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Pestilence
- University of Georgia Press
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P E S T I L E N C E 145 Like the oral epic mode ofrecitation that assigns to Athena the epithet "grey eyed" as a handy metrical mannequin, syllables so transposed are fateful preparations, ontological graffiti—discerning the composition of one text in the decomposition of another. Song's fateful. Crime fulfills the law. Oedipus is a ravishing order in itself. His tearing out his eyes— a phrase, secretly prepared, that satisfies. Clearly, asin the premonitions of old myths as well asnew poetry, "language obeyd flares tongues in obscure matter." Pestilence Language is inconceivable without a granary of words, a "mill of particulars" in Robert Kelly's parable. But particularity can run amok without an informing pattern , a disposing matrix. The pestilential vision of parts overrunning the whole takes the form of bacterial invasion in Kenneth Rexroth's vision of the onset of World War II, Spreading over the world, lapping at the last Inviolate heights; mud streaked yellow With gas, slimy and blotched with crimson, Filled with broken bits of steel and flesh, Moving slowly with the blind motion Of lice, spreading inexorably As bacteria spread in tissues, Swirling with the precise rapacity of starved rats. In the matrix of total war, ghostly avatars of the past begin to swarm around the pools of blood, like the clamoring shades in Hades aroused by Odysseus's sacrificial slaughters as he prepares his descent to the underworld. Clayton Eshleman's heraldic figures are calculatedincubationshatched in intestinalsanctuaries of the 146 T H I S C O M P O S T poems like the embalmed relics of his own childhood dipped into the contemporary atrocities of El Salvador in "Tomb of Donald Duck." As the figures of elsewhere and otherwise arise, an atavistic insistence overtakes us, and out of such grotesquerie oozes the bracing perspective of an "Aurignacian Summation": "... you must nowtake into consideration the savage Excalibur working back and forth against the ratio of the living and the dead. In 2000 A.D.the living may outnumber the dead. When the life side of the balance, heavier, swings down, the death end, lighter, will lift not only this bridge but this rowboat that to you still appears to be 'down there,' 'obsolete,' under the glassine shadow of a weeping willow but which in a way even we are just starting to grasp may already be carrying us toward aJacob ladderjacked heaven, inverted Niagara in which the water rushing up and away is the suction of astronomical design to return to Betelgeuse the energy with which we have pick-up-styxed Orion when our task, from the beginning, was to learn how to vomit fire." Eshleman's Aurignacians,inspecting the late twentieth century from the most remote region of Hades, conceive the earth asasystem dedicated entirely to burning itself up, finding in our time their most conclusive evidence of human dereliction. For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation— a descent follows, endless and indestructible The ear catches rime like pangs of a disease from the air. Was it sign of a venereal infection raging in the blood? For poetry is a contagion . AndLust a lord who'll find the way to make words ake and take on heat and glow. There is a land and a time—Morgan le Fay's— marsh and river country, her smoky strand [34.201.16.34] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:49 GMT) P E S T I L E N C E 147 in whose lewdfilesI too have passt . to tell the beads of that story again. This is a topos to which Robert Duncan returns in "The Regulators"—specifically "In Blood's Domaine," a chilling summation of pestilential intensities and catalog of malignancy and debasement. And if I know not my wound it does not appear to suppurate?.. . Link by link I can disown no link of this chain from my conscience. What Angel, what Gift of the Poem, has brought into my body this sickness of living? "Mind comes into this language as if into an Abyss"—the language of "viral fragments " in atomic weapons and biological metastases alike. Duncan's understanding moves in the realization that "There is no ecstasy of Beauty in which I will not remember Man's misery." In Wallace Stevens's "enemies... whose whispers prickle the spirit" and Duncan 's "not men but / heads and armors of the worm," an imaginalpestilence feeds off its own...