Dot

1935 –

Unicellular sac pressed 
fingertips,

two dots, a me 
row--or a herow? a meandering 
red moist

blastospore, a multicellular 
dot-filled wall, 
lubricious prefiguration of Hermes
who swings with

heat of the amoeba need
soldered to sprout

desire, an earthworm psyche 
spiderline, tunneling on the leash of the 
to-be-peristaltic

boundary seeking

something to curve 
about, zigzag, 
bear claw hut rain, 
diagrammatic boogie-woogie of Hermes
flowing in the boundary catastrophe 
when the animal was separated out

     *

Dot,  doorbell
Summoning Hades through stone.

Silence Raving

Patters, paters, Apollo globes, sound 
breaking up with silence, coals 
I can still hear, entanglement of sense pools, 
the way a cave might leak perfume--

in the Cro-Magnons went, along its wet hide walls, 
as if a flower in, way in, drew their leggy 
panspermatic bodies, spidering over 
bottomless hunches, groping toward Persephone's fate:
to be quicksanded by the fungus pulp of Hades' purple hair 
  exploding in their brains.

They poured their foreheads into the coals and corrals 
zigzagged about in the night air--
        the animals led in crossed 
a massive vulva incised before

Clayton Eshleman

2000

Notes on a Visit to Le Tuc D'Audoubert

for Robert Bégouën

bundled by Tuc's tight jagged
    corridors, flocks of white
  stone tits, their milk in long
    stone nipply drips, frozen over

  the underground Volp in which
 the enormous guardian eel,
now unknown, lies coiled--

to be impressed (in-pressed?) by this
primordial "theater of cruelty"--
    by its keelhaul sorcery

Clayton Eshleman

2000

Poems

Dot

More by this poet

Silence Raving

Placements I: "The New Wilderness"

Notes on a Visit to Le Tuc D'Audoubert

Poems

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Dot

More by this poet

Silence Raving

Placements I: "The New Wilderness"

Notes on a Visit to Le Tuc D'Audoubert

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