Mutabor: Malcantone: (Canton Ticino, Switzerland)

Abstract

Ascension Day, May 17th (A Catholic Encyclopedia declares, “The use of the word ‘ascension’ does not involve the belief that heaven is necessarily somewhere up in the sky.” But if not there, then where is it?): the bells of the Malcantone in their staggered tattoo, EDECDE, EDECDC, ring through the valley from the towers’ broken shales. Hilary is gathering elder-flower beside her parents on the shadowed path. I see her gold head and I hear her laugh, like a cuckoo in the hillside forest where the leaf-mould has been gouged into ruts by the tusks and hooves of the wild boar. Can light itself be said to laugh? And have you not ever watched light and shadow in their play and felt inside yourself that some mortal commodity was being lightly traded, as if by angels, ambiguous and tired, who lost their names in Paradise when they fell? —Out of which one resolves: it is Belfagor, a minor forest god. He will not harm us, his beard grotesques and garlands, flourishes carved as if in gold hammer-wood. And, earlier, Mark wants to show me a great column-stone he thinks of buying, so we travel to where it lies snugged in earth. A camion-grue, he says he’ll need for it, a truck with a crane, crane like the bird, so that this stone, rejected by the builders, might become the head of the corner, the crane a symbol of vigilance for the stone held always in its claw so that, should the bird ever sleep, the small clatter of the dropped stone will wake it. And so Mark will buy this great stone and raise it vertical, this sleeping weight the crane-truck (bird) will move, to shelter those on whom his love depends and who, through sleep and waking, depend on him for yet a little while, given life and time to gather elder out of innocence. Through the deep shade Hilary comes toward me, her face lit by white blossoms of elder-flower, and elder-syrup flavors the cool water Simone gives us, for we are thirsty at midday, and I remember Aeneas, who searched for the gold branch in the darkness of his own time, in such a deep shade. Now, forty days from Easter, the Paschal candle is extinguished; bell-music falls down from the birding towers with a disheveled and a jubilant clang. Belfagor steps into the forest clearing of our own stammering impulse to praise.