RIPE FIRE
I.
All the card-readers in town
have been drawing the Moon for me.
God forbid one flips the fifteenth, he’ll
see — o, but they tend to not take
these things literally. Still,
I know they all goss about me.
Scuttlebutt’s I’ve been keeping a secret, but
they can’t suss what.
I turn, face
the effaced diffuse blue
of the World and bellow o
above and below
I believe in God!
I believe in Him simply, because
the opposite of Him’s the impossible. No,
I believe in God mostly
because I see the Devil all the time.
In skinny-fat strip-mall villies
so smotherous, the beautiful
face of the World’s turned
empurpled, emblued,
slow strangled by the unstrange.
But somewhere on the sterile air
is the voice of one crying
in residual wilderness,
spare us from nothing but nothingness!
*
I’m drinking dirtinis,
possibly even fernet with the Devil.
Old Nick’s inspiriting
my friend Nick the Younger,
one of his guises of Dis. His
suggestion is
that the World could be God,
if She weren’t some perverted
homunculus He birthed.
Then I
of Her demi-telluric humus,
exhumed dust unearthed?
Hell’s the dyspeptic
he’ll say
underbelly of Heaven or else
its back door.
Well I’ve never been to Heaven,
and even though Old Nick has,
I don’t know if he still falls for it.
0.
O! Where is the card called the Poet?
Where is the card called the Dream?
Unless they are the Fool,
his face shown shining in the Moon,
his heart crossed with the Star.
So! Poet as Joker — the only major-player
to ramble and gambol his way
through to the post-modern packs.
The wild card went joker-mode
while arithmetic annihilated archetypes.
At the last trump, he that.
A joke I know goes:
the wisdom of the Fool’s his familiar.
His instinct,
but it follows him
around, not the other way.
Unfailing, his kept pet keeps him
from cliffs, unfalling.
*
Little wet god, maybe my in stinks
but it senses
nevertheless ever the lessening,
great grinding refinement,
some thin akin
to Her humble crust crumbled to dust.
So I compose composites of poesies against anhedonia,
mixing my ups of words burning with fell flame of aphasia,
from violet fire dead-on-the-vine
I hoard red of Her purple toward blue tomorrow:
those fragments of schist I’ve shored against my ruin.
And yet
schisms like synonyms
are still syntaxing me,
this-ing-of-that-ing
in fissions without frisson, as if
the old ode on Keat’s Greek urn
were in potsherds,
Truth and Beauty
in sharts,
so one reads now only
Know and Need.
It’s times like these
when I find myself saying its fine,
not every day needs to be poetry.
When what I mean is
I don’t need to need love,
truth and beauty, illusion,
wise lies, the sublime.
But what I really mean is
how else will I become
the sweet swan-armed prince of the crepuscle?
Meaning —
how else will I be human
in my next life?
*
Maybe I should have a baby.
I’ve been feeling experimental lately.
Isn’t the body God’s bawdy
labor-atory?
Every poem a hysterical pregnancy.
Every eventual letting
proportionally laborious
to length of gestation or festering.
I’ve found that to let,
one must allow
oneself to become an issue
to issue.
Then foolish you! It’s no issue
to render unto Caesar the sections
which are Caesarean.
But I was from my mother’s womb
untimely ripp’d! And I am still
waiting to be born.
Fool, is it you? New issue
of the usual too-earnest ennuïeuse,
spleen-eat’n-ideal,
mouthing off in the agora again,
inspir’n ire, enthrall’n y’all.
*
Driving home, I wonder on the way
in several of the seventh’s renderings,
the Chariot’s drawn by twin sphinx.
Male fantasy!
What legitimate riddl’n trickstress
would ever let herself be curbed?
Surely she’d hurl,
fell herself from the cliffs before this!
II.
Home is the second story, apartment.
In the catalpa courtyard are,
running up from my stopped spot,
stairs to the deck,
the back door. For me, John’s
left the light on, let
the little dog out.
She barks down at me now
as if I’d fallen
from her to here.
Edith — seen between tree’s
deck-level leaves — what shuffle
to draw out the Lover, now he’s
on top of my deck as well.
But at this angle, he seems to me
as one hung from the beany tree:
not ankle-hanged
as Le Pendu, rehearsing his reversal,
but breech as un perdu — umbilical noose
to the neck bluing him, sluice
of albumen and other indignities
already filming his skin.
John — he has his issues. I think
part of me came out of him.
*
As from Adam’s side,
as the “From” story goes,
his sickle-rib was Eve cut-out
just as a crescent
cut from Sun made Moon.
But all that was Before Centuries.
Now who performs Eve’s costectomy?
What comes from some Made-Moon?
I see the apple-act as a pharmakon,
her cursed curiosity cure.
Eve saw a red world suspended
in Eden-green monotony.
A globe of flesh delicious
secreting, secreting
tear-shaped cyanide seeds:
Eve’s seizing ripe fire
of the first impermission.
Naturally Adam the Namer claimed it,
it bobs in his throat to this day.
Though with it he riffs and rather
gives Nicknames — like Newton to
the slither-trickster
who fell not far from the tree
and accidentally invented
the inevitable — gravity.
(Genius, he.)
Eden was the green room
for those who would live
precipitously.
And go on to fall
tragicomically — like in love,
off the edge of the self,
or even all over themselves,
all under
an arch prismatic
of proscenium, promise of
punishment, curse of labor to issue,
permission thus
of this her work to be heard
in word-profession,
which first was Let, thus lit.
MI.
Then let me
skip ahead — up another set
of stairs — though those are spiral,
sinistrose — to the Song Silo’s
one-thousand-and-first story.
(Time, let me
move through you, you me
like you do true prosody — in an
in-and-unfolding
toward an infinite
place of pace
in which we may muse through we.)
Heaven-ascendent and escha-progressive
I go toward what’s on deck,
an epic breath
out-sounding, speaking-free.
Word-letting is bloody medicine,
pharmakon of a sensed necessity.
So I say
Eve, even if it’s only
vapor or vanity,
even if it only grasps at wind I say
all beauty is useful!
(They let you say it if you’re sexy.)
And I am
in the highest silo of Castle Babble,
tumid tower sundering thunder,
a shaft set against
swollen, nigh-cellulite-thighed skies,
cumulonimbus on crack
with a varicose lightning barely suppressed
by purpled surface of cloud.
Wild light of violet letting, its hue suffused
into bruise of night.
I lock myself in long towers
when I need release,
or at least to be struck by something.
But do I need to be rescued or screwed,
a knight or a bolt or both?
For once I’d like to be shocked by something!
Like the lightning-path
to Heaven is lit, this of which
Old-Young Nick spoke as he wrote
and rode the dragon’s tail
to its bass-ack door.
(I fall là-bas),
as if from cliffs,
slipping on mind-grime,
moon-grease, my eyes
on the star’s unfaltering
stares, down stairs,
back down dark
as the backs
of stars unfalling…
The truth is, I was tripping
on all this — go figurative,
a flailure of imagination.
*
Now all the poetry slowly.
Pours out my ears.
Sanguine, I, supine, lie
under the catalpa tree.
Ezekiel’s four freaky angels encorner
my fissuring window of vision’s peripheries.
Venn-diaphanous planets collide inside me.
World’s one word — but all the World’s truly
tout le Monde:
so many souls whither we’ve issued.
So maybe
the great soul mates
with many, the most
in poem-orgy,
collaboratory.
But do I have one of any
separate
from this breath or body
that was before
so many stars’ dust?
At the last trump,
take the Last Adam back
to adamah, to ashes of that.
Then anyone, anyone,
if you drew
out my Moon for me
I’d draw the wild word down
from its bough, I’d draw
the wide World into your palm
like you were a god.
Then I know — you’ll love me too.
You’ll need to — I mean, my God!
My World — I’ll live in you!
**
CHLOE BLISS SNYDER lives and writes in upstate New York. Her work has appeared in Annulet, Caesura, Grotto, and New American Poetry, among other publications. Her chapbook Ekho and Narkissos was published by The Swan pamphlet series, and its recording may be heard on PennSound.
