partly nothing could be said.
Life had struck her down.
Like, “Stop. Listen!” Dragon Esmeralda …
and the part that could not be said she could not stop
Her skirt
her shirt
her hair
had just such confusions in them.
As if
The smaller you got the more words there were
No longer to describe but names for the smallest particles
Volumes dense with words crammed into the spaces
Pleats
Folds
Darts
Crenellations
Matted forms
Nooks and holes,
She lay dense with names …
The worms in already
In her and the mattress
The mattress and the dirt
Struck down,
The animal necessity of joining in
Invisible worms made of light,
Crawling in crawlspaces
Her skin
Her organs vermiculate and peristaltic
Night-laden,
Starpoint
Her collarbone
Her lobed cranium
The cavities she assumed in her clothes
The cavities
her clothes assumed in her
Filling up
Going down,
In a sea which did not exist until she felt its heavy salinity seeping into her
Through every unnamed, uncaulked cavity and crack of fabric and tissue
A feeling of worms or the sea creeping
An affect articulable only in terms of its consequences
And only partly in terms of its causality,
Starpoint
Her mind
Thinking to bless itself with the ambiguity of dark forces
Telluric forces
Unnamed sources
Night-laden
Her “Stop thinking”
Esmeralda
The
Dragon
It is upon you
The monster
In one small hole in time was a woman
Who had a spirit
And it’s not that long ago now
It’s not that long ago
For
Partly this feeling is possession
A century past
Owned by the female sex
A switch
A loopback,
The vocabulary of reason goes haywire
There be dragons,
Esmeralda
Nothing can be said that does not rely on the clichés of the nineteenth century
A century ruled by the spirit of a woman
Trapped in hair
A skirt
A shirt
A volume
A hole in time,
In which one is desirous of finding not a monster,
A dragon, Esmeralda,
But words,
A density to match the volume
To reach the pitch and stop the sinking
The body to the bed
The bed to the dirt
Laced in worms
Surrounded by sea,
Starpoint and nightladen
Of one whom life had struck down.
