Archive
Chases
Name me—a stone. With what rod shall we, branded among the any, inch out the Golgothic stunnings of our onliness? Washed sand lays sounded waves imbricate in soft scrolls, but when I prize out of those reef-shallow, solitary and galactic offices, conscripted and construed within the commas of the coved brine, the sculpt flesh vermillion of the anemone, bourned within a starry multitude of sting-inked quills shaded as the bottom waters cantering revelation, blends against my hunger’s flex and torsion of tongue, being its same tint and shade but flowered too with budded islands of salt and bitter, sweet triparted sensationings, dripping with undersea fatted unction: where in deeds are the mortal humilities of our doubting species flailing in the strew? Where, O coherence? Which is the land of the skull? Who fathers and gathers the papers ere the dead done souls lie wrapt in yellowed watery sub-archives? What darkened tongues lie tangled deep among the same moisted blood which paves Saul’s unblinding and writ road with the lain? Where withered the hortus and haruspex of our crossing? Caedmon’s fruit ripens the mind in its sackcloth of histories. Proteus of Lucian, my signature is straw bed and chowder: I am gone, bound to tell you, stitched to the milky nipple of the sea-worm’s feculent trapping, sounded to the hymn of the last incarnadine spurt, into this leathered library, where dust flows trailing along the oils. The meat of my mind leaps, undermined by its parodic radical, against its dart and kindred rope, white, whitely and wild, drenched till the humble last in another color. Figure me then, with my own skin’s ravel, ornated and loomed through the garment of a ghostly praying. O emptiness and socket! brined cauldron and caul calling out the wings of my neck-pulse! What god achieves the end within my carvings of this buoyant sepulchre? Death in the commas and death in the heave and brain of love. Fey, and away, rhetors. I, he’ll have spit on the voltage of the turn, all lines crossed, but yet the Hyperionical flame of friction unfriends my coinaged suns! I dive deep with the barbarous enrapting thing, sulphurous within it! Inscript no more of hermenutical nor nautical me. There is no time abandoned, nor none to be nursed within the whispers, if I am not time cast on the day’s dial, the hammered gold signatures and rhapsodes of threaded light.
after The Whale.
Theodore Worozbyt’s work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, Image, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Quarterly West, Sentence, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly Online, Verse Daily and The Best American Poetry. His first book, The Dauber Wings, won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize, and his second, Letters of Transit, won the 2007 Juniper Prize. Scar Letters, a chapbook, is online at Beard of Bees Press [PDF]. Objectless Fragments, a new chapbook, is forthcoming from Apocryphal Text.
Cetus
Whether I go annealed to the oyster’s demesne, but for the lack of an inner tester, the most discrete but intimate counterpane, is unknowable; yet here staves one of bone, inside the one of muscle, another scarf to wrap around my own inner flensings, and here another in my moving hand, of same blood but of blood removed, if all colors be but a version of the volume of that bibled sea which pulses hidden within us, the red sea, the blue sea (wheresoever the sun’s coin travels, its disc on a round orbit, spending our watch and watchfulness); whither I go, across the latitudes and longitudes of my nether-nexus, warping and woofing invisibly ‘neath the skin of the ever sine and cosine uncritical ocean, tell me then and there that the ocean is not a living breather absolute, when as its radical equation we observe the ritual geometries of the gams of Leviathans? Euclid spells geometries; Archimedes levers the globe with a measurement of shadow; Heraclitus bespeaks the river’s ever-flowing soul. Who will ever apprehend sufficiently the failing lights and vitals of the sea to preach the ever-looming watery yarn of the sperm whale? Who will stitch the ever-wounded skin of the cutting waters? Each weave of the sea is invisible; every atom beneath our copper-bottom hulls is a prairie where spacious grasses wave in long undulance toward the nucleic almighty brow. Our hearts mouth the rivers whose tributaries flood the brain with breath; and what man’s soul is not soothed by the sight of the vaporous exhalations of the whale, the tester of smoke which is neither smoke nor texture nor skull? There is he; he is there; he gams in his own eras. He has descended a sounded hour by the watch and then he rises to breathe our breath again. Are not our souls thusly fed with an invisible wind, thinner than the brine of our aqueous dreams? Do we not see in the workings of rain into rainbows the breach of divine color into the firmament? The ghostly hours in the deep of dark thoughts: on these we feed our solitudes and nourish our hopes for ghosts, whose specular vehicles motion us toward faith in the power of our levers and irises and pupiled brains.
after The Whale.
Theodore Worozbyt’s work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, Image, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Quarterly West, Sentence, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly Online, Verse Daily and The Best American Poetry. His first book, The Dauber Wings, won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize, and his second, Letters of Transit, won the 2007 Juniper Prize. Scar Letters, a chapbook, is online at Beard of Bees Press [PDF]. Objectless Fragments, a new chapbook, is forthcoming from Apocryphal Text.
qarrtsiluni 