---a meditation---
---from the oeuvre of Len Blatt---
4 September 2001 9:45:17 PM
What joys are mine?
Elusive and eclectic are the entrails. Ghostly an homunculus shade. Whorls, in crepuscular, obscure, in latent darkling. Convolvulus, a neurosis of dimness, of inchoate striving writhings. The blind trembling and throb of pale lightless worms.
We say "the cat's whiskers". Why not the carp's, or the dogfish's? And indeed, why not go a whole hog here, and let us play. Let us play:
The pig's bristles. The halibut's lips. The plaice's plane. Dog salmon's hook. Man o' the moon's gibbous grin's hideous, it portends whisky dreams and bloodshot dawns. Nettle and dock.
Nettle and dock.
I lay among the stunted shoots of yellow grass. I yawned into a sky of gleaming glass. The sun was a marble of molten that melting bouldered the crumbling ruins on the shuddering hill. Hard tongues of blue lashed the wounds of the gills. Such clouds, such clouds as never were, translucent and silk, shot fleshly white and dandled in airs high, silent and strange.
Look how the cracked bark is a crocodile's monstrous hide. Ruddied by the liquid light it writhes unmoving in me. There the still pool cools in hidden deeps unknowable shelves and ridges of red. Hueless shoals shoot and sweep, shocks of their teardrop feathery shapes turn, return, veer and jibe in a gyre of fears beneath. Weep for the silver poles that peeling are bared, their terrible delicate shanks in the hair of the marsh, their glistening skins shining in a heartless evening.
I leave the fire of the dying of the day. Through the tunnel in a reeking mountain of rhododendron I crawl in scented dusk and woven bones and thews. Drown in perfumed breathings. A miner after unsingable melody, I plunge for unreachable glimmers of pearl. Its earthless hue. Haunts of old, of buried, that's beyond.
Over the scowl of the moor the evening is dying in a rending and a bleeding of vermillion and gold. Why is this not killing you?
Not to hear you say my name, or to see you ever. Not to see your face, nor you, or to hear your voice, or to see you ever. And time stretches ahead, and the All moves endless and on. Empty of you for ever and ever. For ever and ever, amen.
And the sky, whose fire bleeds to grey, and it melts away to dark. And the black vastness beyond, whose formless emptiness in fathomless emptiness endless empties into infinite boundless emptiness.
You are all that I live for. I know this now. After all this. And you have gone from me for ever.
