Donald Wellman
χῶρος
On that island lives a nation of poets
The poets have perfectly round heads with appendages
for locomotion and for lifting the objects that they daily encounter
on the streets of their city.
All of creation in that world is a living, sentient soul,
each part has a life with properties of its own.
The heavens and the planets are animals, “icons.”
The gods created time in order to observe the intervals of rotation.
One living sphere revolves within another;
the head within the heart,
produces the music.
Among Yoruba as a child matures it is said to grow into its head.
Both Timaeus and Judith Butler chose to revisit the concept
of the receptacle or chora, that empty pouch from which all springs
with marsupial elegance. Naming of what cannot be named
is penetration and erasure, she writes (44). The receptacle
as Timaeus asserts is the nurse of all becoming.
It is a matter of translation
for becoming is always imperfect and so indeed
is translation. Among neurons, dendrites are receptive.
As used here “translation” is a process.
The chora is the mother of the ur-text that haunts her own dreams.
Are the traces of the all-father’s cosmic finger
a script to be held in the hands and studied
or only smears that dissolve and become
indistinguishable from the clinamen that distributes
indissoluble substances across the night sky.
Horace declaimed the muse gave genius;
to the Greeks the power of expressing themselves
in round periods. Roman youth learn by long computation
to subdivide a pound into a hundred parts.[1]
Grais ingenium, Grais dedit ore rotundo
Musa loqui, praeter laudem nullius auaris;
Romani pueri longis rationibus
assem discunt in partis centum diducere.[2]
Gray ice in gaining, gray ice dead it, rotund oar.
Muse low key, pray tear lauds null us anus.
The woman who helped me from the rubber dinghy
on the Antarctic shore has been likened to a nurse.
She dispensed broad specifics, eucalyptus or mint.
I am propelled backwards by a nameless pain
associated with the loss of a body part
that takes form in my imagination
when I grieve. Tears weep from the socket from which
an eye had been surgically removed. The ghost penis
I inherited from my mother. Descend now further into the gravel pit
and scrape Sanskrit from pitted knees!
Death Valley pupfish nibble the diver’s face.
φύσɳ
Nature in its most chaotic, boundless, terrifying dimension
awakens the sublime. The failure of representation,
at its purest, first requires the apprehension of beauty (Zizek 203).
Shelley’s salt drenched locks spread on the waves, medusae.
“I see the Deep’s untrampled floor.” Swirling motes
of dust and silica dispose the tired eye to close
when vision races with nausea, outpaces consciousness.
Gulps freeze time, a hammer blow between the shoulders
shocks the boy into rapt silence. Drowning faces
gaze upon the victim from empyrean heights.
In the symptom lies the symbolic reality of lost trauma (Z 57).
I take used volumes from the shelves and proceed,
examining bent pages and underscored notes.
Concerning Baume aus einem Stamm, I wrote,
The trope was pillars with crowns of thorns
Cedar stumps like cacti with crowns of nails
Magnetically charged clumps of nails. Thick
with disarray like new cut curls. Porcupine bristles.
Language failed. I could not close the distance
between the Real and its symbolization.
(Günther Uecker, Verletzte Felder).
I saw three penises crowned with thorns,
some bark carried traces of a brown ooze.
Simply being Irish, with that gift of gab, but ignorant
of the language, might catch the failing note
where identification and misidentification collide.
On the reefs of my native island, Sergeant Major Fish
swam over domes of Coral. The boys swam
to Green Cay and reveled until dawn.
On the beach of my native island,
sea wrack turned black and crunched under my boots.
A sentinel I stood alone in reverie
Snow pock-marked the waves, adolescent skin.
[1] C. Smart and by E. H. Blakeney (Horace on the Art of Poetry, [London: Scholartis Press, 1928]).
[2] Q. Horatii Flacci “Ars poetica,” 323-326.