Ithaca a Saga
The Ithaca Psychogeographic Liberation Front has sought the council of Sága in the form of a rune reading. We received the following prophecy in reply.
ᚨ (Ansuz)
Screaming, I take up the runes.
A river of language pours from my open mouth–
Alive, the words carve meaning into a frozen world.
A comfort to the wise, and a charge.
Speak;
Your story begins.
In the beginning, then, the word
That sparking leap of conjuration,
Meaning brought forth from dead earth.
The way we speak of kings, in tales of debt and thunder.
The myths and lore. The cunning men who tell it.
This much is known:
I drink with Odin in a sunken place where water flows.
Odin, who screamed forth the runes from which you read,
And learned a woman’s magic.
This is an old tale,
Old as glaciers, a saga written on the earth itself.
He died. He hung nine days upon a tree and died.
Whatever war he fought was lost,
Gungnir’s bite upon his side,
He hung, alone, and died.
This much is known.
This is the magic of the word.
The way the very speaking of a thing creates it.
I say “the crossroads where he hangs”
And you can feel the chill,
Smell the rot and shit from off his body,
Hear the wind trace a lazy finger
Across his freezing chest, which draws an agonal breath
The likes of which there’s what, a handful left?
This much is known.
This is how the story ends.
Imagine it. The flaming eye sputtering out,
The last thing the gallows’ burden sees
My runes, just eight and three.
Among the spots of light that strobe across his dying eye,
He learns their secrets.
And then he screams.
Imagination fails here.
This is a pain beyond words.
A god is dying.
And then he isn’t.
A scream that grinds like ice,
And then escapes.
The rest is lost,
Is just a whisper passed between a gallows pair
Who drink beneath the earth.
Even my name’s an ambiguity,
Derived perhaps from sight, perhaps from speech,
This gap the spring from which my magic flows.
The thing unsaid, or said in lies,
Made up, and then come true.
The text below the text, the hidden word,
The secret cloaked in paradox and metaphor.
This is the magic I taught him
There upon the gallows tree.
The raven tester paid me well.
Gave me a hall,
A sunken place where waters flow,
So radiant a glacier stopped
To drank it in, an ice age nib
That carved a rune into the earth,
A watery digit pointing to this spot.
What? You thought these were just streets you walked,
And not the corridors of thought?
That Ithaca was just a town above Cayuga’s waters
When so much treasure lays beneath its ground?
You ask for omens?
Why look, there’s Alex Haley’s roots,
And there a buried map of Sagan’s cosmos.
There’s Feynman stood beneath the shadow of the mushroom cloud
And Courtney Love beneath her grief.…
