Supplice (3 page)

in your cry-trapped-in-amber

eye that says
yes,

touch,
but you duck

away, but gracefully, fire-

drake dancer

into such

slow death, slow whirling

exit from genesis,
aleph, beth,

and where should I put these flowers?

Here, by the mirror
. . . in which

the eternal present eternally fails

to be trapped.

Out the cabin window,

into time-lapsarian

pines and the quickening

clouds on the ridge

and the watertower—delicate,

this kind of sight,

it tatters on the needles

as the clouds and minutes tatter on the ridge

and on the trident-like

endfire arrays atop

the tower—delicate, this kind

of quicker time

without a signal

without you.

Walking over particles

of leaves of older

colder autumns

with Supplice, and she's

in a tolerant mood;

she doesn't turn

live oaks to advertisements

for vacations to Arcadia

in a bottle. You can have it,

too, in a syringe,

1.618 ccs

of numinous euphoria . . .

and then aporia . . . then coming

down is plummeting

supplice.

She flips from mock-irenic to

erinnic in an instant
he

could hear
he couldn't

see. What was she—breaking

beauty on a wheel,

was she—twisting

a heretic's fork

to deconstruct

the throats of ideas

as old as the grove

of olive trees

at Hekademia, pulling

out of you
aveux
that truth

is beauty isn't true.

She took him to her gallery.

What's this?
It stared

without a face. In place—of eyes

it had two
viae

negativae
—of a voice

it had a subtle hiss,

a cosmic background

radiation.
What is what?

What's this? O that's

a piece of “The Abyss”
in a wrought-

silver Renaissance frame from which

the original portrait is lost.

Feel welcome to look into it for a bit,

I'll be back in a minute.

Drunk on liquid capital, skipping,

tripping, self-kicking, one foot

in a Van Gogh boot,

one in a Warhol

“Diamond Dust Shoe.”

It's late.
I'd like to go home.

There was an old woman and man

who lived in a pair of matched Van

Goghs.
You can't

go “home,”
said the Jack

of Dust.
You live here now,

drinking the water of broken forms,

eating the seeds of dud grenades,

wintering in the desert.

Listening yes,

but from such a remove,

like eavesdropping after hiding

a wiretap behind

a
Portrait of an Unidentified

Aristocrat,
thickly lashed

with linseed and mastic

and white spirit. Ear

to her cold solar

plexus,
what

could you possibly hear?

Portrait of aristocrat with poor

lightfastness: prince-eye green

to toadstool yellow, beast-blond

to meek-shall-inherit brown.

Video art or an ad (he can't

say what's for sale) zooms in

to the 39th floor. The bankers have

a potted tree,

a uranium sword

thrust in the trunk,

xylem nectar

running down the blood

channel dividing Sinai

from Washington, currencies

running together, usurers fleeing

the flooding delta, heaving heavy

metal weapons, shredded

memos, people, trees,

and computers out 39th windows.

Away from the violently quieted

riot, running

on streets strung

like still humming

wires on a cymbalom dropped

from a window. He picked it up,

and she took it from him,

it was only

an old stone

calendar, took it into

the back room of her gallery, cracked

it along

the millennium line

with a jeweler's hammer.

Vulturine zeitgeist

succubus crouched on his chest,

sickle beak with the last few bits

of P. Bysshe Shelley's liver on it,

but she turns in the monitor light

and is beautiful almost

like actresses might

be if not built of platinum,

wax, and uranium
need

you I love you,
she promises thousands of pop-

lyric times and trillions

of dollars and renminbi.

Promise him you and she

aren't Janus-mask-sides of the same night?

The mask's eyes:

strabismic,

forked by two beacons,

one of the sacred

heart of banality,

one of the unbright

guidestar to irreality

far from this “any old

night” with legs “spread”

and “Egyptian” linens, made

in China, cold,

ironed, tight on the bed

of conception

of cataclysmic

ideology and kids.

Because there was—

no stone speck

or salt earth clod

that didn't seem

a symbol and—no symbol

in his time that could

not be stood

on or trod

into the road

that didn't go

to you,

out of
scuro,

into
chiaro,

without withstandable pain.

A neural fire becomes

an image, image

imitated by a sound,

a stone. A “stone”

in Supplice's hand.

She who is without

pain shall cast

the first spell. There was

a child named “seven

billion humans.” This child had

a qualitas

occulta
called

an “innocence,” an imitation of

a stone that struck the image of a man

and woman staring at an ad

for immortality.

Where are we
at the edge

of a great reserve

against acceptance

that your hair is white,

your bones click in the tintype

light of it no longer being

one summer

you were immune

to time, mouth to mouth, blue brandy-

fire crown

revolving in

your chest against

another citizen of summer's chest

on the beach at the reservoir.

A bed in a windowless room.

Supplice's hand

cupped to his ear;

it was whispering

something like

ehtel, ehtel

over and over,

a hand like

a lightning whelk

quoting the ocean

backward, tide

so high the delta

reverses and salts

the source.

House on a seaport road. And that

—look on the zero zero

that is her face beside his in the fog

in the mirror. Horn

of a lighthouse

telling cargos of international money

the safe route home

—look of scorn

for ontology, scorn

for the squints behind

the fogging lenses of his glasses

in the mirror that swings open

the door to the sea, lamp-

post light on the road and light

from monitors in windows (islanded, rectified,

static blue skies)

refracted by

no
Ding

an sich
ness.

Ship of December

docked at the dwarf star

in her iris.
MCMXLV

recurs. June, July. V

of bombers fly

north to mate fire with fire.

Did he say,
can we reconcile

the sexual tear with the ember.

She smiled, and the new year

screamed from the sky,

and the docked ship went down

to her benthic zone

to become a home

for extremophiles.

American rain and French lace.

Germanic ink and Rome erased.

Hebrew blood in Arab blood.

Aramaic not quite understood.

Greek pillars fall on Russian dolls.

Seven billion human shadows writ

a thousand suns
in Sanskrit

on a blown-down wall.

And you are who he asks

to love. Supplice is who

his time supplies. She tasks,

she mocks him: try to

filter pillars from the rising seas

and carve them into letters, these.

This book is set in Perpetua

by the Center for Literary Publishing

at Colorado State University.

Copyediting by Melissa Hohl.

Proofreading by Jayla Rae Ardelean.

Typesetting by Drew Webster.

Cover design by Stephanie G'Schwind.

Printing by BookMobile.