Clayton Eshleman
Combarelles, 2007

The horse showing through
the cave wall showing through the horse. Goal
of the engraving:
to arrive
                 as reciprocity.

*

A limestone lightning rod for the new mind’s
animal flashing borderless rinks,
inner-bordered with a line
scraped between me and the thee of cosmic indivisibility.

*

The fine sand of creature life poured through mind’s riven mesh.

*

In the jigsaw puzzle of creation,
the desire to not just fit, but to allow,
through sudden aperture,
the hiss of the shuddering other.


Crag
                                  La Roque Gageac

Limestone houses terraced up a nearly
perpendicular rise
(hand shading my gaze
as if saluting where the buildings end
and a vertically-
ribbed sun-baked rock wall ascends.

In this rubble-chinked glaze
so many sensations to be felt!
Iraq entering my sentences as word pits of
measled fire, viral insurgencies.
Oil is sign and countersign,
water and oil, the psychophoria of a new I Ching.
Oil in water in oil,
“the darkening of the light”
as “the oiling of the waters.”

Gray layered dark and lighter gray.
Sunlit shadowed nemesis!
Is the truth gray?
Or is it to be found in word-granular faults,
in projection and relief…
How keep the black of my unity alive
in the white of my separation?

Is there a deus absconditas in this crag?
Cave animals as preconscious instinctual structures
brought forth from the unconscious.
Being in the caves excited these powers,
brought them out of stone, enabling humankind
to communicate with its unconscious
rather than being ruled by it.

Passage of baboon specters,
sun-shadowed bull-horned snakes across
the desert
intestines of the crag.

This dragon-scaled enigma, this terrestrial thrust,
does it represent the torso of unfinishable works?

Mandala of this antiphon!

It holds, for a moment — then
La Roque Gageac reappears

showing its back, massive

apostate, gold with gravel in the chrestomathic
afternoon!


Gabon

Mask as shovel face through which black bug bane puts forth prongs.
Iboga for the Ogooué of me, polluted, pure.
Iboga for the Jesus of me, non-existent, ubiquitous.
At the base of religion: a sacrified woman
    Bandzioku Coatlicue Inanna
The one sacrificed lies coiled at the base of the goddess spine
which is why Tantrik ascent begins in the Muladhara Chakra.
Bandzioku spends her day at the forest edge of the comprehensible,
a spirit with a shadow longer than her life.
In her voice, a proto-tongue spider is shacked up with a goat.
I climb on to their tensile tenses,
    with her shadow surplus,
                                                   in an ancient barque.
There a black swan strummer on a 12-string antelope
plucks bicameral blowback from the inner stereo of rock.