AQUATELOS A Thesis Presented to the Faculty ... - Cornell University

Hold me, yes, I long to say then, but no.
How can I clear this virus from my veins.
gnawing clarity in alcoves of my mind.
How can I speak, relapse into conversation,
bring some precious and necessary self to table
with the catabolic giants of the cosmos.
This is a lying part surely. I know you’d disagree,
take one of my hands in your hairless, fleshless own
and press my grub-finger to my wormy lips,
let a smile incise my memory like a bloodletting,
a cactus thorn removed deftly from the ten-years-aching sole.
Such gestures a speech approximating delight, an asymptotic
deliverance.
But there—the hands drop, abused by crows.
A slim glide, amber loon tracking lake current,
mapping out a possible death or possible water field
where spray grain soars and sheds on its roots its nourishing fruit.
In the face of such potential, I can only be
noncommital about the hawks’ omenness.
I try to remain at least a part of my own identity,
not some sprocket lodged in a nerveless circus.
The road seeps on, the towns change but not the act and not
the actors, if they are like me, but I think
others seem to know something right and exclusive, like a formula
for baking successfully on Everest, a way of frying
good meats in Greenland, and not the audience, of actors.
I am made of star-stuff and so was Hitler. So are dumpsters,
the babies they cradle on their way back to nothing. So was that shit
who lied to me in second grade about another student’s lunch
and wishes, and led me to devour her candy bar and get slapped
by a tonsured principal. I was the moon hit by a meteor:
why this permanent hole? Why no breath
to massage it gently away, level my uneven self-hatred?
Star-stuff: also the meteor, the moon, stars. The dead stars
and dead worlds, all la-dee-da one spirit of one
super electron masquerading as all the protons, neutrons and electrons
supposedly out there in a froth like a saintly,
subatomic ant colony.
Mist is coaxing matter’s stain from the world.
The glaucous wedge of ridge between lake and sky
will soon dissolve in the nothingness of lake and sky.
Already puffs of white arise here and there—
Already upwelling radiance forces the cracks wider—
The limit within one—the swelling, uncontrollable growth—
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