Black Light by Galway Kinnell Page B

“Never mind, old man,” Jamshid said, “I am sorry for what I said.”
    â€œNow,” the old man went on, placated at once, “let us see what the poet has to say to you.” He held out the book. “Just open the book where it opens, and put down your finger where it puts itself down.” The old man studied the line on which Jamshid’s finger had touched down. “For you,” he said, “the augury is this: ‘Who is it comes dancing on the grave?’ He studied the phrase and nodded his head. “A deep saying,” was all the exegesis he offered.
    Poets of mystical inclination irritated Jamshid, because they gave the impression of high significance and yet kept hidden exactly what it was. This incomprehensible question irritated him now. Why did he have to get a question anyway, instead of straightforward advice? The old man, who would have been content with any utterance, the cloudier the better, was given an unequivocal prescription that a fool could see was preposterous. That, Jamshid reflected, is the way with poetry. When it is incomprehensible it strikes you as profound, and when you do understand it, it lacks common sense.
    The flush of poetic pleasure still showed in the old man’s eyes. It embarrassed Jamshid, and he decided he had better go about his business of locating Ali’s widow. He asked the old man if he knew the neighborhood.
    â€œI do,” the man said. “I live nearby and stroll over here every evening to get my augury. I have done so for as long as I can remember. By now I have received nearly every one in the book. Every night it comes true. But yours . . . I have never known anyone to have received that one. A very deep saying . . .”
    The old man sensed Jamshid’s impatience and got back to the point. “I live over there. Where that palm grows up out of a garden. Will you come and eat with me? I am a poor old man and have not much to offer. But I think you are poorer still and will not object.”
    Jamshid protested only a little, for it did seem to him this was the wrong time to call on Ali’s widow. To show up just at dinner time was certainly impolite. Furthermore the poor woman might have no heart for cooking, on hearing the news. And Jamshid had never been hungrier. Protesting a few times more, according to custom, he went along.
    In the twilight, under the date palm, they ate melons, pomegranates, rice, mutton, eggplants, and curd-water. Then they smoked the waterpipe. It made a loud purring noise in the garden. Finally the old man got to his feet.
    â€œNow for our auguries to come true. Wait,” he said, “I will be back directly.”

chapter thirteen chapter thirteen
    T he old man came out of the house carrying an opium pipe. When the pipe had heated up in the fire, he cut a morsel of opium, yellow-brown as his face, and pressed it to the bowl. Holding a red-hot piece of charcoal to it, he blew down the pipe until the coal turned white hot in the jet of air and started the opium burning. It crackled and hissed as he sucked its smoke deep into his lungs.
    He handed the pipe to Jamshid. “To help you find the meaning of your augury.”
    â€œDo you feel anything?” the old man asked. Jamshid only tasted burnt smoke, the almost cloying richness of something dank and moldy that suddenly dries out by burning. Jamshid thought of the poppies, their waxen blooms in the fields, made for the eye. He could see their sap flowing by night from their wounds, to be breathed into a man’s blood, in some garden of flowing water and roses.
    â€œI am feeling the blessing of opium,” the old man said, preparing himself a fourth pipe. “All day I miss the blessing. All day I am dead for lack of it. But every evening I come back to life. The blessing is the relief of no longerbeing dead. If only I could be dead and not know it. I used to wish I never took up smoking. Now I am very old, and to