coils
"Learn to see that in all corporeality is a holy life and that man can lead everything back to this root and hallow it." BAL SHEM TOV (from Buber's Tales of Hassidim)
persistent memory of seeing
films of Australian bushmen circumcision
rite the young about-to-become
man his penis slit (lengthwise) with blunt
edged rock bleeds
bleeds masculine/feminine until the gash
heals
hollow
as his heart
chambers
until he enters the circle
of elders he is
no one
to be wailed by his mother as if
dead
his consciousness of women - vague
:an unpaged text
of glossy prints
the man on top face blurred with exertion (if)
transplanted to mid-
Western ground the boy steps on an
accelerator & rams
into the side of
a silo a wheatfield of nerves
lighting irregular
as Methodist
salvation I
hear his pulse returning to this root
races
holy
that hollowed-out chamber filled with blood / gashed to prove to
whom
he will (no longer)
drown in his mother's
waters
a microscopic sighting of bundles of nerve tissue; or images
(telescopically) of crab nebulae Reich directed his sight toward
& saw as sexual energetic whirlpool
to the tune of "Stardust" my parent's wedding ended. They sought
eachother across a polished dancefloor reflecting artdecco tinsel.
In a mockery of slapstick they crossed opposite ends of the
dance floor in search of each other arms yearning to enter
the dance. The music changed to "Moonglow" what ache
in the heart remembering those band songs:
the only lasting marriages finalized to the strains
of "Stardust" in an artdecco paradise she
was dizzy from waltzing but continued for 30
years
Coils:
my first day working in a city hospital operating room:
assigned to cleanup in the operating theatre (?) they
penetrating layers of flesh saw
bright bloody coils of intestines root-image
of Ourabouros oh Jung where
is his goddamn soul in this
mess
:to deeply live out the charge of a whore, that
passion to strip pretense, offer up /
Clayton's
writing more than a recording of a shedding of psychic
skins. His poetry yields the dialectical rhythm of his
struggle to declare self: so his language indicates
nature of his trek: his language suffers (not the heft
of stone in his words like in Neruda's / rather the quivering,
stammering-to-be-born, visceral tongue locked of Artaud
& Vallejo)
the poem comments on complexities of its own making
(emotional blocks to composition revealed nakedly
at all moments the writer maintains an absolute
earnestness as he wears
ALL the masks
after adolescence who is permitted to wear all the
masks in his tribe's gallery?
try them (Scientologist, Politician, Reichian) & still maintain
the character
of his singular mask of blood
I was permitted in jail one freedom: but it saved that moment:
to hear the sound of my blood coiling through my veins
what sex is woman?
because he has come to his terms in relation to woman
he can speak of past beloveds in his history
without bravado and with compassion as Blake
drew Catherine in terms as dimensional and as
unsparing of himself
I was bothered in his earlier poetry by what
I took to be his posturing adaptation
of a prophetic stance (who, like Dante) wouldn't
wish to immortalize his mortal enemies
on earth by placing them on their earned
circle in Hell? / In "Bedford Vision" & other
poems in Indiana Doris Heller, Marie never emerge
as women in their literal life activities: the poet's
imagination etheralizes their actual
womanhood out. This is no longer
present in Coils.The insertion
of a long letter to a ex-lover signaling
the end of their lives together works
precisely because the woman addressed in the
letter is substantial & fleshedout in the poetry
framing the event of the letter
he can articulate rhythms of feminine
sexuality in his work without reduction
to terms of sociological data, political
cliche, or, necessarily psychological archetype
oscillating gyres that declared
their form through the mind of that
Irishwoman on a train between
Los Angeles &
San Francisco.
Beware of the gulls coiling in off the shoreline
"Can't you ask the voices to dictate to you
during a more
convenient hour?"
always the question: how to protect the vision
from the encroachments
of travel by rail
he has recorded in Coils
voices that rise (in thighs, belly, back) during
therapy recorded their alternating
cries: mother
pulls my hand to go father
pulls my hand to go death
pulls both their hands
I am alone
doubled up unable
to shit out
their commands
I honor Clayton for forbidding himself in his
work the escape of an ideology that might stop
the free play of the flesh of his imagination from
struggling through its cycles of contradiction
toward clarity
in a society (Indiana / America) without a fully
realized rite
of passage ceremony for its
adolescents the passage is rarely
recognized as such by the young. They are
counseled they will "pass through" their physio
logical and psychological rages. "Pass through" to what
is not explicitly declared. Coils
I would put in the hands of any young
person seriously wanting
a mapping of possible psychological territory
that might be passed through
if one asks this intensity of life
So called "Confessional poetry" (which this emphatically
isn't) assumes a fixed decorum appropriate
to the "literary" declaration of personal
suffering. No one
does anything but kneel at the
confessional booth. But there
are men who scream their lives outside
the bounds of convention & are as understood
as Artaud was in light of Jacques Riviere's
taste for proper form
bad manners to say your father
didn't know how to fuck your mother ("Bridge at Mayan Pass")
this isn't confession this is out rage
& past the retelling of personal pain the difference
between simple self-pity & vistory & Lawrence's
"Look! We Have Come Through" They are both
on the side of the angels
wonderous that in the midst of the most
excruseating migrane headache I can
be attentive (if I choose) to
pulsation of pain
against whom must I struggle to tell the truth
of myself (words) for whom
I lie it is one matter
to talk of one's contraries
if you live out their destinies Hell rises
He hides no where in this body of poetry. What
difference between hiding
in a body of self
or a body of poetry
if Hell is written out
I can stand on my feet
& fall when I must
& not fear my images of collapse
the hardest territory to discover opposition in
is Hell (Heaven) his actual
house in Indianapolis breaking ground
angels
operate through nextdoor
neighbors but are reluctant to serve
as guide to your escape. Hell? Heaven?
"I say we're in Hell!" the kid
tauted me. "Prove to me
we ain't" "This ain't
heaven"
I have honored my guides (through Hell) by
erasing memories of their kindnesses
& patiences when their instructions
brought to memory the awkwardness of my
own first steps.
In "Origin" Clayton faces
his own foolishness in his apprenticeship
with Corman
Bless him
for he can make Light of his learning to walk Hell
it has always been "too painful" to remember birth
occuring between urine
& shit he
brings us back to the site of birth
to re member the cause
running into the face of "too painful to speak of" The
flesh re members. At the center of the poem
I hear a woman crying in my voicing!
this, she said, holding the small spiral
of copper thread close to my eyes is
so you dont
repeat yourself
Coils, a great catalog of what / who must be left behind
in the self quest for self regulation. I
STILL HEAR A WOMAN CRYING IN MY VOICING !
"The poem of a life" but
Zukofsky has already completed "A" -
Saint Matthew
Passion played out, his memory of a first
listening continued for a lifespan
but I tire of that precise fitting
together of parts no
life that symettrically cemented
in this age
an early Coltraine recording, listening
to the growth of his solo
recalls a design on a book
jacket: Jolas (Vertical Anthology)
some scribbed spiral opening out endlessly
beyond dust jacket energy
no book can contain
Clayton: I have no son. I have no wife.
Why, when I said "St. Matthew Passion" that
I thought of your son (a vision) I have never seen
& began weeping
Coils: twisting helixs of D.N.A. (wavering arms of Kali)
why the fuck must I
know biology to know
why a kick in the groin
I honor Coils as a poem of a life in an intensity of
process, the interstices of which are
transferred across as images (spider, Niemonjima, Yorunomado,
swordshrine)
occuring in repeated (serial) dreams their
familiarity in no
manner lessening their
cuttingedges
He is clean in his rages towards his literal
as well as literary origins. Therapy prior to the event
of the writing clears an arena of self
examination, lets a light,
pitiless in its hardness
show what will
How insufferably heavy a human head is to
hold for any duration
He returns me to the pressure on my fingertips holding my brow
coiling glass tubing of alchemists a reminder
of how fragile the touch that inspired
the glass coiled so to purify the base
As I left the ward his conversation became pleading. Frank,
I'll call him, subject up until that moment for a
dissertation, began explaining to me (as if
I were a simple child needing unnecessary explanations) that
his veins & arteries were
removed surgically & were replaced
by long lengths of delicately
woven glass fibers that might at any moment
shatter
"Whoever touches this book touches a man." Unshatterable.
:that wonderful sensual optimism of Whitman's "I Sing the
Body electric" mingled with terrors of being a body destined
to suffer pain & death. Clayton's testimony of accepting
terms of the body that dies
the body declares the style of its death at birth
In "The Overcoats of Eden" he recreates his manner
of operation as child (like Stan Brakhage's attempt
to re see his seeing as a child in "Scenes From Under Childhood")
"The Physical Traveller" "The Mental Traveller"
as far as I struggle through the rounds of my flesh
I return to my heart
:a spider walking across my lifeline
on what lifeline am I walking
my head is heavier resting on my fingers in darkness
energy hovering at each circle of the metal children's toy:
watching the spirals fall into each other a fountaining
of new self
self: the fountain the children come to drink of
THERE IS A WOMAN HER VOICE! NOT MINE! WEEPING!
"You never kill the ego, you only find that it
lives in a larger house than you thought"
(Karlfried Durckheirn)
Page(s) 249-256
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