Clayton ESHLEMAN

---

JIG

Nanosounds,
interior stellar
zoom,
  zoas of
the poetic art,
ecstacy enstacy of
the gyrosonic
   body

I am a worker wasp on Tyler Duncan's hand,
   watching him swingle
sound flax out of bagpiped hip,
I enter the wasp nest sound swirl,
melody lines limbically entwine (first parents
  with long, dragon-coiling tails:

spicy early thriller, a sly
pricey thrill, reply as icy thriller, really
tip her lyrics, rip rectally sly heir, rectally
reply Irish, rarely hysteric pill, really
rich piles try, layers prey till rich, rich till
slayer prey, arty lisper rich yell, yell arty
rich perils, lechery rarity pills, thrill
creepy lay sir, slyly retire rich pal, icy
thriller replays, a silly triple cherry, irately
cherry spill, prey ill slithery arc, prey
later silly rich, prey alter rich silly,
slyly rich April tree


Jig, dyadic Kundalini
   "Caryl Phyllis Reiter"
anagrammatic manger

Before I was Clayton, I was clan toy,
    lacy ton,  ant cloy,  any colt.
Rounding thrill icy corners, my face accordion
    unfolds, what twins are spotted
in its pleats! Tunnels of Tezcatlipóca
     turning plumed—archaic sounds,
a maze of reeds, each repeat
                          sprouts new flutings—
     so dart in, retrace, then
pivot to reoccur. The obstétrical toad is
gigging in his fertilized skirt.
                           Foetal propellers are
turning left, strengthening
    energies into a heart.




VERMILION SCARVES RESOUNDING SURF


Open this red door to
the pot-headed lordly and deathless hybrids,
hail and beware of their shadows
consuming the shadow you costume here.

The earth wears fluid robes,
strewn petals on a yoni gust and blend.
The sky is a bath incestuous,
Aphrodite's pudenda served on an orchid,
or is it Naropa's leprous   pinkie?  or a heather-stuffed
   caterpillar?
Is Santa Claus now flashing through the chimney of my chest
an amanita blur, all sirloin, no stars?

Goya hunches by his menstrual harp,
vermilion scarves resounding surf.
"Annihilation is an injustice," he sings,
"each love, each non-love, is unique
Think of the bull in its factory stall,
injected, raised only to provide burger for extra-terrestrials
   like man—
it lives on all fours, as I sit on all ones,
on the creviced dot I am.
How many killings since you glimpsed the spider queen's tiara
     beacon,
its sweep across my consensus: that the disasters of war
are the genetic inheritance of man's petrified snore?"

I turned to Basho's compote of cicada-absorbed rock,
to Linda Jacobson's vision of a stone's magenta folds.
The moon swims Atlantisward through the serpent panels of
    our spines,
praise for these radial stages layered with animals and yellow
     sand,
stages interlocked and eastered by fountains rising from
   when we were masts.

                                     Earth of the Shanameh!
Pink earth quilted with tufts of violet grass,
earth of clouds like tangled, albino eels,
earth of miniver and rose rock alive as coral reefs,
in them the dead are glimpsed, fuscous hands gripped in prayer,
earth of cobalt thrasher-filled trees, chirping purple buds,
all is alive save for the death carousel
I load into the projector of my awareness,


and in Jacobson's dreamscapes I rediscover Bixby Canyon Bridge
    agasp with 9 eyes,
Ginsberg's tidepool bubble talk high on seals like fat brown
    worms,
an azure sky with amber thistle stars lighting up flocks of
   nuzzling boulders,
ah, to be 2 hares here,
one enraged by the boldness of a dilated peony,
the other bemused in its bramble bower lined with dragons,


absent the right-angled hell holes ruled by soldiers,
absent the Ethiopian child in her skin husk.


[for Linda Jacobson]

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