Clayton Eshleman: Two Poems from “Pollen Aria” (forthcoming)

TO THE MUSE

Are you the spume of Laussel, archaic dust dimpled & savory?

Something in the air I nourish to steel myself against
the Selfhood that lays claim to all rapture?
And if Laussel—is it the poet she is raising in her right hand?

The eagle of inspiration sinks talons into our shoulders
lifting us up & off in flight to an underworld

echoing the Paleolithic as well as vaults in the Congo today,

monstrous deformations of psychic space.

So, I am held here in the grip of these printless digits

slightly above the head of one whose glacial face is scraped

clean of green immersions. Do I channel you through

the skullracks & roses assembled in Tenochtitlan & blessed by Dante

in a Beatricious swoon?  Of what does inspiration consist?

Spires of incest over the ages, wirings

short-circuited, then re-fused. I suppose you are part pedestal

part sty part abyss part snake. And if I tunnel,

does the mud around me contain a cast of yous, cell walls, cloisters,

every woman with whom I have traded eyes, particles of

a nebula, all colors, gaseous edges, inner space?

You is your target, your mandala,

bison gaze through the puberty glyphs of transpersonal alarm,

you blank egg, rank ocelot aprowl in legends which enter me through

the godspell of you. The muse as you,

Pandora hexagram milling with changes,

ochre disk on a stone wall bearing in its menstrual, apotropaic sigil

the print of Cro-Magnon woman embedded so

deep in collective mind we can only wonder

if planetary peril is not inscribed from image’s beginning.

And what might that script be? Palmed stone or horn fragment

felt as the presence of one dead, one dead as oneself,

oneself at a womb moment when preconsciousness percolated as

mother consciousness through the caul. Does

Laussel raise the supreme, spectral memory of this sensation?

You image with its angel-insectile feelers

probing the jargon of consciousness to be

rising like a jellyfish drawn up through surging salt by

solar warmth. You muse, you image muzzle, you diaphanous mouth,

tasting the angel matter that I offer at the peak of a pyramid

whose every level argued against life.

                                                                      7 January 2010

The image is the place where I put on my soul

The image is the place where I put on my soul

as if it were an inner lining, or a line

I can reach here, say, one I would drape around me

& then throw off, a death line

twisting down into those depths they say cannot be fathomed,

Cro-Magnon sensations, Neanderthal knots,

earliest shamanic accord, a cord then by which

a master spirit might climb, spinal,

electric with tantrik lesion, so do I sense my Muladhara Chakra

molt the serpent lounge latent in

that magic region Artaud so feared—between anus & sex,

the lower mid-point where the soul snake sleeps

--wonderful idea, all our lives? Through

everything?—until we whistle her up (I assume she)

and she rises along our spines, in the fantasy that sperm & 
     brain

might wed, or are already wed, that the mind is a masculine

spermal animalcule, & that we are frequented by a feminine 
     force…

I do not think my Muladhara is feminine

nor do I identify my imagination as masculine.

I reject duality of the spirit and vote for the orgy of

contested mind, lines in contest to

realize soul, the image in exile (at Lascaux?)

beckoned by the bathyscope of the poem

lowered into places squirrels reflect, or robins

ruminate, animal lager… for the shaman from the start has

a bull’s head, which means he spans

the I & other of formative consciousness.

Artaud feared the Muladhara because he believed God

would murder him there. Interesting. That God is most active

on the balance pan between shit & sperm

HE KILLS AT FULCRUM

anyone, especially one seeking to be fully born.

God certainly exists. He is at throne in man’s Muladhara,

blood vessels like ranging choirs hallow him by the moment.

He is what we have deposited of

fruitless immortality into flesh and the legacy of flesh.

God only exists as an escalator into nerve & musclework,

as a human death-hate aggrandized into a celestial volcano hovering

love.

                  13 Dec 2010

[From Pollen Aria, a new collection of poetry & prose, to be published by Black Widow Press later in 2018.]