for John and Roberta Olson
In the Seattle Art Museum, I stood before
“Good Morning, Mrs. Lincoln,”
Gorky testicles wiggling out of crab traps,
octopus pods dissolving into albino eels,
a vulva grail held forth by fingerless hands
to whom a penis-headed man, palm on hip,
displays his giant gully-raker (shades of
“The Artist and His Mother,”
of an emptied out Japanese Eros,
all is to be emptied out,
all is Easter razor, abstract libretto—
let the viewer restore the muscle tile:
“what am I doing in this menstrual hut in
the savannahs of Ivory Coast!”
he must cry out, “let me meet the holy fire
at the far edge of it’s scythe!”).
Standing before Gorky that Lincoln afternoon,
I began to feel that wigwams lacked anaconda tiaras,
that in fetal gears there was no birch sugar,
that I was being served Aphrodite’s pudenda
on an orchid by a blind man
on a lightless moor. I felt inspected by
pot-headed and deathless hybrids,
or was it the four faces of Eve
making up the control panel of Cro-Magnon alarm?
Just then I felt the spider queen’s beacon
sweep across man’s gravid disasters of war!
Farewell, Mrs. Lincoln!—dear Gorky
just handed me a ticket for the Ivory Coast,
only a floor away, where the mask is the supreme court
and god festers forth from a swollen red
humanoid core.
Standing
before this We mask,
I revisited Leon Golub’s 1948 dilemma:
How grind Auschwitz simulacra
into a statement about power? Golub
transferred to the primitive, urging
what man had become to surface as the horror blender of
the extent to which the irrational dresses
mercs as presidents which too many accept
as the singing masters of their souls.
This nameless mask from We
milked and repumped my Orestial maidens,
I found in one long feeler a Basho straw, and,
Sucking in a compote of cicada-absorbed rock
re-entered the earth of the Shah-nameh
where all is alive, pink ground quilted with
tufts of violet grass, clouds like entangled
cork-screwing silver snakes, miniver rose formations
alive as coral reefs. The horrendous is just
one polecat in the anagrams of the molework
we attempt to unscramble in dreams.
Yet the force in the face of god
as a beltway of circulating thrashers
in the bandsaw of a shark’s eye
stayed with me. It said:
imaginal density is greater than you have conceived.
What most take poetry to be
Is at best an ortolan hors d’oeurve.
On the far side of the muse
there are cometary knots
in which a Tarantula Nebula is volatizing
with all its tarantella power
spit like fire through facial
groin-horned snake-pouched feelers.
Then Caryl and I left,
Drank a Washington State Chinook Cabernet
And thanked Dionysus for a glacial day.
Clayton Eshleman’s most recent publications
are An Alchemist with One Eye on Fire (Black Widow Press, 2006),
a translation of The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo (University
of California Press, 2007), and Reciprocal Distillations (Hot Whiskey
Press, 2007), in which “An Arsenal In Seattle” first
appeared. In the fall of 2007, Black Widow will publish a 300 page collection
of his essays, prose poems, notes, and interviews.
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