Clayton Eshleman

 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Jig

 

 

 

Nanosounds,

interior stellar

zoom,

           zoas of

the poetic art,

ecstacy enstacy of

the gyrosonic

      body

 

I am a worker wasp on Tyler Duncan’s hand,

      watching him swingle

sound flax out of bagpiped hip,

I enter the wasp nest sound swirl,

melody lines limbically entwine (first parents

      with long, dragon-coiling tails:

 

spicy early thriller, a sly

pricey thrill, reply as icy thriller, really

tip her lyrics, rip rectally sly heir, rectally

reply Irish, rarely hysteric pill, really

rich piles try, layers prey till rich, rich till

slayer prey, arty lisper rich yell, yell arty

rich perils, lechery rarity pills, thrill

creepy lay sir, slyly retire rich pal, icy

thriller replays, a silly triple cherry, irately

cherry spill, prey ill slithery arc, prey

later silly rich, prey alter rich silly,

slyly rich April tree

 

Jig, dyadic Kundalini

     “Caryl Phyllis Reiter”

anagrammatic manger

 

Before I was Clayton, I was clan toy,

      lacy ton, ant cloy, any colt.

Rounding thrill icy corners, my face accordion

      unfolds, what twins are spotted

in its pleats!  Tunnels of Tezcatlipoca

      turning plumed—archaic sounds,

a maze of reeds, each repeat

                            sprouts new flutings—

     so dart in, retrace, then

pivot to reoccur.  The obstetrical toad is

gigging in his fertilized skirt.

                             Foetal propellers are

turning left, strengthening

      energies into a heart.

 

 

 

 

Daumier Moments

 

As if by saber blows, in zebra-striped light, monumental nymphs pursued by

 

“The First Bath,” up to his unlit penis in pond water, with moon-white belly, a child wades, supported by hi father’s sausage arms.

 

Under Cezanne, Daumier’s bathers.

 

Ragged lance of fugitives, under hard rose light, pushing into their own hilt.

 

The human face, unmoored, alienated, mobile, sneers bubbling slime satisfaction, brows arching as if to depart, eyes poked like spotted eggs.

 

Below an old lawyer, hunched like rockwork on the Palace of Justice steps, a snob drifts.

 

Wrestlers interlocking, a Siberian mammoth-tusk hut.

 

Wrestleresquely, a man embraces a child into a kiss.

 

The muddy gray roil of riot-soused mobs.

 

In a 3rd class train compartment, clump of a child nursing.

 

Daumier seems to have been interested in everything.

 

A woman drinker, suctioning a cup.

 

Stooping in black bowler, regarding a rack of prints, a man encased in the 19th century, a man even more alone for having draped himself with the world.

 

Old Quixote, a semi-recumbent wrestler, in amber light, reading.

 

Hoisted in man’s bones, the piratical flag through which all nature blows.

 

 

 

 

Vermilion Scarves Resounding Surf

 

Open this red door to

the pot-headed lordly and deathless hybrids,

hail and beware of their shadows

consuming the shadow you costume here.

 

The earth wears fluid robes,

strewn petals on a yoni gust and blend.

The sky is a bath incestuous,

Aphrodite’s pudenda served on an orchid,

or it is Naropa’s leprous pinkie?  or a heather-stuffed

     caterpillar?

Is Santa Claus now flashing through the chimney of my chest

an amanita blur, all sirloin, no stars?

 

Goya hunches by his menstrual harp,

vermilion scarves resounding surf.

“Annhilation is an injustice,” he sings,

“each love, each non-love, is unique.

Think of the bull in its factory stall,

injected, raised only to provide burger for extra-terrestrials

     like man—

it lives on all fours, as I sit on all ones,

on the creviced dot I am.

How many killings since you glimpsed the spider queen’s tiara

     beacon,

its sweep across my consensus: that the disasters of war

are the genetic inheritance of man’s petrified snore?”

 

I turned to Basho’s compote of cicada-absorbed rock,

to Linda Jacobson’s vision of a stone’s magenta folds.

The moon swims Atlantisward through the serpent panels of

     our spines,

praise for thse radial stages layered with animals and yellow

     sand,

stages interlocked an eastered by fountains rising from

    when we were masts.

                                      Earth of the Shanameh!

Pink earth quilted with tufts of violet grass,

earth of clouds like tangled, albino eels,

earth of miniver and rose rock alive as coral reefs,

in them the dead are glimpsed, fuscous hands gripped in prayer,

earth of cobalt thrasher-filled trees, chirping purple buds,

all is alive save for the death carousel

I load into the projector of my awareness,

 

and in Jacobson’s dreamscapes I rediscover Bixby Canyon Bridge

    agasp with 9 eyes,

Ginsberg’s tidepool bubble talk high on seals like fat brown

     worms,

an azure sky with amber thistle stars lighting up flocks of

     nuzzling boulders,

ah, to be 2 hares here,

one enraged by the boldness of a dilated peony,

the other bemused in its bramble bower lined with dragons,

 

absent the right-angled hell holes ruled by soldiers,

absent the Ethiopian child in her skin husk.

 

                                                                                               for Linda Jacobson

 

 

 

 

Body Sludge

 

 

Should one sell a $200 Kirby Home Renovation Outfit, with a lifetime guarantee, to a housewife who has a hard time paying rent?

 

I’m inspired because I sang hard as I pounded out Kirby songs at the piano, 7 am, in the Indianapolis Sales Office back room.  “Kirby, I’m always thinking of you Kir-by” to the tune of “Margie.”  “Now pick up your kits, men, and go for bonus!”

 

Find a diner in which to sit when not on a sales call.


I’m 17, facing a guy who drops raw egg in his shake “in order to come good.”  Shiny face, skinny neck, cropped hair, dirty white collar, Office Manager and “Closer,” the super-ex-salesman who “drops by” at your after-dinner appointment when not only the wife but the husband balks.

 

Without asking her to sign, you place the contract on her knees, saying “press hard, maam, there’re three carbons.”

 

“If I were to give you this machine, would you come in once a week to sign our Thank You ledger?”  “How would you get there?”  “Well, maam, why don’t you just stay home and send us your bus fare, for that is the weekly payment on a Kirby!”

 

Or hold the piece of once-white cloth I’d rubber-banded to the exhaust pipe right to her nose and ask this rehearsed question: “D’you know what this is, maam?”  She’s staring at a silver-dollar-size mound of grey grease I just pulled through her bedsheet.  “We call is body sludge, ma’am, you could fry an egg in it!” 

 

(For some of the guys, the body sludge demo is the kick of a call—it gets you into her bedroom—sometimes the sheet is still warm, curled body hairs, etc., as you pull back the covers and set the machine, without its bag, right on her bed.)

 

But mostly we sat in the diner the Closer found, while one of us canvassed for leads:

 

“Good morning, maam.  Have you heard of the Kirby Quiz Program, WABC, 2 pm every Thursday, 1098 on your dial.  If you’d like to be called, give me your name and phone number and we’ll drop it into the box.  Now, maam, d’you know about our sponsor’s product, the Kirby Home Renovation Outfit?  Well, all the questions you’d be asked if called are about this machine, and since our sponsor likes winners, why don’t we send a Kirby Answer Man over who’ll give you the answer list so you can win if you’re called.” 

 

Next thing she knows, one of us is on her door step with the 80 pound box.  Foot in door, machine out, get into the demo before she knows what hit her.  They called this “creative saleswork,” because you went to them.

 

Blacks never made payments, so we hit low-class white neighborhoods.  Some houses had no rubs.  So we demoed on the couch, or on the walls.  If they had a car, simonize it.

 

These were the first hours of social consciousness for me, awareness of the other, imposition, morals.  I knew I was “over” her, like a big animal over a little one, but in 1952, I also merely had a weird summer job, working with grown men, maybe making 3 times what I’d make as a lifeguard . . .

 

But a log was rolled over for me.  I saw an underside, another shade of white, the odor of poverty, the dirt, grease and dust Kirby was dependent upon.  And diner life was more depressing than being down on a crumb-sodden rug, for we salesmen were essentially out of work.  I knew Jack Distlehorst whose dad had the Indianapolis franchise, but the others couldn’t hold regular jobs.  They lived in rooming houses, surrounded by a deeper grime than they’d ever pull through a rug.  Hungover faces pallid in sweaty diner sunlight.  Fingers trembling at coffee mugs.  Filled cemetery of an ashtray.

 

Over dinner, my father’d say: “Well, how’d you do today?”  I thought a sale was more than ok, but I wondered in bed: who are these people.  These people.  Who was I to do this?

 

My Claus Oldenberg monument for the 1950s American midwest is a hand holding out a piece of muslin with its grey dollop of body sludge, fixed under the raised eyebrows of a housewife in faded terry cloth bathrobe and curlers, who only a decade earlier was a cheerleader spreadeagled in mid-air as her partner-in-sweat-to-be dribbled out onto the gym’s polished-to-a-gleam pine floor.

 

                                                                                                               for Ron Padgett