Friday, March 7, 2014
worksheet , , unfinished draft
POEM
That the acrobat would remain instead
In the burning hoop rather than complete
Their turn through it is a suspect thought. Why
Halt there in that residual nought wrought,
Assault that seary vortex, flarehenge shroud,
Round and red as Plath's ovenhead. Ghastly
Silhouettes of gaslight pervade our past;
Kindled images drenched in daguerre, ancient
To the point of banishment when evenings
Vanish in a similar coup, v-neck-deep in
Loinclothed caverns it's best to hide. Abide
May elapse and they, framed by flames, fall from
That looped height finale, that halo-hold
On all our eye normally denies. Still,
The signal desire to stay locked in such
Arsonous arcs is one the circus rocks
Against each night in its maze of dreams,
Replaying the deaths that dared defy this ploy.
Is this highjinks all our mountebanks allow:
With thrall a ring of fire they marry the day
To their devious acts and thus are at last
Delivered, severed from its whole, that portrait
Momentarily clicked past every portal
Scorching their soles as they halt there bathed
In that eye whose lashes fry their hair and toes
Posing perhaps for the one photo its parade
Maims our streets with, vicious charade whose
Promised feats are purely made, not performed.
One might imagine it were in the nature to occur.
You could conclude this event was more yours
Than nature's tiger tricks extinct already for
Their blessedness, a mock phrase the lecturer
Faces lions with, his tamed stallion stoned as
They lean over the podium to watch us wince
At each pick ax throe. That cam contaminates
What it captures, bright cages bulge with fetish
Divulgences—it freezes trapezes, these bareback
Riders, nude knees. They cannot move beyond
This figure, they must die there daily just for fun.
Charioted into that charred station, this
Stagey stasis verges on the absurd, what a coal
Crude farce, though objections to imperfection
Are part of the drama enacted by critics:
Obsolete the sole acrobat's illusive tiptoe
Teeter that flammable cameo concerns us;
How the spotlight is mottled in the star, blotched
By their performance marring each watched face.
Such sight must perpetuate what it sought
Or go astray: but is this status, this
Jumpcaught bit what our linear needs
To thwart its deliberately taut onslaught,
Swan somersault halted strid-air, though no
Continuation of the comedian
In that conflagration could be the true
Disruption, the correct avoidance of
Transcendence: it can't taunt that denouement
FX-splendiddy enough, unlike the way one's
Living beyond their years in splatter or
Pattern brings fit end to each leapt theft,
Though certainly one stalls its engulfment with
Curious realms of appalled affrights viz.
An astral body coined in light, the vaunt
Tumbler pauses there in their circ de solar
Auto da fe, feral fireball our drone
Missiles visit hourly to satisfy the spacious
Prey of the ticket window's demands:
Why do I care if they burn there in mid air
Abandoned by the gruesome need to reach
The applause line, to round the stadium track
Racing for the tape across their chests hurrah
While victor olympian marathonic greeds gild
Post-event. Better calamity for them, they
Should perish publically in clusters of cloud
Clash fare, the bomb heard posthumously by
The body it shatters. They should explode there;
Let them droop like an upside down U from
That white hot hoop. When Hart Crane sailed through
The goalposts to win the game for Sodom High in
Their annual grudgematch against Gomorroh
Prep, he shone for a moment as bright as this,
Each stadium cheering his radium. Fireworks
To our face must fly the phantom bound pyreward
Drenched daily from raucous Pompeii . . . But ask
The acrobat: demand from her/him whether
Hovering in that hell is preferable to
The headlong hurl of time: does it protect
The climax from commencement's rash intent,
From end and then the only end of end, hails Larkin—
You will have seen the sun as a figure standing
Inside a similar wheel etched enfold, Da
Vinci's Vitruvian Man. Sustained by his
Refusal pall to ever leave this modest pose,
That threshold of gold spits scarring us for
The sacrifice that surely the crowd expects.
Inca-high that knife gleams. History buffs
Confirm his death and worship none but him
Perhaps. Lingering, third-degree, ideal,
Some hung circumference of furnace
Festival. Like celebrant Empedocles
We prefer an oval entry to eternity,
Who saw how perfect circ his volcan rim
Rose in its apotheosis of form, pure
Aureate anti-goal, broken so un-coned
And conjured in its ofference of O.
Say it is this incompleteness excites us.
If it were closed, if the acrobat aced
Her symbiotic roundgame, if the goal
Were capable of twinning its beginning gone,
Would DadaVinci/VineVanGogh have cheated?
Shall we salute, requite, honor, any
Height which resists summit, disdaining each
Ultimate point that might map our madness,
Spurning the pursuit of angels who seek
Peaks only, dullards pining for the crest's
Honed sharpness of spite, groundsake shed where
We doctrinaire humans find sync thread in
Some secular oriel. Regardless of descent
An actor takes their bow from this window
Lit by licking jets as if its footfire
Spanned the entire stage, or, thinned to a line,
Led tightrope misstep regrets. Circling
Whom is the audience, applauding for
Coherence they griddle the enclosure
With incendiary candles whose torch would
Barbecue them if they dared abandon
That pose their tragic-guarded aspirations
Demand every artist must adopt: don't
Bail and save yourself, Rimbaud, show-and-
Flambeau, rainbow-scald us till we laugh.
We love to see your turn-as-burnout blazed
Across our bluetube skies, your moon
Rockets die Titanic-wise. Hush-lit
Orchesta pits await but why would she
Not complete her set, traverse that fiery
Core and trudge back safely in center ring;
What need too urgent to gratify our slavish engine
Moults us in that molten omega motif,
Bold bad figure trying to transbolt itself into
Pain's pantheon of prancing grindshows film
Ilumed, from whom these testy trips descend;
When cymbals cling their triumph there, why
Does artifact elect the Paphos illusion,
Scales wept in random arbors, desiccate
Flowers whose vase unearthed the breach
Of our first kin. Appalled sleep of the sentinal
Culminating in twelve o'clock amendments and
Celebrations—fixated by laminations of
Dexterity: to remain there in that Shadrach
Shade, that Abednego abyss where tapering
Grapes render the host bodied as mould mouth,
Incomplete transubstantation of the ashes
Promised by such. Exposed to this apotheosis
Of the will obeying its stubborn occupation
Of the suicide it opposes, how can we
Respond when there is no red in the blood to
Accent the mime's whiteness that designates
And underlines this cry for gore: nonlineage
The liontamer opens each cage hoping to
Channel the crossing over of the dice, odds
Gods wrestle as stainedglass, angel porthole
Jacob juggles with and must jettison the privacy
Of, because the act must occur in the show:
The acrobat could stand there on her gymroom
Treadmill encircled by flames in solitude, who'd
Care? Publication's scandal is vital, to air
One's immolation's the de rigeur we pay for—
Thrown wager against that hazard entrance, he,
The exegete costumed in cameo, the clone
Of our circular locket solar island marmoreal,
Posited motionless and visual, this principal
Model fixation focus of interest and poised
Inaction, this cessationpoint where one's
Lapidary leap suffers its defiant disgrounding
Death around which cancellations flash
And norms occur: in the tethered fire of its
Incompatibility may we see this evanescent
Foreign frontier erasure all ways the farer flies—
A cat would not sit in that hot that long.
Maybe only Bartleby can understand
This arch refusal to honor the task and
Go through the hole that enters the stale turnstile
Of success, to land standing amid acclaims
Less receptive than those flames that clapped us
Rife for the briefest of blinks, captivated
Spellbound, gaining that acme game whose contest
Our feebleness would bear the better of,
Wear its caesura more purely. What suspension
In the poet's portrayal of silence, rude
Interruption of the spectacle by this perched
Ecstasy of decline, musing the stoopstance
Of routine, elevating its spasm comically
—The tragic transport is empty (Holderlin)—
Barren, contradictory, purgatorial,
Pause unconnected, discontiguous coup,
Bridge-span the bride's threshold bloodied with
Liminal costumes of grief. Who repudiates
In spite of himself the gulf between this loss
Of trajectory in a space wagered by weight,
A grace of phases borne now by the citizen
Brow, laurel yearning from emerging light to
Observe their whole depleted origin, scald-version
Displacing this usurpation of a course
Reserved for lustral berth. Acro is a stand-in
Syncly for the hearth whose gate waits to
Consume this fence-sitter, unwilling arbiter
Loathe to choose which of their substituted
Phoenix-eyeflicks can span this whirlicue
If only to escape the eternal bracing it takes
That cut-out coin to fix cold within space
A corpus collage, practicing whose personae—
Unanimously deformed, incessantly lazy,
Beyond seen clearly, veils cleaved, as when
Your nape dawns for the headsman's axe and
He spits to make its split-edge shine sharper
For every arctic-pitted spectator—
Investing the forsaken sky with this
Decisive dearth is not enough to placate
Alleviate our loneliness as probe-missiles
Out-limbing him with love for his ice-cream
Hat and hacked-off head, the holo-guillotine
Honing itself against any lack of descent
From that arcade's space capsule, or Anne
Sexton painting the shade carbon monoxide
Tints skin with in your car's career, cherry sword,
Aureoled revolt upon the shocktuft tree:
That she, the acrobat, should fear that sphere
Of fire would seem synonymous with our own
Hesitance, but can that figure sustain its ground
Up there in transient facticity, that
Matchstick myth mourned by all, mute-hymned
To the core. In Summer harvest the hung
Fruits manifest spirit, flesh hangs from an ideal
Wheel flung and clinging to air's a-leaf womb
Atmosphere toppling at hand. How near
It roams its round of annihilated creation
Emanating from the central outcast spun;
Can the burning child awaken the father
In time to be rescued or will he too grow old
Against vigilance. Or must he watch over
This oval cremation where the wind's kinks
Wither infancy's summation, trender toward
Spurious apparitions, godmaze stalled in some
Corrupt word preferred to those I might throw;
Any furtive shadow my launchpad had.
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