A Moment Writhing with Revelations

by Clayton Eshleman

Being here as an enraptured trap, an entrapture.

Nothingness pregnant with the isolational reality of one’s being.

In Francis Bacon’s portraits, there is dark matter digesting in
     John Edward’s shadow the simian borders.
Rouged New Guineaed eyes opened as if by skillet heat.
Hewn rock heads with slicked – back riverine blood – tinted hair.
The head as a dream meal, including knife cuts, fork stabs and
     sirloin chewings.
Car crashes babooning in Henrietta Morae’s tusk – thrusty laughter.

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

And what exactly are these black discs set into some Bacon heads ?
Are they 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, the visible transfigured
by the invisibility of Hades’ kingdom, anointing the psyche by the killing experience of its personal mortality.”

Or are they black holes ?

Do they indicate that we are in the final stage of our species’ history
That, like certain stars, we can no longer produce “expansive force,”
which, on a hominid level, might be translated as “imaginative
     transformation” ?