Supplice

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Book: Supplice by T. Zachary Cotler Read Free Book Online
Authors: T. Zachary Cotler
designed
    to fail to appeal
    to all the scientists of sadness
    standing with compasses ready
    in the dawn spliced with bone-
    yellow twilight on Earth
    and nowhere else.

And yet what Earth was this not quite
    ailleurs,
this not-quite-possible-to-lure-
    into-the-possible, and yet
    the only
fleur
    de sel
to curl at night into
    a Delhi, a Los Angeles, a Mengcheng
    cluttered with sleepers, and yet, for want
    of a latterday Chuang Tzu dreaming
    a butterfly wingbeat, the wind was lost:
    for want of a wind, the cycle was lost:
    for want of a cycle, the pattern was lost:
    for want of a pattern, the system was lost:
    for want of a system, Nietzsche wept?
    For a horse beaten in a Turin street.
    And when will you be here?
    Not until “ THETRILLIONTHCONFIGVRATION
    OFFORTYNINEROMANLETTERS ”
    is the trillionth configuration
    of forty-nine Roman letters
    picked from a bottomless hat
    d’ailleur
at random?
    Throwing letters like rice,
    salt, petals, confetti
    of dire why-not-hope
    the trillionth isotope appears
    before his doom in human
    time. Someone’s singing,
    languagelessly, in the next room.
    A man built a watch.
    His children were quiet.
    A man built a chain reaction.
    The quiet
    blown open: gate to the room
    of his
thousand suns,
our father
    lost in a continued fraction
    burst at once into the sky,
    staring into the inverse white
    square of light in the sound
    as it opens: he paces
    toward counterfeit dawn
    on the coiled path that, if drawn
    from the—room, extends
    to the end of the desert—wound,
    will empty him of a visceral fact.
    Thousand
white
suns
sands
    in a grain of sight
    approaching blind
    at the rim of the blown-
    away night. He returns
    to the house of impossible work
    to abandon. One
    can abandon in
    the desert least
    resistance to Supplice,
    she
white
doves-me-not
    petals collecting
    against the door
    in a windy eddy.
    Harbor hidden in the heat
    beneath a desiccated wing.
    White wing of the wíthdrawn claim
    that there’s an unquestioning
    guardian for any human
    in whom something more than
    humanity hides. A ship arrives
    with crates marked MEDICINE , MEAT ,
    FLOUR for the starving city.
    City at war with authenticity.
    Battered-smooth bits
    of an old wrecked question drift
    in with the tide. What flour is this
    that so resembles ash?
    On a still day, on a fallow hill
    of understanding, he
    had crouched, like at a campfire,
    blowing on a sign
    that had lost its simplicity,
    like a fire in stasis,
    fire-shape at t = x gone
    motionless, but then
    the static fire itself caught
    fire; the second-order shape,
    too, froze, and then,
    along its cursive edges, caught.
    Recursive stack
    of sticks.
    One x 1000 ends to one
    day on Earth, still the null
    cone narrows to one
    postmeridian drop of dark rum
    on Supplice’s lip—or a 14-penny nail
    in a piece of old wharf
    in the hearth. As the piece
    burns from the bottom,
    the nail, point first,
    appears, in an hour, falls
    into an abstract
    Alexandria—or
    a point at the end of a tract
    on the anatomies of elsewheres.

A man came down from the mountain
    after five years without Internet
    into a crowd around a public monitor
    on which a far-off civil war equally
    addressed their delight in violence
    and sense of compassionate decency. Supplice
    was in the crowd, but not exactly of it.
    I’m the herald,
said the crazyman,
of the bridge
    to a far-future peace,
to the crowd, but the war
    was too loud, and Supplice smiled
    at the man, so back he went
    up the mountain in his temporal
    cortex and onto a lightning-
    shaped bridge and kept waiting.
    How near now to asymptote zero
    hope that once, in a remnant wilderness,
    kneeling in loam to turn over
    a stone, he might read
    a missive in the markings,
    more than insentient
    pseudo-hexagonal patterns
    of calcites, arágonite flowers of iron,
    instructions for never dying,
    stone book of the cryptic proof
    of providence, instead of
    this stubborn staring and turning
    and turning the patterns

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