Wednesday, April 29, 2015

What Is The Opposite Of Absolute Zero?


                           Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,
                           To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities
                           Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever
                           With glitter of sun-rays

                                                                        Ezra Pound

1.

Is it antimetaphor to say that truth is cold?

What is the opposite of absolute zero?

When cold leaves lair into summer air
do butterflies fall like razor blades?

Ruthless in its ancient cave,
never seeing sunlight, craving.

And what of desire?
Is it infinite heat waiting
to be devoured by truth?



2.

Snow—xue:



falling, whitening, making ghosts
of land and water.



3.

Are absolutes truly opposite and jointly apposite
of another there?

Is the teleology of matter by matter formed?

Is lack of appetition appetition's eyes?

Comes the Ice Age. Waters rise. Wooly Mammoth hypnotizes
geneticists to resurrect its form.

The cold burns across the planet dancing with invisible warm.



4.

On the tundra a million years ahead
an encampment of hunters
following game across the plain.

Numbered among the domes
the heavy-boned tabernacle
of the man who sells letters.

“Anyone to trade venison
for an 'S'?” he sings, “to engrave
a hiss upon the dart and speed it
to its prey ?”



5.

He keeps the campfire.

He fashions arrowheads and torches.

He strings bows
and notches arrows.

He paints with animal fat
and ocher.

He counts winter
(there is only one season
and only he can count).

The lady of the hut
comes and goes looking
for the misplaced tooth
and leg he lost to
a Siberian tiger.

She plays the bone flute.

She is expert in poisons.

See his hands.

See his forearms.

See his fingers and nails.

In daydream he invents the wheel
but reasons there are no roads
to roll it on nor a beast to pull it.

He looks at the missus.

“Anyone to trade for a Capital 'I'?”,
he sighs, “Use it to comb hair.”

Her eyes burn like a flint blade.

He settles for dogs and a hupak'in
from which arises sleigh.



6.

As ambiguity is the unspoken figure,

wheel-less and wily,

as lust flows in waves across poems,

so is ground the third term:

snow melts, mares are delivered of colts,


and the travois fills with children.


E. A. Costa 28 April, 2015  San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua

2 comments:

Kort said...

Thought provoking poetry!

the ninja said...

cool eugene.