Supplice Read Free

monitor light
    and is beautiful almost
    like actresses might
    be if not built of platinum,
    wax, and uranium
need
    you I love you,
she promises thousands of pop-
    lyric times and trillions
    of dollars and renminbi.
    Promise him you and she
    aren’t Janus-mask-sides of the same night?
    The mask’s eyes:
    strabismic,
    forked by two beacons,
    one of the sacred
    heart of banality,
    one of the unbright
    guidestar to irreality
    far from this “any old
    night” with legs “spread”
    and “Egyptian” linens, made
    in China, cold,
    ironed, tight on the bed
    of conception
    of cataclysmic
    ideology and kids.

Because there was—
    no stone speck
    or salt earth clod
    that didn’t seem
    a symbol and—no symbol
    in his time that could
    not be stood
    on or trod
    into the road
    that didn’t go
    to you,
    out of
scuro,
    into
chiaro,
    without withstandable pain.
    A neural fire becomes
    an image, image
    imitated by a sound,
    a stone. A “stone”
    in Supplice’s hand.
    She who is without
    pain shall cast
    the first spell. There was
    a child named “seven
    billion humans.” This child had
    a qualitas
    occulta
called
    an “innocence,” an imitation of
    a stone that struck the image of a man
    and woman staring at an ad
    for immortality.
    Where are we
at the edge
    of a great reserve
    against acceptance
    that your hair is white,
    your bones click in the tintype
    light of it no longer being
    one summer
    you were immune
    to time, mouth to mouth, blue brandy-
    fire crown
    revolving in
    your chest against
    another citizen of summer’s chest
    on the beach at the reservoir.
    A bed in a windowless room.
    Supplice’s hand
    cupped to his ear;
    it was whispering
    something like
    ehtel, ehtel
    over and over,
    a hand like
    a lightning whelk
    quoting the ocean
    backward, tide
    so high the delta
    reverses and salts
    the source.
    House on a seaport road. And that
    â€”look on the zero zero
    that is her face beside his in the fog
    in the mirror. Horn
    of a lighthouse
    telling cargos of international money
    the safe route home
    â€”look of scorn
    for ontology, scorn
    for the squints behind
    the fogging lenses of his glasses
    in the mirror that swings open
    the door to the sea, lamp-
    post light on the road and light
    from monitors in windows (islanded, rectified,
    static blue skies)
    refracted by
    no
Ding
    an sich
ness.
    Ship of December
    docked at the dwarf star
    in her iris. MCMXLV
    recurs. June, July. V
    of bombers fly
    north to mate fire with fire.
    Did he say,
can we reconcile
    the sexual tear with the ember.
    She smiled, and the new year
    screamed from the sky,
    and the docked ship went down
    to her benthic zone
    to become a home
    for extremophiles.
    American rain and French lace.
    Germanic ink and Rome erased.
    Hebrew blood in Arab blood.
    Aramaic not quite understood.
    Greek pillars fall on Russian dolls.
    Seven billion human shadows writ
    a thousand suns
in Sanskrit
    on a blown-down wall.
    And you are who he asks
    to love. Supplice is who
    his time supplies. She tasks,
    she mocks him: try to
    filter pillars from the rising seas
    and carve them into letters, these.

This book is set in Perpetua
    by the Center for Literary Publishing
    at Colorado State University.
    Copyediting by Melissa Hohl.
    Proofreading by Jayla Rae Ardelean.
    Typesetting by Drew Webster.
    Cover design by Stephanie G’Schwind.
    Printing by BookMobile.