Clayton ESHLEMAN

LIFE IN THE FOLDS


Imagination has never met
a non-love it did not love, or
a wall with which it did not become engaged.
I am a convict of light
in the suction panic of the sun.
The range is eternity,
the focus? The halter of time--
a babe in halter we spring up and down,
restrained, eternity invades our dreams,
spreads across the stone,
form trancing form. What is
is inherent in what is not.
Only in the abyss do time and eternity
dissolve into a sinless
source of origin. The first image was
a prompter box, gesturing to
an us spread out like bat wings on
a stone relief. Each second is
vertical with middened hives,
I fish for bait trapped in my own line.
Across the stone, the actor hordes are
streaming ochre, enmassed
manganese penetrates
their menstrual pour. The tunnel is
enlightenment if
death's lager can be drunk there.
Silo hide, imprisoned sand
course my throat, an appled road rent
with all who have responded to daybreak's
roll call of bones.

In the suction panic of the sun, we are
entwisted spectres, our veins
streaming with verdure,
octopodal bursts of infant flowers,
tender calcium--in your
outstretched hand you hold our wheat,
in your torso interior a banquet hall collapses,
a Lethe seeping into mist-dead-dusk.
In comparison, all retwists--I watch
a watch-headed serpent
enter your red breast-hung hall--
on the same mobius strip
we act, via awareness of death,
as if we are alone.
Your head disappeared eons ago,
my tombal shoulders, armless, and dimming with
sallow orchards, writhe stilly
as your charge bolts and
makes beaver shapes in Matta's mind. I spot him
at the horizon's vortex where the panic hits
and the sun takes on stick insect
latitude, filmy cosmic trestle
before which we bend and whisper,
green fuses trapped in a summons that runs
through the known,
now picking up some shred turds of
uncharted waste.

I participate, in advance,
in future time. My point of reference is
spherical, amoebic,
a chorus of strings. I take my leads from
tunnel intestinal macaroni,
ancestor lines wandering
having left their rear-ending hole
--no one has touched bottom,
bottom is a hole at the speed of
engendering poles. The jungle holds up
a mirror, we see we are chalk traceries in
outer space grasped briefly
as elves under amanitas in the garden of
steel-infested self. Traceries
where armored gnomes slash at
menstrual slits. Right now
this raspberry is flooding my mind, a head of
yellow breasts is wearing a Pieta wig. I
set it aside to make way for
an automobile sprouting towers of enraged Iraqis,
like derricks of vegetal steam
they wave in and out of view.
I press no button
but I'm American through and not through,
mind is a jet engine suctioning
imperial drift, attempting to register
an allegiance to dehumanized Palestinians
as well as to the Daughters of Energy
still viable at Le Combel.
Matta now reveals himself:
red disk painted limestone
with a vulvar fold
perpendicular through his being.
A shift, and he is a flayed dog head studying
a vagina on fire as its soot
surges through an amber emporium of astral scree.
It is the profound and beautiful
femininity of the earth
that is always under man attack.
I crawl toward the mirage of an Aurignacian candelabra
still glistening with cosmic dive.
I eat a leech and watch its Whitmanian suckers
unfold, this is wholeness,
or, as close as I'll ever get to a closure
packed with the rubble of
rhinocerotic metonomy.

[Paris, June, 2004]



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