Ekleksographia: Wave 4.1.c: "At the Atchafalaya's Edge"

Estates of Uncertainties / Harbor Era

That's when her expression changed, the heat
lamp whined, and the hitherto impossible lit on
my hand, purring like a cat burrowing nestward
mid palm's soft glow, as in frontal lobe, and why
not?, I thought. Zero was nothing to me. Much less
Zeno who has always actually meant quite an awful
lot. Owls howled out harbor's ear. Dead child. Fish–
bone clot of gull retch. An evagination of sound in limbic's attenuation. She knew I meant it this time. All naught
had come to this. "His writing had been for me," she said,
cheekless and smooth as a medicated Saturday morning,
"something of an opening quandary without a leap," ensnared
in the naked, purplish air. "After all," head declined, "what
would it be to listen if there was nothing to hear?" We sat,
half-stunned, pregnant with weep, shallow drift of hand.
"Are we ripe with ears like the dead?" Her

eye in memory's socket

is cliff, to remember, a falling
off last night in dream, etc., the
argument allusive, maybe stupid, you
suspect before catching yourself "at it
again," Phyllis's face for instance coining
summer morning and trees, not to mention
the ecstatic, a dilation in the melody of that
place, Bowling Green, even Perrysburg was
alien, rubbing shoulders with a shitty, little city
for all there was of it, and for what there wasn't . . .
what? lives in abeyance otherwise, without
coordinate life, ordinal song, the deep hymn of
gravity, all pulling us along (if you look at it
straight), mind in eye's socket, touching light &
all it sings of the body, flailing, falling off
breath pearled
beneath the door, dissipated mid clapboard real estate.

Not that he saw so well
nostri quaerunt sibi vulnus ocelli ¹
–Propertius II, xxii, 7

nor far, nor near, but that he saw too
much, with registration such that each
edge opened to swallow him, as though
it were light itself and all the world a
mouth. Not that he heard so well
but that the damning regularity of each
stroke and character of sound, the dead
horror of its predictability, drove him to
wharf and tossed him, boiling, in. Like hot
milk, like blowing out a blind man. Some–
times like rolling a fifty–gallon drum half–
filled with liquid up hill then down a sudden
incline. Sometimes it'll nail your balls to
the wall, or tear your scrotum along the
seam. Then everything will pour in.

¹our eyes seek their own wound

wraith whisp

Perhaps I hover just beneath this (moment,
you reading, here, if there is a crevice
between my world and yours, it may as
well be this) page from which lines ride or
roll, rocking into your eyes like waves, seeing
now, as though through mine, words filling page,
entailing light, mind and chair, sailing east. Or
we infect each other. You pouring thru me with
the scalding flush of being in your presence; me
corrupting you with the desire of the non–extant for
existence, nothing less than oblivion saturating
the ripeness of each moment, a fat pear in tree,
or a bird singing of what is past, or passing,
or to come, as the dead have infected me.

"the absolute has no price"
–P. Bowles

An old man sits in his chair, exhausted. What
he had been no longer exits, nor can he remember
what it was, his life, yet he is still here, weak
and confused, at times scared. Outside, the wind
howls. It rains. It snows. Etc. He sees nothing
of the storm, nor later of the light that reaches
beneath clouds, from beyond the mountains, to
twist in the broken web of branches, glittering,
nor the play of water on water, the hardness
of night air, how it swallows everything. Never
again will he see such beauty as was pleasure
to him. Now the world is merely a place to be
gone through, simply, meanly, with suffering. No
answer is sufficient for this, no question required.