CHLOE BLISS SNYDER
WHO GOES THERE?
who cares?
I am only aware of the awakening
through the away-kenning:
see-spear. so soon?
then revelation après un rêve:
hallwas of faces behind pains of glass.
their heads tumescent with living
frankincense and phantom limb’s
concupiscence colingering
in thin fingeredair.
tapers to read tween or by.
but find the True Face behind
the mirrordoor at the end of the all.
(all going, no coming.)
weird how a mirror means what goes
afront
but a door what lies behind.
who said it when the looking-glass
death-mask is lifted
her facefalls away?
or maybe it was when a door means its key:
the candle I carry
longs short for its stick
whilst the gauche
dagger whittles
the unlitend
to bittings.
turn-see, I
while white wax wicks me
drippingsight— violence!
conforming to me — I turn,
turn to see
unsealings:
my own deface
veg-turned and soft-tallowed,
drippingwhite disallow this!
hollowflesh pinchpot of cheek
and redrot looseslit maw untoothed—
not true! not true...
two Saturn-hoods, drooping snoods
mal-mel-deliquesced
by lowtide o’ time! o’er eyes’
green fields still shine
behind white shields,
still mine. black sun sigil dilates,
prime.
a shield is no-door.
but what pierces, perceives.
who gores these?
who dares?
what-eyed Desire, dreaming lies unveiled.
SEE YOURSELF THERE.
––––
LA JUSTICE
Walking the unweighed way,
the s’wordly straight
between what’s been
cut away,
I was blunting my tongue
— all while knowing
there’d be a point at my ending —
down a dark arcade vaulted as a throat.
— Meanwhile at the Halls of Justice —
(an establishing shot with its own theme music)!
Laws are walls without windows
we can’t live within or without.
From early,
further bricks were furnished
for every fresh defenestration,
and the vaultings made tapered
to distort perception
in tort of perfection
imprisming.
But listen — the letter of law is wordlet,
law-letter of wordly permission.
It comes from passion, reasonfree.
I admit I’m still finding
the equipoise
that will blind the darkness
binding the eyes
like her diadem worn low,
enfolding.
Or two scales over each,
unfallen to increase
feeling.
(Passion, reasonfree.)
Brass platters effuse
light blue light —
she being the beam between
and wavering —
the green verdict, verdant truth
dribbles in rivulets down
inthrough to mouth.
How can we trust the tongue
-muscle, the undumb
undumb, undumb
heart of the head?
Its beatings and scourge-words
like lifeblood let into air
to disgust the wind?
Everything knowable spoken
but innocence, the unknowing
festers in the unlettered.
Notion negation
to the end of division —
of words from meanings,
of means from ends,
the not from the guilty.
All this dissects the caesura betwixt
inflections of twin pillars,
impassable bars
— see there suspended
something severous
over the mercy seat —
gentle sentence, suggestion
of procrustean adjustment.
But law can’t justify, just
trust, the holding true.
I try to remember
who said the truth
would set me free?
Measure me out in poundings —
I’ve come to wonder
who will weigh
my heart against the eye of a needle.
––––
A TALE OF TWO
WHO TRAVELED AND FOUND OUT WHAT SHIV’RING MEANT
It’s night like this that take. And take
unwary little friends entranced. And make
them track unmerrily the musky spoor of moons
that casted, scatter trem’bling through
the Silver River’s path, unspooled.
Of Magnetite or Mercury, a madness draws you to
that sylvan hollow, oh!
Not far from your sweet home, small ones,
can you find Craven’s End!
See, it’s the jewell burg’ling moonlight who has stolen all
the streaming, tealish-iridescent luster, terrible,
with her descending pale and grasping breath
that leaves us only whits of gray
the way that Selenite will steal the green from glass,
the way the green along our path turns black.
Then have we reached the End?
Turn back if two can find
the cliff by sky-white shining, sheer, too steep
for climbing angels’ scale.
Can find the ush’ring River’s end that sinks in low
obeisance deep in Earth.
Oh, abject, toadish bow to thirst!
I say down-rushet slavishness of water cannot hold!
Remember you : retention ends
in soaked revolt, up-rushet dew
condensed to drown its hoarding few
when water-lords dry-out usurped,
the wet-gluts all slurped-up.
But it won’t happen at the End.
You see, no, sense a secret Schatzkammer
of greenless silver glimmer grows
unrisen, hidden in the sodden Earth below.
Here, what the Dowsing Toad stole holds.
She’s welled here turgid and here weirder with a cumulous of swells, unrighteous weir retaining, reigning warty-white
and corpulent as craters of a Canc’rous moon convexed.
(They must be in cahoots, these thieving moons!)
And so but wonder or but guess at phasing breadths
of ivory Selene’s far and ever-respirating chest.
But won’drous here and manifest
the Bulbous Toad boasts three, God, three,
three sets of breasts : the six distended, milky-white
and weeping, heavy as half-leavened bread.
The seventh : see-through, serving nothing seen
though it will ripple, excrescent
with dripping it,
with pebbly nipple intumesced and quiv’ring with the rest. Here seven six-winged seraphim will shiver ever, too :
in sunken muck,
their ends encumbered, come too early, Heaven-shut,
and stuck.
A breath, a step, a gasp aback.
Remember what you know.
Cat’s soul is stored or hidden in her tail, you’re told.
(Capricious little crescent switch, her swishing, warning crook).
And so, in tales, aren’t yours?
And Dog’s are in the whites of his belying-mournful eyes.
(Dear little slivered sickle-glints, eclipsed by glancing orbs).
So where is hidden this Unfathomable Toad’s?
In her great grasping, taking tongue?
And could it still, like Cat’s be one?
(You see, she lives for self alone.)
Could be just like a bezoar in a chthonic gut, you think.
Some crummy, dull, lone moon (no sun)?
Or even split in twins, like Dog’s?
(No not, you think, by half.) Oh no,
she’s rent herself to pebbles it
would seem, you see, you dread.
(Her eggs!) The rubble brood strewn ‘round
and Mother Toad enclosed
in the surrounding spheres she made
like wishes on a strange
unworthy moon, like prayer-beads strewn
unspooled in ropes, unholy rosaries
(the ones you see slung by those Greeks)
who pass the time as an illusionist
his coin : through fingers, fluid, cycle-like
and strange.
To see the pricks of egg-blacks on the whites of eye-sacs : two
must think of Ophanim in rings,
apotropaic strings.
Ach, strang,
you say, that these unnumbered wishes would remain unhatched,
her milk turned curdled and intumorous.
Though you suppose that witches take
the time to make the time to hide
young kinder-sweets in souer-pies,
or towers-high, or so you’re told.
And oh, in bub’ling muck she knows you find
her ugly! But every mother watches dreadful phases of a moon
immured in pits of her own murky making, mired,
and labors to breathe through.
And du! Ach, to forget your own amphibious
beginnings, shame! Once slid
from dark primordia to light you find
that dryness comes as no surprise.
And still the murk returns.
And now nostalgia pricks your guts : the home
that couldn’t hold,
the pain from a forgotten wound.
You need time to forget the flesh
and rending mem’ry, ‘gain,
regain the loss, forget the lost,
but I’ll remind you this : the beautiful and true strikes bright, terrific, mad’ning, blinds! And yes, ach, du
its Schattenseite-twin, unnamed and dark
but softly does the same.
The cruel truth is : the beautiful and truly hideous will hide
themselves at ends
that all must find alone.
Bewildered children seeking deepest valleys wild,
beguiled by perversity, you’ll find
the aweful urge to rend your eyes
like rubble from their pits,
or else to sew the lids shut and to let the needle slip.
So tell me now : what happens after the princess’s tears
have healed your dark red-slitted eyes
t’were torn by blinding thorns?
Or after the good huntsman tears you back to light,
and you slide through
the axe-slit from the wolf-gut, then?
The purest have remained here staring, ‘gainst their wills, of course :
in unhatched wishes, mud-encumbered angels, babes lost in the woods.
So leave, I say, retreat in dreams,
in seas of in-betweens,
and in the delicate and mid’ling light
that men call beautiful, a breath away
from dullish and mundane.
The dreaming shivers darkly with a baritonal moan
through mire and clay, which way
is home?
You’d better be asleep when Mother comes.
––––
Chloe Bliss Snyder writes in upstate New York. She was co-editor of Blazing Stadium, and her work has appeared there as well as in Annulet, Caesura, 24 Hour Store, New: The Journal of American Poetry, Nomaterialism, and elsewhere. Her long poem "Ekho & Narkissos" was published in The Swan pamphlet series and its recording may be heard on PennSound.