A Midrash of Kuzka

By Matthew D Albertson

“As Midsummer Missiles Rain

A broken-winged crane / Rests in gloaming fallout greens / As a daymare blooms: / He is shown Kuzka’s Mother, / The ash-plumed anti-phoenix.”

— The Broken-Winged Crane, folio i, verso

The book predated all.

I was drawn to it, a lure,

As anyone with half a heart would

To a broken-winged crane.

At first glance, it was

Slapshod, pseudoacademic,

A nonsensical collection of

Manila folders, coffee

Stained, misaligned, and

Notably not color coded,

Covering a hodgepodge of

Loose parchment—like a more

Disheveled House of Leaves.

It had me, and I, it.

On its spine (or what counted)

Was the oblique title,

The Broken-Winged Crane;

It glistened

In tarnished silver thread

Stitched into drab manila.

This folio of foibles—

Surely the work of the mad—

Introduced the phenomenon

Kuzka’s Mother

First with reverence,

Then with adoration,

Then with fear,

As a great anti-phoenix.

I fiddled

For days with the sheets,

Including the leathers [palimpsests],

The doodled marginalia [hieroglyphs],

The take-out menus [cyphers].

Pieces fit together too neatly to be

Ancillary miscellany.

Thus I assembled a canticle

Of Kuzka’s Mother,

An apostate’s gospel

Of bad tidings and

Undue sufferings and

Woes writ to you

Who reads, echoed throughout

The not-book.

First came the psalmic précis,

Herald of nine canticles,

Each a revelation of the anti-phoenix.

The work took life of its own,

Released,

Determined as the wildest of wild things

To be

And so the world heard the cry

Of the immobile Crane:

Radiance and gust and fire

And earth and sea spray and

Crackle and erosion and poison and final

Gelid calm.

Each element

Contained, but never meant to be understood

In segment.

As The Crane is here read,

It would be wholly known

In a great cascade, seemingly

All at once.

It began when I began,

When we began, reading.

It was scribbled as marginalia.

That you, reading and pouring

Over the paradoxicalities,

Will have driven away to your Walden

Country refuge, retreat.

And now, with distance, behold

The trigger sequence from afar

As but a thumb-sized threat on the horizon!

Fevered writing will have set upon you

In sudden, blinding

Spark of inspiration.

So wrought by the book, you’ll breathe

First relief, the thought complete,

Then gasp, at its infectious onset,

A new sun reflected in your eye.

Gaze

Enraptured

By the wild daymare.

The mere thought was itself

Revelation’s onset

Under the great

Anti-phoenix’s wings,

Bellowing.

Run

In vain, into the annals

You’ll have fallen,

The Crane in hand,

Held ready,

Pages all a-shuffled.

It forms a midrash of plenary

Destructive knowledge—

One you’ll never have read,

Broken-winged in the countryside—

A study of Kuzka’s Mother.

Matthew D Albertson is an Oregonian poet and a graduate of the Portland State University Honors College. His work frequently navigates the intersections of mythology, digital culture, environmentalism, and civic life. His previously published work may be found in Alchemy: Issue 50, The Cardinal Anthology: Vol. 2, online with North Meridian Press, on Oregon's Tele-Poem Hotline, and in Acrana's "Smitten With the Written" anthology. He enjoys warm tea on a chilly day, watching the atmospheric river.