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| Clayton Eshleman Five Queasy Pieces August/September 2003 I want to come to terms with my vaulted and faulty interior, with the clocks stacked in my kidneys, with my face of a radish draining tears into a tile sea. And I do not want to come to terms with this vaunted faculty, with these mer and men maids calving right below consciousness. Fuse and refusal, torque of the Vallejo legacy. To mince the baby wind— to feast on nothing. * When I was a woman I smiled, the arrows bristling from my face, an old-fashioned woman, a rooted flow. Then I became a winged pilgrim, intestinal offerings bumping along the ground as I flew. My ambivalence worked my negations on looms. Now I am gutless, peristaltic in ascent, radiant with memories of menstrual wastes. * Sitting under this outcropping, thinking at the speed of limestone, I hear waiters below struggling with diners, diners sparing with food, a breeze sweeps up the sound of gardeners locked in combat with shoots, swimmers intercleaved with the spermatic flex of yesterday’s wind. A workman shears the earth’s head, revealing its timed skull, limestone time, openly dead, not closed like we are, fighting with everything we touch, trying to become headless crosses, gods below the horizon, gods of the mystical hollow earth. * The reason you came here has dropped away. You have butter on your fly. You write because your beanstalk is raced by giant Jacks. Because the midden strata at Laugerie Haute strikes you as the origin of fashion. At best, a zipper meshes dualities, the zipper of the mind interlocking its own bite. How moving it is to hear someone say something veined with reflective and suffered pleasure. * Awake as if drunk with the last dream, ready to remake whatever —my life, my vision, my love— to see through is to have nothing to resist, is to lose the resistance for which one secretly lives. Poetry from the beginning is posited, based, on resistance, is a work against, whether with flint or with quill it is to convert one’s boring into a lateral spell, an ecstatic wandering in which one lives as if weightless on the hunch of a finger tip— hunchwork wondrous release of the body poised on the burin of itself. Clayton Eshleman, poet, translator, and educator, has founded and edited two seminal literary journals, Caterpillar and Sulfur, published twelve books of original poetry, two volumes of essays, and nine volumes of translations. He was the recipient of the National Book Award in 1979 for his co-translation of César Vallejo’s Complete Posthumous. |
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Out now: |
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The Rail invites you to a reading with Jason Flores-Williams and Brian Carreira, along with musical guest Steve Strunsky of the Lonesome Prairie Dogs. Thurs., Sept. 22, 8:30 p.m. Vox Pop--Flatbush, Brooklyn www.voxpop.net |
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OFF THE RAIL FALL 2005 at the Central Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library - Grand Army Plaza |
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The Independent Press Association-NY recently honored The Brooklyn Rail with the following awards: |