Looking
into the telescope of the night,
with its
vehicular cinders, its naked sea butterflies,
I
contemplate the composted humanity
under me,
or
of self, so
latent as to be a dwarf lantern,
to realize
what the male head means in my Sepik layers,
to kill so
as to amass souls, soul strength of others,
and to dine
on brain, and the cave-like
interior of
the bone,
at the
juncture of Rumsfeld
and Yorunomado, souls provide
supernatural
power, immunity
from death. So
how deeply
is the worm of immortality
aghast in
me, a flicker gourd, something firing in
my vegetal
flavors?
To bring all
of this near,
so as to
reveal and embed,
to be at
thick with my self,
sucking off
a 16 year old so as to become inseminated
with maleness, I am 12
hangdog,
hanging out behind the men’s house,
in world
obliteration, caught up
in the
piston of a drive
to wear a
semen bone through my nose,
to be
vermilion in a cloud of gnats,
a force
amidst the talking trees—
how thin
rationality and shoes appear
set beside
animistic gore,
soul-driven
blindness to
the
reciprocal, the “sane”—
inside the
soul bone I munch, suck, and draw,
I am a kind
of ant, many-legged, with a head packed with
holy robes, life
grinds up
in me, the silex between my fingers
cuts into
bone my tweezered lust to
live and to live and to… see women
as through
a periscope, are they wrestling anacondas?
or moon
slivers, metate-bent filaments,
mothers of
the peccary
into which the sun ejaculates its lightning?
Paralyzed by
finiteness,
I hover
over the semen stored in my testicular vats.
Everytime I
spurt, the trees flash me their vaginas,
barked gates into soul racked realms…
So I am
here, an old man stretched out under his belly,
while As If
focuses and refocuses in the night’s
magnanimous lens… Now or never,
to build
into the poem a packed humanity
with cuts
below the furnaces of reason
in which
the 21st
century,
like a baleful shark eye, rimmed with fire,
gazes upon
its hideous justifications,
feels
warmth for its wounded, then wounds them again
as if
we men
were, at the precipice of the cosmic vagina,
fighting,
jacking off, and dancing, to impede
the
feminine
from
closing over us, so that we might face,
among the
spotched karate of our contact,
the mirrors
of immortality…
into
these cuts
to plant imaginal spannings.
[N.B. Writes
Eshleman of the poem’s origin & rediscovery: “This
poem was written after studying Weston La Barre’s Muellos: A Stone Age Superstition About Sexuality (Columbia University
Press, 1985). It is dated 8 August 2010. It will appear in my book Pollen Aria, to be published by Black
Widow Press, spring 2019. After writing the poem I forgot about it, and
would have lost it had not my Georgian translator Irakli Qolbaia come across it
online. How or where he found it I do not know. But he sent it to me and I
recognized it as one of my own.”]
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