Audible Cities

By Puran Lucas Perez

The great Sufi teacher, Ibn Arabi, encouraged us to inhabit the 'imaginal realm' as vividly and creatively as we inhabit the physical environment in which we live. Audible Cities is a travelogue of one man's exploration of that world.

Inspired by Italo Calvino's "Ïnvisible Cities", this collection of poetic reports invite us to enter the vastness of personal imagination and from the locations it brings us to, consider some of the central questions of existence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Puran Lucas Perez
• Release date: Jan 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466089242

Book preview

AUDIBLE CITIES

by Puran Lucas Perez

Copyright © 2012 by Puran Lucas Perez

Smashwords Edition

Year One – Audible Postcards

Year Two – Erotic Diaries

Year Three – Wonders of the World

As Italo Calvino told us, the great marvels of the world are invisible. The deeper human planet is imagination and his Marco Polo one of its chief illuminators. It is to Calvino that this collection is dedicated. And it was with Invisible Cities by my side that it was created. ~PLP

Year One – Audible Postcards

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Agaron

Dear One,

Who could blame you if you choose

to set aside these words unread.

The world has claimed me all these years,

her roads and rivers pulling me through city after city,

worlds in worlds, in a trackless dance that keeps me moving,

arriving, departing, arriving essentially nowhere.

But you came to me so vividly

in those quiet days I spent in Agaron

that I had to try to reach

out into this silence spread between us

like an uncrossable sea.

Let me tell you of this grand city, and of its mystery.

Broad straight boulevards, shining in the sun,

lined with towering trees, and heroines high on marble palfreys,

always go flat out to the horizon, without the slightest curve.

Yet they all bring you back to the place where you began…

like a round dreaming.

In this city of circles, you began to haunt me.

First I thought I heard your voice behind me in the market.

Through the clamor of the street merchants’ selling songs,

and the rattling wagons with their crates of whicker and seashell,

and the tribal banners flapping proudly in the morning breezes

your delicately penetrating call was in my ear, in my chest.

I spun to find you… but was it you or the fruit sellers’ music

meant to draw and hold you there fondling a lenomine?

I kept walking, hoping that as I came back around –

carousel-like, as I passed the market a second, a third time –

I would feel your voice again calling my name.

That evening I’m sure you called me as I walked

the pearl limestone shore, teaming with seabirds.

Your petulant voice – like when, on the verge of tears,

you would insist that I did not understand.

So sure I was that you were there that I waited,

Knowing you would step through the pale mist.

And waited.

That night the murmur of your breathing, like the faintest hum

wafted from the crooning silence on just this side of sleep.

It was exactly the sound you made when we lay there

after making love, resisting the deepening tide of sleep

…lingering even if just a few more breaths

in the devastating bliss that had befallen us.

Next morning the rainbow birds sang your name

over and over in the towering trees

beyond the veranda where I stood so still.

I fled from Agaron,

like a man suddenly haunted

by night-riddled memories of old desires,

and the ever-present absence of you,

of your loving touch

upon my soul.

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Lauristan

Lauristan was more a mud hole than a city in the old books.

But in time it blossomed into a proud, honeyed oasis, where

the men are all soft-eyed, silent makers,

the world rises from their industriart.

and the women all have wide welcoming hips –

the world comes through their birthing hips.

They wear peculiar adornments – these strong gracious women.

One will have a saffron smudge across her pearlescent brow;

another has the feathers of silver swallows encircling her ears;

on another, gold nails flash from scarlet fingers on indigo hands.

But these are not merely decorative – they are charms:

Carefully wrought and blessed, they cast potent spells.

It works like this:

When she comes of age, a woman sets her sights

on one of the soft silent ones; her breath leads her to him

and her heart rhythms confirm: he is the holder of my future.

She prays to Hakianun for guidance and eventually

she is granted a vision – a dream in which the color, form,

and even the sound of her special adornment are revealed.

It may take months, or longer, for her to find

the particular materials, and realize her dreamed vision.

When it’s done, she dons it and goes out to find him.

Typically, at first, he does not see her or her charm.

But suddenly the magic grabs and his eyes, his mind are caught.

Innocently, he is mesmerized by the sight of these small feathers,

or the glittering stones dangling from her everywhere,

or the bright pink snake writhing round her neck.

While he is in this trance she mounts him

(which in Lauristan involves only touching eyes).

As his state deepens there rises up from deep inside

one of the only words he will ever speak.

It bubbles up to his lips and is uttered into the air

like a rare bird freed, or a spirit loosed.

In that instant she becomes incandescent with life

and the sound seed in her begins to grow,

for he has spoken the name of their first child.

In Lauristan, the old mud hole that over

eons blossomed into a honeyed oasis,

the men are all soft-eyed and silent,

the women all draw magic

through their birthing hips.

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Qatarayn

Because it only rains a time or two in a month or two,

in Qatarayn, the populace is ever poised to listen.

You see, the patter of precipitation is called Aurata.

It is their Oracle, their Way