A MORNING WRITHING WITH Revelation

by Clayton Eshleman

A MORNING WRITHING WITH Revelation

                                                  [Bacon & Giacometti at Gagosian]

Being here as an enraptured trap, an entrapture.

In John Edward’s shadow there is dark matter digesting his simian
     borders.

Giacometti’s gropentangled maya maze. Erase nothing.
(How can Nothing be erased?)

Bacon mayhem make–up: rouged New Guinea eyes by skillet heat
     widened.

Diego breasted in rubble: hoof–legged arms, a lap of Mars.

Hacked–into eaten–out Bacon head, riverine blood–lined hair

Car crashes babooning in Henrietta Moraes’ tusk–thrusty laughter.

Mohawked George Dyer, a semen-mouthed turbine in a slather of
     bulbs & rags.

Milking a man out of an udder fist: fornicate, whistling fission gist.

                                 This is the morgue of a mandala.
My efforts are to unleash the spirits of words,
to amble with & intoxicate their agencies
so that the morgue empties by the second
as new lines pour through.

And what exactly are these black discs set into some of these Bacon
     portraits?
The immobile, uncanny, unlightable lakes in humankind?

James Hillman: “This would be the ultimate task of soul–making and its beauty: the
incorporation of destruction into the flesh and skin, embalmed in life, in the visible
transfigured by the invisibility of Hades’ kingdom, anointing the psyche by the
killing experience of its personal mortality.”

Or are these discs Bacon’s versions of black holes?
Indicating that we are in the final stages of our species’ history?

That like certain stars, we can no longer produce “expansive force”?

That nothingness is now pregnant with the isolational reality of our
     being?
                                        29 November 2008