Read an Excerpt
Supplice
By T. Zachary Cotler The Center for Literary Publishing
Copyright © 2014 T. Zachary Cotler
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-885635-42-6
CHAPTER 1
Who on Earth
was this not quite
if I crossed out, this not-quite-
possible-to-say, and yet
the only possible to call
a life, so too effaceable,
this last and first
repeating endlessly, but all
at once,
like a book of numberless
pages in a wind tunnel turning
always the same
page of first lastness
abyss of light.
Struck a chime of delta clay,
first lastness of
a lifelong day: supplice
sans aveu
that the rest is the fall
from erotic noon into
a simple Lethe
that is not a river but a word
he can't recall
by the time the bedside
clock reads 10,
all the out-to-sea of all
remaining time for him
to follow one zero.
This alien salt,
not of chlorine
and sodium,
but of lust
and indifference
(a twilace veil,
across a face expressionless
except for a trace
of the éxpress
.5-truth of the statement
"this statement is false,"
blown aside) dissolved
in Lethe falls
from Supplice's eyes.
A little heap of salt.
The breath of two asleep,
her hand on his desert
face, his knee
in the bight of her waist.
A Middle Kingdom cult.
The death that isn't deep
is what millennia believed
was set aside for you, oneiric
white sand sun lagoon.
An arctic meter melts.
The rest is pillars
falling two by two: she wakes,
he wakes, he sleeps, she sleeps.
And sleep inside inside
her being time, waiting for
escape from brittle, worn
thin metaphors
inside their matryoshka dolls,
it's 11 p.m. in eternity,
and it is a patience as future-old
as space, what is necessary now
within now within now,
if any being any time is to escape
from the smallest doll,
a patience so extended
it would remain after all
waiting had ended.
Naked to you
at the end of a long blank hall,
his clock face
of surrender to
beauty is terror to you,
and if A=B, the reverse is true
to you
at the end of a Louvre
stripped of art, misconstrued
as a safe place in which to at last
come true, asking why if
beauty to him is
you, the reverse is
to you.
When a weathervane spins at a constant speed
in a wind disbanding a phalanx of snapdragon
petals tossed spindrifting over your shoulder,
petals as ideograms for yes,
you may touch me but perishing, bright,
draconian parts of your sentience blow
out of range, out of what you call
love at a constant speed: a petal
for telomeres splitting to telos
and meros, a petal for Adam-
strands warping with Eve-
strands and thinner, more cháotic
ideograms in a night's weft tossed.
Wind over Belarus, wind over Boston.
CHAPTER 2
What if I open this?
door at the end of a huntress-
gatherer cry
at the climax of supplice
sans toi, antithesis
pulling thesis by
the line of finest hair
from Delphi down
to Olduvai — spears
beating in common time
with her heart, against shields
of stretched hide — synthesis
beating in time with his heart in his wrist,
flexed, with his hand on the latch.
What if he loves what's "perfect,"
a word that has no sense (so
the book is incomplete), but in the city
of abandoned sense, by the well
of perfect waterlessness, a sense
gets picked up from the stones
by a public that doesn't remember
how angry it is (it is
an accident to them, like finding
a piece of money), how paper-dry
and ready to combust from thirst,
and the sense goes into the billion
pockets, to be perfectly forgot,
like the Eightfold Path and the City of God.
Place in which nothingness
grows like a kudzu,
nothing to rant about
nothing to do.
Past the edge of that place,
a faint quintet,
a Schumannic rite
he believed he believed
he could hear, ear
to her nothinging chest
at night. Quintet
of not having
eternity, of not having
consented to not having
you, absent eternity.
Supplice of desiring
godspeed telecommunion
without older intimacies
slipping into disunion;
supplice of desiring a cure
for old age, for disease,
without the petroleum pyres
that power the laboratories;
supplice of democracies
without populations
entirely philosopher king;
Supplice in her Artemisian skin,
washing her painfully beautiful hair
in the last of the potable water.
She tells him one night of her long dead sister
Helen, not a woman, but a narrow-
waisted, asphodel-bedecked Idea
with pornographic breasts
and a mouth that shaped lies into song,
song abducted across the sea,
but he tells her it's children's minds,
not his own, that he fears
for in this noise that shapes song into money,
the coins that break the scales that measure
the coins that cover the eyes gone blue
from staring into hyperlinks. She pets his knee
and promises this noise is amniotic
fluid of utopia, when everyone will be her sister.
Temple of Discontinuity ...
a single night-long sigh,
broken by broken
egos and Is
of a thousand nights, he
turning on, off, and on
a schizophrenic light
in the lighthouse parapet
atop his temple by the Sea
of Sudden Discontent, the tide
in the bedroom doorway carrying off the broken,
curved
planks of a thousand ships
made of nothing
more than words
for all the thousand types of subtle heart
attacks
one suffers wanting "Helen" back.
Hurt but to heal, to cool — what heat,
what real but a fake
touch, what pulls
away like a craft
sans gondolier
the tide keeps knocking
against the pier. But real
when the tide takes
away what hurt but what one
asked to feel — what never
but what today. White shirt
but to strip
as you drift
in the breakwater craft of burning one's days.
CHAPTER 3
Vacuum tubes from old TVs:
void-marrowed bones of the
alembic she supplies
to transubstantiate a lack
of faith into a clearer lack
of need, a liquid so devoid
of sediment, of particles
of protein from the heart, that she,
humming the tune to Vive la
Ressentiment, consumes
all night with total calm
the two-cuts-
per-second pornography
of this particular century.
— that she can hold his head
like John's from Salome's
platter or Klimt's
Judith's Holofernes' death
after little death after death
held by the hair — that she exits the bed
without waking the head,
leaves the house in its halo of lampposts
and moths and wanders
side-by-side with herself,
arrives at the water
and, lifting a platter
of 32 Fahrenheit glass, talks a long
time to her own death's head faraway in the mirror.
The other shore
garden of untended
heartstems, forked
succulents, tangled,
a seine to trammel
all intimate talk that
crosses. The coin-on-the-tongue
price of crossing is that
he retreats, she repeats
scores of times "system
error" has lost
his mind at a fork
in aortic, riparian,
intimal talk.
Hurt but what one asked to feel,
I will, so they wed
with a ring of American rain
disbanded by wind
blowing newsprinted "CITIZENS
SCATTERED BY RIOT POLICE,"
along the waterline. Supplice,
zeitgeist succubus,
speaks English not
to talk but to drop
a drop in each void,
each unplugged incubator
lined up like world news
monitors along the waterline.
Raking lace
at the fringe of the tide,
raking with fingers
the English and cutwork
and French of the froth,
with the negative black
dwarf sun in her eye echo
eye mirror eye, she,
taking his fingers,
English and Hebrew bones,
bobbin bones,
to lace with her own,
said love, if you like,
but abyss of light.
Wax seal and watermark
and copyright protection code:
so go in through the crack
in the aft of the ark,
past helot pugilists
petrified in armlock
in the secular dark
of the 600,000 ton hold
with CAUTION-orange plastic crates
of Third World aid
and darker crates of complex
not-exactly-shame
and pirate gold
and pyrite.
Open your mouth, he will see
ailleurs (an elsewhere slightly
more distant than elsewhere), where, if he
forgets his Earth, he may found
a city of rhapsodes
who drink from their own
calvaria inscribed
with circlet arguments designed
to fail to appeal
to all the scientists of sadness
standing with compasses ready
in the dawn spliced with bone-
yellow twilight on Earth
and nowhere else.
CHAPTER 4
And yet what Earth was this not quite
ailleurs, this not-quite-possible-to-lure-
into-the-possible, and yet
the only fleur
de sel to curl at night into
a Delhi, a Los Angeles, a Mengcheng
cluttered with sleepers, and yet, for want
of a latterday Chuang Tzu dreaming
a butterfly wingbeat, the wind was lost:
for want of a wind, the cycle was lost:
for want of a cycle, the pattern was lost:
for want of a pattern, the system was lost:
for want of a system, Nietzsche wept?
For a horse beaten in a Turin street.
And when will you be here?
Not until "THETRILLIONTHCONFIGVRATION
OFFORTYNINEROMANLETTERS"
is the trillionth configuration
of forty-nine Roman letters
picked from a bottomless hat
d'ailleur at random?
Throwing letters like rice,
salt, petals, confetti
of dire why-not-hope
the trillionth isotope appears
before his doom in human
time. Someone's singing,
languagelessly, in the next room.
A man built a watch.
His children were quiet.
A man built a chain reaction.
The quiet
blown open: gate to the room
of his thousand suns, our father
lost in a continued fraction
burst at once into the sky,
staring into the inverse white
square of light in the sound
as it opens: he paces
toward counterfeit dawn
on the coiled path that, if drawn
from the — room, extends
to the end of the desert — wound,
will empty him of a visceral fact.
Thousand white suns sands
in a grain of sight
approaching blind
at the rim of the blown-
away night. He returns
to the house of impossible work
to abandon. One
can abandon in
the desert least
resistance to Supplice,
she white doves-me-not
petals collecting
against the door
in a windy eddy.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Supplice by T. Zachary Cotler. Copyright © 2014 T. Zachary Cotler. Excerpted by permission of The Center for Literary Publishing.
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