[From Penetralia, a new collection of poems, to be published by
Black Widow Press in 2016]
In Matta’s “Wound Interrogation,
a Malangganesque robot thrusts a flattened palm against
a large pulpy vaginal wound hung before it.
Matta comments:
“The wound is separated from
the
human being & subjected to
the
torture of intense examination by heinous machines. The bloody red insides of
the
wound convey a life striving to exist, while
the
grays & blacks of
the
demon robots remind one of an industrial plant.”
This morning at
the
end of first light
the
sky was drinking a sap so old I could hear
the
ayahuasca
cloud pythons gargling menstrual-seminal elixir.
I sensed
the
oracle gas between that Hadic distance &
Matta’s robots interrogating—I propose: Persephone’s sexuality.
Who exactly inhabits Hades’ kingdom?
ALL DO (a chorus chants) THAT IS WHY HADES IS SO RICH
Can I interrogate this region of dense, cold air without light?
“You can, but my icy lace is blinding
& my knuckles, feeble from your Herculean viewpoint, are
hurricane poundings, tidal flail.
I am
the
dream jaguar which you created so as to,
while lurching out of bed, crash onto
the
floor.
I am the kobold which bit your ankle as you climbed out of a cave.
While you were driving home that night I bit again
so that you smashed into a ditch & really did that ankle in.
I am, in other words, untapped center, shifty ‘always.’
In my casket chloroform are blind troll suns, split
gourds of brain jam, simmering golden sweat known as world wars.
You glimpsed my erection in
Lascaux
’s “Shaft.”
So I opened my beak toward you that you might watch me scram via
a bison’s vagina-winsome hanging guts
There never was a beginning!
All is nexus & midriff cast on an alabaster plain of marauding
tarantula-shanked camels…”
*
The frailty of being holed & rampant with closure.
Blake’s angels feast on my neck
as strapped to this fuselage of honking verbs I watch Hades:
a zyzzogeton munching on alfalfa alpha.
For that matter, what is deliverance?
To find oneself present at Pluto’s cornucopian spread & grasp
that one must not pluck a single grape?
The first Persephone, Laussel, pumped time out of her held-aloft
bison horn,
& with that image phantom she impregnated herself!
Between the cracks in the time board,
to write from a double periphery, in swerve with the labrys…
“Not to subject
the
change,” Hades quipped,
“but what bugs you
the
most about
America
today?”
One: The suppression of
the
horrifying truth of
the
9/11 assault (more appropriately referred to as “The Pentagon Three Towers Bombing”) infests
the
American soul with a stifling sense of unreality charged by
the
rivers of blood flowing alongside
the
Euphrates & Tigris through a destroyed & failed state that may never again be reconstructed. I note that o
the
rwise responsible political thinkers like Oliver Stone & Bill Maher will not even engage this ongoing nightmare.
The truth of The Pentagon Three Towers Bombing is, like an undiagnosed plague, lodged in
the
American subconscious. This truth is now
the
lie veneer of our dailiness. There is a knotted veil in our eyes building rancor where
the
re could be revelation.
Two: Since I have been writing, translating, & editing for over 50 years, I have to deplore
the
degree writing programs that are in
the
process of substituting creative writing for the art of poetry. In 1994 I wrote: “Quotational Reality is
the
new Purgatory making each desire artificial.” My comment appears to identify Kenneth Goldsmith’s aes
the
ticized plagiarism.
The first poets, facing
the
incomprehensible division between what would become culture & wilderness, taught
the
mselves how to span it & thus in such caves as Chauvet & Lascaux respond to
the
ir “wound interrogation”. Our key distinction may become that of being
the
first generation to have written at a time in which
the
origins &
the
end of poetry became discernable.
*
The poem is a fire burning alone out of contact with
the
brushwood of my body.
I study it as Heraclitus studied fat raccoon clouds become weeping
Hathors.
Sky stigmata. Archaic smile of
the
brave.
An image is fire
around which language appears to be
tightly-packed ash.
James Hillman: “I and soul are alien to each other because of soul’s
domination
by powers, daimones and gods” Soul is molten protocol.
Life is
the
blessing. Death
the
“less” in blessing:
Count Gaga spread-eagled & gagged in everyone’s smoking gate.
Humankind is timed, as if with a timer, by & for
the
apocalypse of immortality.
Know thyself = know thyself to be mortal.
To think of
the
te
the
red mandala of
the
hand,
the
radial glory of
the
fist unhooked from its fury.
Vallejo
: “Our brave little finger will be big, worthy,
an infinite finger among
the
fingers.”
Vodun thumb-post attended by 4 hexed dwarves.
Palm pressed to
the
Matta wound, to
the
Gargas wall:
new human negative:
the
I am not that is.
I dream because I first had hands.
And in dream tonight I held my fire in my hands,
my fire with Caryl’s eyes!