Supplice (2 page)

without the petroleum pyres

that power the laboratories;

supplice
of democracies

without populations

entirely philosopher king;

Supplice in her Artemisian skin,

washing her painfully beautiful hair

in the last of the potable water.

She tells him one night of her long dead sister

Helen, not a woman, but a narrow-

waisted, asphodel-bedecked Idea

with pornographic breasts

and a mouth that shaped lies into song,

song abducted across the sea,

but he tells her it's children's minds,

not his own, that he fears

for in this noise that shapes song into money,

the coins that break the scales that measure

the coins that cover the eyes gone blue

from staring into hyperlinks. She pets his knee

and promises this noise is amniotic

fluid of utopia, when everyone will be her sister.

Temple of Discontinuity . . .

a single night-long sigh,

broken by broken

egos and Is

of a thousand nights, he

turning on, off, and on

a schizophrenic light

in the lighthouse parapet

atop his temple by the Sea

of Sudden Discontent, the tide

in the bedroom doorway carrying off the broken,

curved

planks of a thousand ships

made of nothing

more than words

for all the thousand types of subtle heart

attacks

one suffers wanting “Helen” back.

Hurt but to heal, to cool—what heat,

what real but a fake

touch, what pulls

away like a craft

sans
gondolier

the tide keeps knocking

against the pier. But real

when the tide takes

away what hurt but what one

asked to feel—what never

but what today. White shirt

but to strip

as you drift

in the breakwater craft of burning one's days.

Vacuum tubes from old TVs:

void-marrowed bones of the

alembic she supplies

to transubstantiate a lack

of faith into a clearer lack

of need, a liquid so devoid

of sediment, of particles

of protein from the heart, that she,

humming the tune to
Vive la

Ressentiment,
consumes

all night with total calm

the two-cuts-

per-second pornography

of this particular century.

—that she can hold his head

like John's from Salome's

platter or Klimt's

Judith's Holofernes' death

after little death after death

held by the hair—that she exits the bed

without waking the head,

leaves the house in its halo of lampposts

and moths and wanders

side-by-side with herself,

arrives at the water

and, lifting a platter

of 32 Fahrenheit glass, talks a long

time to her own death's head faraway in the mirror.

The other shore

garden of untended

heartstems, forked

succulents, tangled,

a seine to trammel

all intimate talk that

crosses. The coin-on-the-tongue

price of crossing is that

he retreats, she repeats

scores of times “system

error” has lost

his mind at a fork

in aortic, riparian,

intimal talk.

Hurt but what one asked to feel,

I will,
so they wed

with a ring of American rain

disbanded by wind

blowing newsprinted “
CITIZENS

SCATTERED BY RIOT POLICE
,”

along the waterline. Supplice,

zeitgeist succubus,

speaks English not

to talk but to drop

a drop in each void,

each unplugged incubator

lined up like world news

monitors along the waterline.

Raking lace

at the fringe of the tide,

raking with fingers

the English and cutwork

and French of the froth,

with the negative black

dwarf sun in her eye echo

eye mirror eye, she,

taking his fingers,

English and Hebrew bones,

bobbin bones,

to lace with her own,

said
love, if you like,

but
abyss of light.

Wax seal and watermark

and copyright protection code:

so go in through the crack

in the aft of the ark,

past helot pugilists

petrified in armlock

in the secular dark

of the 600,000 ton hold

with
CAUTION
-orange plastic crates

of Third World aid

and darker crates of complex

not-exactly-shame

and pirate gold

and pyrite.

Open your mouth, he will see

ailleurs
(an elsewhere slightly

more distant than
elsewhere
), where, if he

forgets his Earth, he may found

a city of rhapsodes

who drink from their own

calvaria inscribed

with circlet arguments designed

to fail to appeal

to all the scientists of sadness

standing with compasses ready

in the dawn spliced with bone-

yellow twilight on Earth

and nowhere else.

And yet what Earth was this not quite

ailleurs,
this not-quite-possible-to-lure-

into-the-possible, and yet

the only
fleur

de sel
to curl at night into

a Delhi, a Los Angeles, a Mengcheng

cluttered with sleepers, and yet, for want

of a latterday Chuang Tzu dreaming

a butterfly wingbeat, the wind was lost:

for want of a wind, the cycle was lost:

for want of a cycle, the pattern was lost:

for want of a pattern, the system was lost:

for want of a system, Nietzsche wept?

For a horse beaten in a Turin street.

And when will you be here?

Not until “
THETRILLIONTHCONFIGVRATION

OFFORTYNINEROMANLETTERS
”

is the trillionth configuration

of forty-nine Roman letters

picked from a bottomless hat

d'ailleur
at random?

Throwing letters like rice,

salt, petals, confetti

of dire why-not-hope

the trillionth isotope appears

before his doom in human

time. Someone's singing,

languagelessly, in the next room.

A man built a watch.

His children were quiet.

A man built a chain reaction.

The quiet

blown open: gate to the room

of his
thousand suns,
our father

lost in a continued fraction

burst at once into the sky,

staring into the inverse white

square of light in the sound

as it opens: he paces

toward counterfeit dawn

on the coiled path that, if drawn

from the—room, extends

to the end of the desert—wound,

will empty him of a visceral fact.

Thousand
white
suns
sands

in a grain of sight

approaching blind

at the rim of the blown-

away night. He returns

to the house of impossible work

to abandon. One

can abandon in

the desert least

resistance to Supplice,

she
white
doves-me-not

petals collecting

against the door

in a windy eddy.

Harbor hidden in the heat

beneath a desiccated wing.

White wing of the wíthdrawn claim

that there's an unquestioning

guardian for any human

in whom something more than

humanity hides. A ship arrives

with crates marked
MEDICINE
,
MEAT
,

FLOUR
for the starving city.

City at war with authenticity.

Battered-smooth bits

of an old wrecked question drift

in with the tide. What flour is this

that so resembles ash?

On a still day, on a fallow hill

of understanding, he

had crouched, like at a campfire,

blowing on a sign

that had lost its simplicity,

like a fire in stasis,

fire-shape at t = x gone

motionless, but then

the static fire itself caught

fire; the second-order shape,

too, froze, and then,

along its cursive edges, caught.

Recursive stack

of sticks.

One x
¹⁰⁰⁰
ends to one

day on Earth, still the null

cone narrows to one

postmeridian drop of dark rum

on Supplice's lip—or a 14-penny nail

in a piece of old wharf

in the hearth. As the piece

burns from the bottom,

the nail, point first,

appears, in an hour, falls

into an abstract

Alexandria—or

a point at the end of a tract

on the anatomies of elsewheres.

A man came down from the mountain

after five years without Internet

into a crowd around a public monitor

on which a far-off civil war equally

addressed their delight in violence

and sense of compassionate decency. Supplice

was in the crowd, but not exactly of it.

I'm the herald,
said the crazyman,
of the bridge

to a far-future peace,
to the crowd, but the war

was too loud, and Supplice smiled

at the man, so back he went

up the mountain in his temporal

cortex and onto a lightning-

shaped bridge and kept waiting.

How near now to asymptote zero

hope that once, in a remnant wilderness,

kneeling in loam to turn over

a stone, he might read

a missive in the markings,

more than insentient

pseudo-hexagonal patterns

of calcites, arágonite flowers of iron,

instructions for never dying,

stone book of the cryptic proof

of providence, instead of

this stubborn staring and turning

and turning the patterns on the neural wheel

to make of them more than mere beauty.

He took the book

from atop the stone, nothing

in it he could read—or

maybe it was all one word—

or maybe it was English

and he'd had a stroke,

or Hebrew

and he'd had a stroke,

and he was Daniel and began to write

in Aramaic

in the middle of his Book. A lightning

stroke of zagging time

down the ziggurat steps of Mind—

or maybe it, too, was a stone.

Needles and snow fall behind

the long look