Free Supplice by T. Zachary Cotler

Who
on Earth
    was this not quite
    if I crossed out,
this not-quite-
    possible-to-say, and yet
    the only possible to call
    a life,
so too effaceable,
    this last and first
    repeating endlessly, but all
    at once,
    like a book of numberless
    pages in a wind tunnel turning
    always the same
    page of first lastness
    abyss of light.
    Struck a chime of delta clay,
    first lastness of
    a lifelong day:
supplice
    sans aveu
    that the rest is the fall
    from erotic noon into
    a simple Lethe
    that is not a river but a word
    he can’t recall
    by the time the bedside
    clock reads 10,
    all the out-to-sea of all
    remaining time for him
    to follow one zero.
    This alien salt,
    not of chlorine
    and sodium,
    but of lust
    and indifference
    (a twilace veil,
    across a face expressionless
    except for a trace
    of the éxpress
    .5-truth of the statement
    â€œthis statement is false,”
    blown aside) dissolved
    in Lethe falls
    from Supplice’s eyes.
    A little heap of salt.
    The breath of two asleep,
    her hand on his desert
    face, his knee
    in the bight of her waist.
    A Middle Kingdom cult.
    The death that isn’t deep
    is what millennia believed
    was set aside for you, oneiric
    white sand sun lagoon.
    An arctic meter melts.
    The rest is pillars
    falling two by two: she wakes,
    he wakes, he sleeps, she sleeps.
    And sleep inside inside
    her being time, waiting for
    escape from brittle, worn
    thin metaphors
    inside their
matryoshka
dolls,
    it’s 11 p.m. in eternity,
    and it is a patience as future-old
    as space, what is necessary now
    within now within now,
    if any being any time is to escape
    from the smallest doll,
    a patience so extended
    it would remain after all
    waiting had ended.
    Naked to you
    at the end of a long blank hall,
    his clock face
    of surrender to
    beauty is terror to you,
    and if A=B, the reverse is true
    to you
    at the end of a Louvre
    stripped of art, misconstrued
    as a safe place in which to at last
    come true, asking why if
    beauty to him is
    you, the reverse is
    to you.
    When a weathervane spins at a constant speed
    in a wind disbanding a phalanx of snapdragon
    petals tossed spindrifting over your shoulder,
    petals as ideograms for
yes,
    you may touch me but
perishing, bright,
    draconian parts of your sentience blow
    out of range, out of what you call
    love at a constant speed: a petal
    for telomeres splitting to
telos
    and
meros,
a petal for Adam-
    strands warping with Eve-
    strands and thinner, more cháotic
    ideograms in a night’s weft tossed.
    Wind over Belarus, wind over Boston.

What if I open this?
    door at the end of a huntress-
    gatherer cry
    at the climax of
supplice
    sans toi,
antithesis
    pulling thesis by
    the line of finest hair
    from Delphi down
    to Olduvai—spears
    beating in common time
    with her heart, against shields
    of stretched hide—synthesis
    beating in time with his heart in his wrist,
    flexed, with his hand on the latch.
    What if he loves what’s “perfect,”
    a word that has no sense (so
    the book is incomplete), but in the city
    of abandoned sense, by the well
    of perfect waterlessness, a sense
    gets picked up from the stones
    by a public that doesn’t remember
    how angry it is (it is
    an accident to them, like finding
    a piece of money), how paper-dry
    and ready to combust from thirst,
    and the sense goes into the billion
    pockets, to be perfectly forgot,
    like the Eightfold Path and the City of God.
    Place in which nothingness
    grows like a kudzu,
    nothing to rant about
    nothing to do.
    Past the edge of that place,
    a faint quintet,
    a Schumannic rite
    he believed he believed
    he could hear, ear
    to her nothinging chest
    at night. Quintet
    of not having
    eternity, of not having
    consented to not having
    you, absent eternity.
    Supplice
of desiring
    godspeed telecommunion
    without older intimacies
    slipping into disunion;
    supplice
of desiring a cure
    for old age, for disease,
    without the petroleum pyres
    that power the laboratories;
    supplice
of