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The man who first saw nothing
drew a line around it
shaped like a kiss or gasp
or any of the lips' expressions during shock,
and what had been interior
welled from its human source
and pooled, a mirror perilous.
That was the mouth of the horn of agony,
the womb all matter tumbled out of in the first
meaningless avalanche of the concrete,
and I'm afraid that it will be
sewer of all water and the grave of space
so as to be complete.
When his head, dead tired of its theory,
dropped to the mark it made,
his forehead drank the kiss of nothing.
That was not sleep!
His students dove through it
down oceans of absence and
are not remember, but
beautiful wet women ran out of the surf, subtly changed
and laughing over something secret they had learned.
Their navigating sons
sailed past horizons of the sensed
and founded wonderlands!
deep in the deserts of flesh away
from heaven's waters. They have not returned either.
I am not interested in mathematics
as a way of knowing, but
once I was the bravest acrobat
ever to leap through burning hoops!
Now I balk when I run at
my burning mirror, mouth, and twin,
afraid that I will not break out again
the other side of death,
applauded, unscorched, and agrin.
Oh I refuse that lovers' leap
through spit and image
down the throat of shock
and into the opposite day.
I am afraid that parity is lost
and nothing wins.
Once I calmed
myself before that chaos caught
so weakly in the charms of will
and called it cornucopia, cloaca, or else: nought;
but now the charmed
circle seems no longer to be charmed;
its wizards must have lost
the mumbo-jumbo that could call up
useful salamanders, fiends, and witches from the pit
and hold them helpless in the will
and tractable to Liberal errands.
Now when the fouls appear
howling and snorting fire
who is to ride them out
fairly and full of honor like the knights
and to what businesses?
Whole governments of them
induce it at the world's heart,
all their citizens are food,
and it can drink the oceans,
eat the mountains, roots to peaks,
and bubble to the outer edge of air
to be a nova. "Istimirant Stella!"
strangers might say, and make their own
unearthly, efficient prophecies.
After sleepers first touch zero at the maw
they wake up in a permanently different light.
They wear its caste-mark as another eye
incapable of sleep or hurt, and burrowing inside.
They're fed to it; it
widens unastonished and they drown: internally.
If only I knew a woman's charm I cannot learn
in whose clear form and lines
the trouble of the problem slept, solved,
oh they would have a lid against its light,
rest in the mystery, and a chance
blindly to venture on in time,
but no such Cyclops
crazed by the price of size
would search the bellies of his sheep
to thank his blinders and their flame-sharp stick;
his eye is the condition of his flock
and his flock is his food and fleece;
so: sack the world's
unfinished business in your balls,
Ulysses, and escape
to soaking Venus or the red plains
of Mars: Nothing might be here.
courtesy of Seven Stories Press
from Poems Seven by Alan Dugan copyright 2001
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