Peeping down my skirt. You should be ashamed," Hestia teased. Then she crooked a forefinger and asked, "Is there any wise drink left for me?"
          "I try to save some."
          "Wicked twig."
          Hestia wrinkled her sharp face at the magical vapors. "You would not limit my allotment."
          "Never, my dear."
          "Such enchantment you propose, sir."
          "Amrita! It stays the dark hand of death."
          Hestia shrugged. She was young. She waas cavalier and blissfully existential. It was the buzz from Grandda's booze she cared about. Zing!
          Grandda was thinking: My mind is immortal, but not my little wag.
          He rued the hollowness deep within his groin.



                                                                                         *


          "May I?" Hestia asked, pointing to the silver divining bowl.
          "It works best when there is a moon reflected in it."
          "I must be home before moonrise."
           Feeling the rising tide of lust, Grandda arose from his throne and sat beside her on the turf. He took up the bowl and poured water from his ampora. Close enough to feel her bodyheat, he whispered, "Starlight will do."
          "Please don't cause me to doubt you."


                                                                                          *


           Trying to sound avuncular, Grandda asked , "How did your term paper fare?"
           "Either I pass with honors or I receive a speedy dismisal and it's off to be a Piccadilly Communist or a literary collier's wife, barefoot with asters between floured toes."
           "What kind of essay did you write?"
           "Its working title was 'Tantric Joy Via Telepathy.'"
           This rocked him. Aghast he retreated from her aura. Evidently his powers were  forces of nature, requiring extra thought.
           The etheric bond he had established with her during the previous night bore residual effects. The sticky connexion between his rod and her rosebud remained as strong as it had been when he first imagined it. Be that as it may, the virgin hymen was full of grace.
           "What happened to Mister D.H. Lawrence?" Grandda asked.
           "Had to let him go." She giggled.
           "Professor Milton will simply die!"
           "He just might. As my tutor he had insisted I write on Lawrence's titanic rage."
           Grandda gloated. His rival had been defeated.


                                                                                        *


          There was a portrait in Grandda's mind of Professor Milton, "dean of Lawrence studies" at Hestia's Grove of Academe. The old scholar resembled a young Bertrand Russell, weak of chin,strong of nose beak, with a corrupt smile, as if about to eat Lady Ottoline Morrell's "fig."
          On hearing that Hestia had switched subjects for her term paper Grandda clapped his hands. "Excellent, my beauty! Excellent!"
          The severity of her grayeyed gaze nearly turned Grandda to stone. Reminding him of strong-thighed gorgons he had known. Wantons every one.
          "It's a hellkite battlehag nagging BITCH of a paper!" Hestia spewed.
          She spread her loins and fell upon her buttocks. She bellowed a woodsy laugh. She kissed the blowsy air!
          "Soma," Grandda hoisted his tankard. "Drunk on it, the great Zoroaster laughed in the face of the hatchet."
          He poured another for Hestia.  He wished an answer to the riddle beneath her moist furry folds.
          Hestia smacked her lips, imbibed, all the while impishly observing the old gypsy.
          Smiling like Mona Lisa, she spoke like Sybil: "Focus of Will. Ah, the snake rises from the basket."
          Grandda felt an enormously satisfying erection. Her eyes glittered and twinkled.
          "Blast! I forgot to mention it. Professor Milton wants to see me tomorrow."
          Jealous, Grandda mentally rolled out his big cannon. Hestial noticed a faint tinitus, as if having chewed too much aspirin. In her mind she could sense his manipulations. There was a gravitational flux in her bowels. The sinister Pygmalion worked his will upon her. Aleister Crowley style.
          So she closed her mind like a sphincter.
          She used a hoary technique taught by Swami Panchadasi.
          Grandda was persistent. It's time to sleep, my chela.
          CHELA.
          The word reverberated through many layers of consciousness. A voice like Orson Welles in a radio play of "The Shadow." Lamont Cranston. And she remembered Grandda's crude hands upon her dreaming naked body.
          An image flowered in her mind. A screw. She turned it.
          Eager to redirect him, Hestia exclaimed: "The birds are gone!"
          Defeated, Grandda realized it was no accident Hestia was named for the Roman hearth goddess of vestal virgins. Her raven hair. Her chalk cheeks. A beauty shone in a clarity from the ruins of pre-Christian Brittain.
          "Yes, the birds." His voice cracked. "Our boys with their fedoras and shotguns have chased all those decent of song down to the forest."
          "Boys--"
          "You DO entertain thoughts of them. Don't you?"
          She sniffed. "Some boys are quite beautiful."
          "I am sorry if I have influenced you in that way."
          "Do not flatter yourself."
          Hestia began a dance. Loping barefoot, she took their dyad to the trees. On some leaps her toes clipped drooping boughs.
          As if after tea, her mind was clear. Brilliant.
          Grandda wheezed. "Stop jumping!"
          I am Isadora. The leaves of the grove shimmer in the breeze, flashing their silver bottoms to me.
         "Sit down!" He was coughing now.
         When Grandda caught up with her she was sitting cross-legged.  She had unbuttoned her blouse and was sweating profusely. Rivulets trickled into the hollow between her breasts. Grandda sank to his knees, overcome by the sight. Her eyebrows arched up. She asked him: "Am I being coy?"
          "I am not a schoolboy."
          "In a way, you are. Old man."
          "Pshaw! I'm your tutor!"
          In a cadence of condescension she explained: "Women's teats, their nipples, pink, brown, European, Asian, African, Amerind, all have these invisible wires running from them, networking the whole planet, into the cold noonday of  reason, and all of them pinch onto nodes in your universal male mind."
          Silence.
          Refreshed, Grandda erupted jovially. "Ah, already you know how to control a man."
          "Just you."
          Remembering her recent psychic combat with him, she added, "I would not come here each evening if I did not control something."
          "Don't underestimate me."
          "You're drunk. Be still and enjoy the fading world."


                                                                                       *


          Hestia smoothed Grandda's beastly white mane, thinking, in such a balmy land of chalk and sod any fool could find immortality if not longevity, in a brewer's yeast.
          "I must go," Hestia announced. "Tomorrow begins early."
          "Fare thee well, my beauty. Pleasant dreams."
          He watched her fade into the loamy ground fog. Waiting for the moon to rise, he played Dvorak on the old violin.