The Voynich Manuscript: Prologue to The Hubble Cantos by Tree Riesener
Now that Yale University has published an edition of the mysterious medieval Voynich Manuscript, I hope those interested in such esoteric delights may find some fun in the prologue to my new collection (just published by Aldritch Press), The Hubble Cantos. The poems in this collection engage in conversation with astronomical phenomena as demonstrated by the gorgeous photography of the Hubble Telescope. Most of the poems in the collection engage with actual heavenly entities but there are a few playful offerings, as this prologue, blazon for a new constellation, or the incarnation galaxy (my invention).
prologue: onws
speculations on the voynich manuscript
a pre-hubble guide to the heavens
of course found in a mouldering chest
deep in the cloisters of a jesuit college
villa mondragone think about that
a name of obviously cabalistic significance
in frascati near rome
at least hundreds of years old
seven by ten inches
two hundred thirty-five pages
soft light-brown vellum
language unknown
meticulous drawings of constellations
never seen with human eyes
the real reason for the hubble shhhhh
detailed drawings of naked women
embellish the pages of mysterious words
a phenomenon familiar to movie goers
nothing mysterious or new about
the onws (obligatory naked woman scene)
only if artistically required of course
minimum the onbs (obligatory naked breast scene)
again only if artistically required
how could anyone write a book
about constellations as seen from a ufo
in a secret family language handed down
since the beginnng of time
without an onws or at least an onbs
the women in gardens could represent
creation and rebirth of consciousness
the women in baths a cathar sacrament
the endura bleeding to death in a warm tub
rudolph II bought the book from a peddler
for a cool six hundred
in the days when a dinar was a dinar
added it to his collection of dwarves giants
and the elephant man’s bones
had a contest to translate it
the first to do the job got to marry his daughter
who rumor had it at saturday night parties
after a little pot would pose like the women
in the manuscript’s onws’s or at least onbs’s
some of the things the finalists said were
it was an account of a civil war
written in an archaic
vowelless form of ukrainian
an antique prayer-book
offering repetitive meditations
on the themes of pain and death
an ancient attempt to transcribe
an east-asian language
into alphabetic form
an unexpurgated version
of the emerald tablet of hermes
an arabic alchemical treatise
spiced up with onws’s
of purely academic significance
the lingua ignota of hildegarde of bingen’s
attempt to conceal her heretical idea
for a new language
composed only of nouns and adjectives
meaning found in the individual pen strokes
that composed each letter corresponding to
an ancient greek form of shorthand
(unfortunately simply cracks
in the manuscript's ink caused by age)
reportedly the cryptologist went mad
the onws’s seemed no consolation
to an internet researcher
who said the translation came to him in a dream
it was the movements of the stars
at the moment of the first destruction of the universe
a guide to what is coming
hubble’s almost there at the beginning
unless the government cuts the funding
from this learn it doesn’t matter forget the onws’s
throw away the book
find love act out the alchemical marriage
