AN ACCIDENTAL DICTIONARY by Charles Wyatt
Succarath is a kind of beast. I found it in a poem, my own poem, and on its back it carries its young. But the young, too, are Succarath. I picture them with many teeth. Teeth like the feathers in an angel’s wing. Although I am willing to picture angels without wings. Glaver is all the stories at once. Birds in the morning. Grass in the lawns. Leaves noticing the wind. Myomancy is divination by mice. But not by mouse. The single mouse knows nothing.
Bomullock is something that knocks in the night. It is eyebrows with no eyes, a kind of Cheshire Cat thing. It is not a thing in the night but what you fear in the night. It can sit on your chest. It smells like a can of dead fishing worms. Night sounds gather closely around it like roots.
Eten is a giant. Once the world was eten but now it is just a jammed hard drive spinning ever slower. But I can make myself small, and then this room, or even this cluttered desk is eten or etenish. And nothing is more gigantic than the skull that holds the mind’s universe.
Animalillio is the fish in the sea that washes in the cave of mind and which nibbles the lips of the blind transparent beast who drinks on its shore in the black lapping silence. Tiny creature we must see without light, we must know, then. There, we become animalillio and there, we disappear.
Mithe is to lie but myth is a lie made true. Like the creature we see without light, myth is made in tune with itself so many times we tolerate, no, welcome it. I mithe a poem, but the poem has story. Stories can’t be made up, they exist whole cloth, they crawl out of the ground after the hardest winter and make soft lights from the ends of weeds. They launch and signal from the night. Here. And here. You can hear them padding through the house on feet which are not soft, not hard. Their nails touch the hard wood of the floor with a dry sound.
Knevel is a mustache. Mustache is Bomullock to voice. Voice is invisible, but dark or light. Light is a particle, a wave, a gesture. Knevel is a gesture of the lip, and lip, lip is the medium of kiss. And kiss is the touch of light on darkness. Umbra.
Deliquium is a falling of vital powers. The melting of skeleton. Here is a story: a skeleton walks into a bar. “Oops, wrong joke,” he says. The bartender stands forlornly with a mop in one hand and the fresh poured beer in the other. The skeleton does not look back. It walks away – it walks gracefully with a loping limp.
Megrim: the biting worm, the maggot, the pain, the source of the itch, the egg, the animalillio, the procession of ants, a sentence across the page of the earth, unbroken, story-telling story, story struggling with its sentences. Capricious fancy, caprice. Oddment. Nut. What a small story. Bite.
Brizzle: Hold the light on this one. Magnify the sun. A small tangle of smoke, smell of scorch, a rope burn, rug burn, itch beneath an antler.
Skainsmate: nor is it flurt-gills. One wonders if it is ribald companion or bawdy. Can a bawdy be other than bawdy?
Mazard is a cup made of wood, but the cup is not the wood – like the inside of the flute which is the soul of the flute, the mazard is the absence which the wood embraces. Mazard is the cup in flight, the sound of wood moving its absence through air, like nails on wind, like soft paws, like hard feathers, a kind of vibrating sound (as if anything were other) – rattling then, peacock shuffling, cards cut. A bell bent until it bells. Drink.
Cherisaunie – here I sit me in the warmth of my thoughts, holding one now in hand like a cup, mazard. My hand only shakes a little – the thought is warm, but it does not spill. I sip the thought. I am suffused in the thought and green with its leaves. Birds nest in me.
Lostling – Elizabeth Bishop advises us to begin with car keys. I am good with pocket knives and once I lost a watch for ten years. But also pennies. Pencils in a cup. Anything in the shape of a duck. Needle with short thread. No more than three stresses. “Even losing you,” she says, addressing the beloved, having moved from the lostling to the territory of the enormous, but in this we share, a life’s work, and the chronicling of it, that single unending sentence, circling the spilled thought, carrying it away.
Mirknight. Frog gobble. Babble of fireflies. Out over the smooth calm water, away from the just set sun, its slow sinking and bubbling – see it rising up, not Bomullock, but like, a hovering presence, all chill and wide mouth, soft white belly. Give it tiny eyes which cannot see, nor can you. Each ripple from its step would have one light side, one dark, if only you could see.
Maffle – sadder than lostling, this is a scrap of twine. Anything in the back of a drawer, the photograph you find but do not recognize, the story you cannot tell because it is lost, another white butterfly. Pencil stub. The lines you can’t recall which come before “write it.” Cat’s claw.
Haspanald – the quick-grown youth aspen-like, their limbs wild onions poking out of the snow but take care, those roots will pull free in the damp spring earth and the youth will tumble away. Also the slender old, leaving behind their bones. There in the vase beside the door.
Darkmans brings the night, ringing his silver bell, and following then, the night, in a body, snuffling, munching, fond of brick, of tile, of old shoes especially. Darkmans, child of the night who will whistle to himself ever so softly his whistle, the kind of sound that comes from the bottom of a well.
Quother – the chickens in their coop become confidential as the dark crawls down, dims up – perhaps the poem, too, should speak softly, hiding its egg in the tall mint behind the outhouse. At the end of winter, there is less to shout about anyway.
Lypothyme – a swoon, a swounding, like the tendrils of sleep or the black dog that sits, invisible, on the chest of the unwaking and the waked alike and will not budge. A bell that will not ring, cocked like a wheelbarrow but sullen, its bite more eloquent than its tongue.
Mi-nabs are those not present of whom we speak who might have been here before, crossing the threshold cautiously, because they have curious customs, or they might come after, when this room is dark, and I am drinking cocoa in the kitchen and they might speak of the things terrible and the things not terrible in a rhythm like water flowing in pipes. Where are they now? I will not set a place for them or him, that one with his special hat, the one he wears when I’m speaking of him. Sotto voce. He’s taken off the hat and bows to the invisible East.
Avering – the false beggar goes avering. Also loseneers (escaped captives of the Turks), iuweeliers (specialize in fake gems), swijgers (smear themselves with horse shit and water to simulate jaundice), Schleppers (phony Catholic priests), Nachbehuylers (lie with their children in front of houses moaning until they are let in) – the bird that crashes into window glass and then dies or does not.
Buzznack is the hurdy-gurdy, the broken organ, the junk yard for organ pipes grown over in thistle and caster bean above a swarm of out-of-tune moles singing in too close harmony, sad objects of wreck and ruin. Enigma. The weeds have found butterflies.
Gardyloo is what you must shout before dousing the poet with night water from gardez l’eau and there is no truth in truth and I have lost my cats – they were playing with the night and pawed it under something, perhaps an old organ, gardez, gardez – it falls like the cat falls, does it not?
Flamefew can be the moonshine in the water or flamfoo the tart whose lines are short but who drags a flowing cloak like a rising angel. All that flapping and the falling of loose feathers which strike the ground and smolder – there is no music for such things – that turning just under the surface is not a wing. Surely not a wing.
Knoup was once knap but one does not strike a bell. One must roll in low sounds, in the bowl of bells, to toll, even as the story is told, the bell is bold and it flares its bell, bongs its bell, tangles in roundelays and wrongs, in batches and thickets, down the stairs and up, those bells making a noise pure bedlam would suck like a welcome thumb.
Thunderstone – perhaps not the falling stones which invisibly shatter, this stone is the source of thunder and it is risen from the earth flapping its stony wings rumbling unscanable poetry. To trip on a thunderstone is the burden of the man who gazes in distraction at the passing moon.
Barghast – also barguest, is the ghost in white with saucer eyes which finds you in the field near gates or stiles. Also fond of rising from cracks in the ground, first taking the form of a little spotted dog, transforming into a bear or a flight of owls – especially active on wet nights.
Cramble is the gait of the dunce bear or the sore bear. To walk with sore feet in moose mud will give a close approximation of a cramble. Also the three-legged dog hounded by a blown newspaper and the gaping weed-hidden maw of a muskrat hole, the sudden cramble.
Malebouche or wikked-tonge is the voice of evil, the serpent clearing his sooty throat, the devil’s argument: once an angel, always an angel, professional courtesy for the poet who arranges black feathers and a skull in a place where he can smell the writhing sea.
Lib – first, a charm, then to castrate, then to suckle, then to sleep, then to sleep as a man and a woman sleep together – an odd journey for a quarter note of a word, the worst part of any tune whistled in the night. Lob it in the lake where it will float like a quill until it suddenly disappears.
Buccinate – blow the trumpet, puff the cheeks like cherubim, ring the ringing in your ears, shatter glass, spin the river moils, the river roils, make of them fine funnels to the shy sinking sand, the deep plunge into gaping lillabullero.
Brustle – When the peacock flares his bristles and all eyes are open and upon us, there is a slow snick, an awful awakening like thrashing through cockleburrs in the glade at cockshut, the hens gathered in all fluffed and broody, dark descending crepe and bats tangled, black limbs brustling through the wind – we hear it again: rustle on cold crust of snow, a lost leaf lost mouse dog’s paw, listen, attend, there it is (near) again.
Behounc’d – furniture upon a cart horse might be a dining room table or, perhaps, his collar. He is decked (behounc’d) out, decorated, his scales are shined, his fins polished, feathers dusted, eyes peeled – hear his distant clops like rain drops in a down spout like a line of verse with no commas.
Taghairm – if myomancy fails, wrap the seer in the skin of a fresh slain calf, and leave him in the wild where the spirits of the departed may visit him and speak – best in a place where rocks or water fall – the spirits there are lonely and will offer up their syllables like the one long sound the moon wolfs down.
Noctuary – the passages of night are writ here in these pages which turn of themselves from right to left, brustling in the room you have no will to enter. And water drops make old songs, remember themselves out of a dusty cupboard, a forgotten drawer, the space beneath a board. And one small bird.
Gapesnest – of course, a gazing stock, wonderment, nest of squirming stones, vision of ascending angel, or, less common, burrowing angel, wings besmirched, wings of snakes with little imagination but bad temper, Medussa fits, sneezing stone and ash and hair and the thoughts a man guards even from himself.
Dorbel – when the dorbel rings, the dunce enters, and the dunce believes the dorbel peels in courses of seasons. The dunce believes he is the king of dunces.
Baragouin – not bara pyglyd, which is pitch bread, from the Welsh who would be busy killing snakes – this is the astonishing white bread and from that perspective, all the rest is double talk, crows alighting in trees, larks nesting in ruins, and, of course, snake doors, snake spit, snake song – the tessitura very low, very low indeed.
Jaunce – not a jaunt or a haunt, although a haunt is weary enough – this is a hard ride with no verb until the very end, a morning with no crow, rust with no iron, ticking with no clock, a weary journey during which the horse lost his urge to cavort – hooves drag like the wind in dead leaves, its mischief never done.
Jar – the night jar echoes from the wood and his vast mouth contains the sky: charre, gorre, churr, chirr, chirk, chark – any meaning is accidental but the angel doesn’t wonder who struggles with a man, wrenching him entirely from his wonderment. The sky is wide, but the jar contains it and its clouds.
Glaik – a dazzling flash of light which leaves the mind deceived like a man who juggles fire and reads a fish. To cheat, to swindle, to trick, to cling, to rendezvous, to undress, to gather, to grow one shadow from another, to carry it carefully to the shadowplace, to let it go, motionless thing, flash of soot, of winter night.
Kist – a basket for the baby Moses or Noah’s ark or Queequeg’s coffin, or the cup of the sea, or the stinging stars pursuing, or the stones falling and shattering while the soldiers stand at attention, or their attention, unmoved, or their wonder, already composed. Down, then, these steps into the clouds, basket in each hand, as the bass rises and each entrance, trumpet, bird, angel, flute, comes harsher than the one before and the heavens see only fog, neither rising nor falling. Tuned. All attention. Will.
Sources
Kacirk, Jeffrey. The Word Museum. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
Schama, Simon. Rembrandt’s Eyes. New York: Knopf, 1999.
Schipley, Joseph T., Ed. Dictionary of Early English. New York: Philosophical Library, 1955.
Charles Wyatt is the author of the story collection Listening to Mozart (University of Iowa Press). This is his fourth appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.