Clayton Eshleman
Descent

“Why do poets write vertically?”
—Sam Shepard (after the Vallejo program)

     Cremasteric
metaphor. Descent intensifies
consciousness.

     Laddered
language rooms
               constructed,
then ramsacked,
        each next

               a trap-door
nexus,
               each door
a downwind Pandora

opening into
the reversal of gravity:      to take my own time here,
brushed by ascending, descending angel
     breath.
                    To pick my way
     down…

(The trail through Le Tuc d’Audoubert was marked
by strings tied to stalagmite stumps.
We could only crawl inside the string “aisle”
one by one. On each side of us,
   “virgin” ground      strewn with
viper skeletons, bear skulls.)

     As my body contorted
                              in Le Tuc to
accommodate our “stanza path”

so does the line here
          versify (akin to vertere,
“to turn”) when meaning
     shifts (specter of prose plowing
a rectangular field).

          Line beginning and end
words are out sides
up against the page equivalent of
                              “virgin” ground.

Can the page blank be thought of
                              as gnawing at
these stanza sides? Are they
                    stays against
the walls of voicelessness forever
     pressing in?

               Black road to Xibalba.
     Cleft in the Milky Way.

Below closure’s boneyard,
                              Absence:
          source of the next

poem’s being.