Cougnac

BY Clayton Eshleman

The mutilated man shall mount the mammoth,
shall mount and
shall enter the mammoth’s head.
The man’s head shall pierce the mammoth’s brain,
the man’s head and mutilated body
shall become the mammoth’s animating soul
and a lance shall now spit mammoth soul and skull.

This is how we get into animals,
how we project ourselves as versa
into the vice of animal stone.
This is how we lance our otherness
on the winch of vice versa.

The self,
pupa run through six times, penguin-finned,
in its mammoth head
chrysalis.

The self,
hybridizing amoeba jerking to
its wounds,
peering forth from its mammoth
cradle as if
off the planet’s edge.

What a drop
25,000 years compose!
What a Fall
from man exterior to mammoth
to man lodged
mutilated in
this hybrid head.

[Gourdon, 2007]

— FROM Anticline (Black Widow Press, 2010)

 

Biography

CLAYTON ESHLEMAN‘s poems, critical essays, and translations of poets as important and diverse as César Vallejo, Aimé Césaire, Pablo Neruda, Antonin Artaud, Vladimir Holan, Henri Michaux, and Bernard Bador have earned him international acclaim. Also the founder and editor of two literary journals, Caterpillar (1967-1973) and Sulfur (1981-2000), he has published over forty books, including, most recently, three books of poetry — Anticline (Black Widow Press, 2010), Reciprocal Distillations (Hot Whiskey Press, 2007) and An Alchemist with One Eye on Fire (Black Widow Press, 2006); three translations — Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Wesleyan University Press, 2001) and Conductors of the Pit (Soft Skull Press, 2005), as well as The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo (University of California Press, 2006); and three books of prose — Companion Spider (Wesleyan University Press, 2002), Archaic Design (Black Widow Press, 2007) and Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld (Wesleyan University Press, 2007). Professor Emeritus at Eastern Michigan University, he lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan, with his wife Caryl. For several decades, they have led yearly tours to the Ice Age painted caves of southwestern France.

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