Descent

“Why do poets write vertically?”

— Sam Shepard

Cremasteric
metaphor, the descent
primes consciousness,
compresses language into
laddered angel
language rooms constructed
then ransacked
each next
a trap-door
nexus into,
each door
a downward Pandora…

The trail through Le Tuc d’Audoubert,
marked by string tied to stalagmite stumps.
We could only crawl inside the strings’ aisle.
Each side of its “virgin” ground
a void of sorts
strewn with
viper skeletons, bear skulls.
As my body
shifted in Le Tuc d’Audoubert to
accommodate
karstic contours,
so does mind here reposition
metaphorically:
black road to Xibala,
cleft in the Milky Way.

The blank pressure in each
Margin
gnaws at the stanza-ecstatic
harp. Music
plucked and dissonanced
by the void.

---

Clayton Eshleman’s most recent books are: An Alchemist with One Eye on Fire (poems, Black Widow Press, 2006); The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo (translation, University of California Press, 2007); Reciprocal Distillations (poems on art and artists, Hot Whiskey Press, 2007), and Archaic Design (essays, notes, prose poems, interviews, Black Widow Press, 2007). Every June he and his wife Caryl lead a tour, sponsored by the Ringling School of Design in Sarasota, to the Ice Age painted caves in southwestern France. The Eshlemans continue to live in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where Clayton is Professor Emeritus at Eastern Michigan University.