Supplice
Authors: T. Zachary Cotler
The Colorado Prize for Poetry
Strike Anywhere, | Frayed escort, |
Summer Mystagogia, | Carrier Wave, |
The Thicket Daybreak, | Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems, |
Palma Cathedral, | One Sun Storm, |
Popular Music, | The Lesser Fields, |
Design, | Annulments, |
A Summer Evening, | Scared Text, |
Chemical Wedding, | Family System, |
Goldbeater's Skin, | Intimacy, |
Whethering, | Supplice, |
T. Zachary Cotler
The Center for Literary Publishing
Colorado State University
Copyright © 2014 by T. Zachary Cotler.
Winner of the 2014 Colorado Prize for Poetry.
All rights reserved.
For information about permission to reproduce
selections from this book, write to
Permissions, Center for Literary Publishing
9105 Campus Delivery, Department of English
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, Colorado 80523-9105
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cotler, T. Zachary, 1981-
[Poems. Selections]
Supplice / by T. Zachary Cotler.
pages ; cm. -- (Colorado prize for poetry)
ISBN
978-1-885635-41-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) --
ISBN
978-1-885635-42-6 (electronic)
I. Title.
PS3603.o86833A6 2014
811'.6--dc23
The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI
Z39.48-1984.
1 2 3 4 5Â Â Â Â Â 18 17 16 15 14
Excerpts from this sequence have appeared in
Poetry, Explosion-Proof, Diode
, and the
New York Times
.
When a weathervane spins at a constant speed
What if he loves what's “perfect,”
She tells him one night of her long dead sister
Temple of Discontinuity . . . a single night-long sigh,
Hurt but to heal, to coolâwhat heat,
Hurt but what one asked to feel,
And yet what Earth was this not quite
On a still day, on a fallow hill
A man came down from the mountain
How near now to asymptote zero
Drunk on liquid capital, skipping,
Listening yes, but from such a remove,
Away from the violently quieted
House on a seaport road. And that
American rain and French lace.
Who
on Earth
was this not quite
if I crossed out,
this not-quite-
possible-to-say, and yet
the only possible to call
a life,
so too effaceable,
this last and first
repeating endlessly, but all
at once,
like a book of numberless
pages in a wind tunnel turning
always the same
page of first lastness
abyss of light.
Struck a chime of delta clay,
first lastness of
a lifelong day:
supplice
sans aveu
that the rest is the fall
from erotic noon into
a simple Lethe
that is not a river but a word
he can't recall
by the time the bedside
clock reads 10,
all the out-to-sea of all
remaining time for him
to follow one zero.
This alien salt,
not of chlorine
and sodium,
but of lust
and indifference
(a twilace veil,
across a face expressionless
except for a trace
of the éxpress
.5-truth of the statement
“this statement is false,”
blown aside) dissolved
in Lethe falls
from Supplice's eyes.
A little heap of salt.
The breath of two asleep,
her hand on his desert
face, his knee
in the bight of her waist.
A Middle Kingdom cult.
The death that isn't deep
is what millennia believed
was set aside for you, oneiric
white sand sun lagoon.
An arctic meter melts.
The rest is pillars
falling two by two: she wakes,
he wakes, he sleeps, she sleeps.
And sleep inside inside
her being time, waiting for
escape from brittle, worn
thin metaphors
inside their
matryoshka
dolls,
it's 11 p.m. in eternity,
and it is a patience as future-old
as space, what is necessary now
within now within now,
if any being any time is to escape
from the smallest doll,
a patience so extended
it would remain after all
waiting had ended.
Naked to you
at the end of a long blank hall,
his clock face
of surrender to
beauty is terror to you,
and if A=B, the reverse is true
to you
at the end of a Louvre
stripped of art, misconstrued
as a safe place in which to at last
come true, asking why if
beauty to him is
you, the reverse is
to you.
When a weathervane spins at a constant speed
in a wind disbanding a phalanx of snapdragon
petals tossed spindrifting over your shoulder,
petals as ideograms for
yes,
you may touch me but
perishing, bright,
draconian parts of your sentience blow
out of range, out of what you call
love at a constant speed: a petal
for telomeres splitting to
telos
and
meros,
a petal for Adam-
strands warping with Eve-
strands and thinner, more cháotic
ideograms in a night's weft tossed.
Wind over Belarus, wind over Boston.
What if I open this?
door at the end of a huntress-
gatherer cry
at the climax of
supplice
sans toi,
antithesis
pulling thesis by
the line of finest hair
from Delphi down
to Olduvaiâspears
beating in common time
with her heart, against shields
of stretched hideâsynthesis
beating in time with his heart in his wrist,
flexed, with his hand on the latch.
What if he loves what's “perfect,”
a word that has no sense (so
the book is incomplete), but in the city
of abandoned sense, by the well
of perfect waterlessness, a sense
gets picked up from the stones
by a public that doesn't remember
how angry it is (it is
an accident to them, like finding
a piece of money), how paper-dry
and ready to combust from thirst,
and the sense goes into the billion
pockets, to be perfectly forgot,
like the Eightfold Path and the City of God.
Place in which nothingness
grows like a kudzu,
nothing to rant about
nothing to do.
Past the edge of that place,
a faint quintet,
a Schumannic rite
he believed he believed
he could hear, ear
to her nothinging chest
at night. Quintet
of not having
eternity, of not having
consented to not having
you, absent eternity.
Supplice
of desiring
godspeed telecommunion
without older intimacies
slipping into disunion;
supplice
of desiring a cure
for old age, for disease,