Clayton Eshleman: from Penetralia (forthcoming): "Orphic Ontologies"

for Matthew Eshleman

Are you, Muse, the spume off Laussel, archaic
dust dimpled & savory that I nourish to steel myself
     against
the Selfhood that lays claim to all rapture?
Is your fertility still based in the blood-filled bison horn
Laussel grasps in her right hand raised slightly below her
     head?

Might the egg-shaped relief of a double figure near

     Laussel

be a Paleolithic premonition of the serpent-encircled
     Orphic egg?
Greeks believed that at death a man�s spinal marrow
emerged from his loins in serpent form.
Since bones are the framework of life,
the semen-like marrow in the skull was for centuries
thought to be the source of semen.
Thus the singing skull, the oracular skull,
an archosis going back to brain-eating Australopithecus
     erectus.

In every desire a uterus shelved with skulls.

I released the energy from the gateless gate of a rock

     face.

The wonder of inhabited nothingness bubbled & waned
     in me, microscopic doodad.
Then I heard manticores chortling with their triple
     band-saw mouths--
or was I hearing the love-songs of Max Beckmann?

Ochre dots circulating around a breast-like wall

     protuberance in Le Combel

bearing in their menstrual, apotropaic sigils the
     presence of Cro-Magnon woman
embedded so deep in collective mind
I can only wonder if planetary peril is not inscribed
     in image�s beginnings.

Is our war on animals a planetary cannibalization to

     reach non-existence

in a masque performed by hydrogen mountains &
     sulfur assassins?

The torn heaven tent draped over our lightmares.

Blake under covers at night. As if an anaconda entered

     as I tried to sleep

& wept insomnia into every shutter of my piles.

Hades is the king of remembered images.

Orpheus did bring Eurydice back. He couldn�t bring

     her THROUGH.

To keep images in the embrace of each other &

     maintain the intercourse of their self-revealing

     conversations.

 
The artist is neither revolutionary nor conservative,
but a worker of the in-between, a messenger from
     the centerless flux.

Is anything left of the beginning?

How about the soul�s dragonfly metastases?
Or the petrified lightning rampant in a bear?

A sloth in a skin-tight body hose of drowned men.

After a vaporized storm, glassy eyes float about,

     burial mounds invading the bolted stars.

Rainer Marie Rilke to Lotte Hepner, November 8, 1915: �When a tree blossoms, death as well as life blossoms in it, and the field is full of death, which from its reclining face sends forth a rich experience of life, and the animals move patiently from one to another�and everywhere around us, death is at home, and it watches us out of the cracks of things, and a rusty nail that sticks out of a plank somewhere, does nothing day and night except rejoice over death.�

At the core of our Milky Way galaxy:

animal eyes in a blackish, red density of dust clouds,
     horns in smears of light.
As if life on earth is anticipated in this 300 light-years
     panorama.

Coitus as the earthly version of cosmic superimposition.

Sciomantic penetrations course a vineyard.

At times I see miles of pools, piles of pumas sunning

     their scorpion sores,

four boars mating in a silken anguish.

Or are we all animals of snow, impelled by that first

     avalanche of mother milk,

haloed by circumpolar whiteness?

James Hillman writes that �Soul is vulnerable and suffers; it is passive and remembers, It is water to the spirit�s fire, like a mermaid who beckons the heroic spirit into the depths of passions to extinguish its certainty. Soul is imagination, a cavernous treasury�to use an image from St. Augustine�a confusion and richness, both.�

In sleep�s porphyry mist, Daphne�s lauraceous hues.

A nude asleep in a water-lily harness rotating through

     my breakfast. Drink from this tambourine.

The portentous, alpine edges in every doorway.

[N.B. The preceding will appear next year in Eshleman�s new collection, Penetralia,  from Black Widow Press, which will also publish Clayton Eshleman / The Essential Poetrythis fall.   A third major publication, scheduled for December by  Wesleyan UniversityPress, is A Sulfur Anthology, in celebration of Eshleman�s great magazine of the 1980s & 90s.  Entering a new decade in his life he remains a poet of enormous power & range, always provoking those powers to their very limits.  In a previous posting I wrote: �In my writings over the years, the work of certain contemporaries, like that of multiple generations of forerunners, has given me a series of touchstones against which to test my own ideas & powers as a poet.  � With Eshleman, as with other contemporaries, a kind of dialogue remains ongoing & mutual: an interchange that has spanned nearly five decades & has fueled moves on my part, & possibly on his, that would have been impossible without such interaction. � I believe that Clayton, at an early point, had made the decision to be totally relentless in his calling as a poet, & I came to prize that relentlessness & his determination to pursue a poetry that would take him to his limits � & us along with him.  There is with that a singular intelligence that emerges in the way he comes at a subject, an idea or an experience, & gives it an unexpected shape & meaning.  Along with this he also � like the best of us � draws from the full range of what he can discover in the world, through his own observation or from that of others.�   (J.R.)]