Eliot Cardinaux

 
OFFERINGS IN ORIGINARITY
 
In the lateword an earwig
crawls
out of childhood wide
intelligence o
soundless body
 
What makes you
write this I heard
in the octaves a night prayer go
also gratefully away
 
You say what
it was the first thing
before birth
 
We can hold & deal with
tension give
what it means to
create to
vanish the window
between us
 
Unspeaking the human project
blacken without
being named


LYING IN THE HOUSE OF YOU
 
1. The Silent
 
Cold fire: the
wolves’ eyes flicker
into no one’s language.
 
11. The Victors
 
Rain stings the pulse
of the fields we lie in.
Stare loudly into the flames.
 
111. The Named
 
Torn from the flowerless rose
I have a single thorn of light
to carve their constellation.
 
1v. The Lost
 
I am a stranger, & this is their bread.
The knife is a sky between us.
Break it with your hands.
 
v. The Hungry
 
The crater’s wheat is holy.
A whole spent earth
rises mutely over the rim.
 
v1. The Defeated
 
My heart still frightened
eases the grasses, lying
in the house of you.

GOYA
 
 
The ladder sinks rung by rung
into thunder’s echo.
Flutes bite the silence.
The fang & the flower
ossify,
horse
falling off
the bone.
 
All animals
& their human souls
break into captivity.
 
The sun slowly covers the mask.

 
FOR OSIP MANDELSTAM I
 
 
Lightlid, you tenderly shed
what soft & flaring
black sunbeams
bled to become.
 
The Jessamine’s
five suns faded
translucent as wax,
 
or the pale noon sun
of elsewhere
embraced by brambles.
 
Those witness, the mourners
& those
who attended the vigil
 
unsafe in the light of candles
even the acme of a twisted smile
longs to embrace, but can’t unmake.
 
& the red glare of sacrifice
finally forever
begins to silence
 
those parched singers;
never in my life
have I heard such music.
PAUL CELAN BENEATH THE ASPEN TREE
 
 
1.
See,
those knifecords --
 
a knot in the blood
overblown with margins
at that
 
enclosure --
wolfskinned.
 
Witness,
wisteria blowing
deep
 
into matter
& deeper.

 
11.
Finch,
the lymph node swells
in the bark,
 
beneath it;
your translucent
hammertrunk,
it sleeps through the keyhole.
 
What the way,
hacks-through,
hacks-into,
the throat can give,
maybe weighs: this
branch.

 
111.
Take these trimmings --
 
of whose shadow,
to whom
I belong,
 
round as a month
or a lunar
 
mouth’s-word --
at mouth’s-worth.
 
Horse-fetched
or Time-lent
still,
 
do they
flutter & bray?