Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and...

127

Transcript of Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and...

Page 1: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return
Page 2: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return
Page 3: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Coarctate: Antigone’s Return and Selected Poems

Page 4: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Other books from EyeCorner Presshttp://eyecornerpress.com/

PULVERIZING PORTRAITS by CAMELIA ELIAS

(poetry criticism, January 2010)

JAGGED TIMELINE by ROBERT GIBBONS

(poetry, bilingual ed. with an intro by B. Sørensen, December 2009)

BETWEEN GAZES: FEMINIST, QUEER, AND ‘OTHER’ FILMS

by CAMELIA ELIAS(criticism, March 2009)

PASSION SPENT: LOVE, IDENTITY, AND REASON IN E.A. POE

by BENT SØRENSEN(criticism, July 2008)

FEDERMAN FRENZYby CAMELIA ELIAS, ed.(criticism, October 2008)

FIVE FACES OF DERRIDA by BENT SØRENSEN, ed.

(criticism, July 2008)

ÅRSTIDER I SKEPTIKERENS HIMMELby VALERIU BUTULESCU

(aforismer; udvalgt og oversat af C.Elias & B. Sørensen, July 2008)

EIGHT SENSES PLUS TWOby CAMELIA ELIAS

(poetry, July 2008)

UNTITLEDby CAMELIA ELIAS, ed.

(criticism, July 2008)

Page 5: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

COARCTATE: ANTIGONE’S RETURN

AND SELECTED POEMS

MARK DANIEL COHEN

INTRODUCTION BY CAMELIA ELIAS

EYECORNER PRESS

Page 6: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

© MARK DANIEL COHEN | 2010

Coarctate: Antigone’s Return and Selected Poems

Introduction © Camelia Elias | 2010

Published by EYECORNER PRESS, August 2010

ISBN: 978-87-92633-00-2

© The author and EyeCorner Press 2010

Cover design and layout: Mark Daniel Cohen

The text has been typeset in Bembo

Printed in the US and UK

Page 7: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

A Touch of Tongues Introduction by Camelia Elias

Coarctate: Antigone’s Return A drama in one act

The Hollow at the Core

The Last

Tremor

The Eyes Lear Never Lost

Conjunction of the Senses

To Tender

La Pièga: A Gio’ Pomodoro

The Planetary Flaw

The Radical of Mars

White Tactics of the Stone

Museo Missionario

Twice

Ravel

Terza Rima

Idyll of Spring

CONTENTS

7

33

82

83

84

90

100

104

106

110

111

112

113

116

118

120

122

Page 8: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return
Page 9: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

A Touch of Tongues

Mark Daniel Cohen’s Coarctate: Antigone’s Return

and Selected Poems

by Camelia Elias

Introduction

Page 10: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

In this new volume that gathers together a new play in one act,

“Coarctate: Antigone’s Return,” and a series of poems written

over the span of several years, Mark Daniel Cohen presents us with

what can be termed configurations of geometrical perceptions of

experience in words, acts, and restraints. The meaning of the word

coarctate indicates as well a more clinical and stark usage of senses

that are made not only to embody restricted forms but also to

form chain reactions within these restricted forms. To coarctate

means to constrain to an oval form, or to disseminate in a well-

defined, yet constricted form. The term can also describe the state

of some insects’ last larval skin in a pupae. In chemistry coarctate

covers a topology of the redistribution of electrons where what is

constraint also undergoes metamorphosis, or finds itself in a

transition state. A state of nothingness of hollowness. In physics, the

idea of a hollow sphere is bound with the law of symmetry

regarding mass distribution. As a general rule, a hollow sphere does

not produce any net gravity inside. While the hollow core exists, it

acts as if it didn’t, at least as far as the gravitational field is

concerned. This field remains the same irrespective of having a

8

Page 11: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

hollow core, and thus irrespective of the co-existence of

nothingness located at the centre.

In Mark Daniel Cohen’s writing we find a profound concern with

how words can follow both a constricted form while at the same

time also following a form that can be said to non-exist. Words

have gravity, to be sure, but this gravity is more of the kind that

one finds in Gaussian physics and mathematical analysis. Gauss’s

law is an application of the conservation law, which states that you

never lose flux. In math flux equals divergence multiplied by its

mass. Without getting too technical, one can use this analogy

between the way in which nature seems to work, tending towards

maintaining the property of flux conservation, and how art works,

tending towards breaking conservatism. One way in which the

latter can be achieved is by forcing gravity astray, as it were, or by

condensing dimensions. In mathematical analysis what is

interesting are not the questions pertaining to how dimensions

work, and how many they are, but how a continuous line works in

relation to its intersecting points. When a work of literature is akin

to the way in which a line can be said to mirror the point, then,

what we are dealing with can be said to be a case of creating

gravity in vacuum. Structurally, words gravitate towards limit

points, they converge, yet thematically, they can be said to diverge.

In Cohen’s work, the characters in the play and speakers in the

poems move towards converging to limit, while exploiting the way

in which the elements of what is enunciated are structurally at

odds with the underlying thematic action. They communicate an

expressionless affect, yet this affect is one of unending passion and

one which consolidates the idea that what ought to be appreciated

in any poetic language is what resists full comprehension.

9

Page 12: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Everything Speaks

Creon: All my prayers are that: The prayer of my desires.

Antigone: For this I feel no twinges of regret. And if you

judge me fool, perhaps it is because a fool is judge.

— SOPHOCLES, Antigone

Although written independently of each other, the play

“Coarctate,” with its continuous one-act, is well complemented by

Cohen’s supreme command of the iambic pentameter in the

poems. In both sets of texts the sound flows beautifully through

alliteration and assonance. Feelings as passionate as in the ancient

Greek drama are conveyed through an intelligence constricted to

form, yet while the feelings are recognizable as most vulnerable

and thus marked by a certain sense of finitude, they also rest on

the movement of ideas towards infinite potential.

In the minimal stage directions for “Coarctate,” Cohen instructs

that “the actors are not to invest,” as their roles are written as

masks, not portrayals. This is quite significant, as the words placed

in the actors’ mouths are thus constrained to conveying a

manipulation of facial forms and gestures as far as the veil, or the

mask, can allow for. What is behind is precisely the potential to

reveal more than what is understood by seeing ‘feeling’ in action.

As with the ancient Greeks, for whom feelings were always the

subject of whimsical agency, thus rendering absurd the whole of

humanity, so does one find in Cohen’s take on art a similar

approach, although here, what one senses above all is not the idea

that some are more fated than others, but that especially the fated

10

Page 13: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

ones wish themselves to be free in that pure form that can only be

attained on an abstract level. As the subtitle to the play suggests,

“Antigone’s Return,” there is more in the flight towards abstract

freedom than meets the eye. The doomed one returns to be freed

from having to act due to a heightened sense of morality.

Sophocles’s Antigone has to pay with her life for crossing Creon’s

injunction to not have Polyneices, her dead brother, be properly

buried. As she insists on having the ritual, she constrains herself to

a moral duty, thus relinquishing her own right to live. Creon gives

in to his weakness, which is the fear of losing face if he were to

change his mind and not have Antigone be buried alive for her

‘crime.’

In Cohen’s play, Antigone’s feelings are what they are, but her

intelligence, surpassing the codes of morality, has more potential. It

is this potential that Cohen exploits, suggesting a reversal of the

cliché which dictates that what cannot be measured is feelings

while intelligence can be assessed with more accuracy insofar as

we have context to rely on. The play, in this sense, can be said to

operate with how the measurable is pitted not against the

unmeasurable, but against calculated, yet infinite thought. In

Cohen’s play the two protagonists are good at counting, though it

is shown that Antigone’s arithmetics, as it were, are better than

Creon’s. Also in the stage directions we find the indication that all

movement should emulate the certainty of a well-wrought and

well-choreographed ballet. If the body is to break down, then it

has to do so by suggesting simultaneously that the snapping of the

mind follows the pattern devised by the choreographer for the

body to follow. In other words, one is allowed to mentally break

down, but only to the extent that the break itself can indicate a

11

Page 14: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

coarctate transition state from calculated passion to cold fire: one’s

own and the other’s. Cohen’s Antigone has a condensed mind and

a coarcted body. Her first lines indicate as much, and one senses

what is at stake in her discourse by wondering what all her words

mean.

Dueness is raw.

Amber seething chafes in supple fluxions,

Implicating teeming.

Darkness lamprey, inch and pull my chamber,

Braid my gardens, curling steep and numberless,

Amethyst and numbness, stitch syncopic volumes

Airless, breathed dimensional.

Linger savors, emerald-dense, and flocking.

Reverie cauldrons, steams to a raveling,

Silks flue, sills fluting, rapt in immuration,

Quails density of stunting tones

And strains to mist in sculpturing ascent.

Stone stars catch the quaver, eye the new night spume;

I, sudden to the night rise, shudder,

Lift to looming gestures, statuary of my various resolves,

Compressed to purposes, coarcted, crushed

To concentrated senses, fume.

Compacted figures, fire, as if diamond mind the dying mire.

Coagulate to underset amends my long transition.

The calcic ground streams under broken, unsought mounds.

Proclivity’s cocked to a nod.

New passions urge the soil.

12

Page 15: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

It is clear from the outset that even if one does not get the words,

one gets the form. Antigone here is not merely a woman who

weeps for her fate and does what is right for her brother. She is a

sculptor who understands carving and its aesthetic implications.

She is a jeweler who understands cuts. And a mathematician who

understands infinity. Antigone knows she is beautiful in her mind

because she is not afraid of following a line of potential thought.

Antigone is not much for dimensions. All she wants is movement

forward and unfolding unto vast spaces. The more male-resonating

words, and which we find in the passive — “proclivity’s cocked to

a nod” — are here set in contrast to Antigone’s wide spaces. If

Antigone digs, she digs not below herself but ahead of herself.

Enters Creon: ‘let’s have some depth here,’ his language suggests,

thus also corroborating the idea that, just as in the Greek drama,

Cohen’s Creon understands nothing, or very little, to begin with.

“You shall have his grave,” he says, in reference to Antigone’s

presence to meet her fate. Creon digs depth, yet not in a language

that is his own. He steals the words of others. His sole authentic

agency consists of commanding silence. He orders silence from

Antigone, and one gets the sense that he can never rise to the task

of seeing through his own acts because he is too enwrapped in his

own dictations. But what does he dictate? When Antigone asks

him:

Is this impressed immensity of silence settled

Thick enough to lodge my surging doom?

Is it damp enough to waive a destiny?

His eyes were wet enough to weep eternity.

13

Page 16: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Creon answers: “Yours is the last.” Ever the man of action, Creon

thinks that he is even above formalism, yet his way of keeping it

simple, while being devoid of empathy, is not devoid of a love/hate

ambivalence. Although Antigone entices him to take a different

course of thinking and action by offering herself as an example of

what could be more interesting to be done to her rather than

merely having her die — “meteorize my ghostly capabilities,” she

says — and although Creon can also speak a meta-language, by

constantly referring to the previous play in which they were also

playing tragic actors, namely in Sophocles’s original play, he cannot

match her discourse. Creon would like to “meteorize” something,

but he does not know how, and Antigone is the last one he would

go to for advice. Here, it is Cohen’s merit to instill in his spectators

a moment of familiarity with these characters, even as he is

defamiliarizing the Greek myth, as we all feel like asking ourselves:

who exactly do these two remind us of, for we know them well

among the ones we have encountered. The language of thinking

and the language of action thus meet the language of domesticity.

In this language, things are very simple indeed. When Creon says:

you must die, and this whole thing must die with you, Antigone is

more skeptical and merely asks: really? Antigone’s fate can be

decided and dictated, but whatever the shape the dictation takes,

she always returns. This is the nature of form, to continue what is

meant to continue. In principle, we can all understand such an

exchange between couples, even when they are not together in

any intimate form. And one can sense the tenderness in Creon’s

gaze upon Antigone, but it is of little help when he is intent on

doing what he thinks he has got to do. He is thus cruel in spite of

knowing better. As Antigone is a perceptive woman, she knows

14

Page 17: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

already what prompts Creon’s acts, and consequently forces herself

to remain implacable.

On a more sophisticated level, yet delivered in an equally

straightforward manner, what we encounter here is also the very

mechanism of ambiguity. For although both of these characters

embody their roles reluctantly, they remain inflexible and faithful

in their devotion to their acts. This renders them ambiguous

characters where the juncture of feeling with form occurs. In

other words, they both do what they think they’ve got to do, but it

is clear that they would prefer not to. Passion rules, but it goes the

wrong way, the principled way. It is also therefore that Antigone is

buried alive, and Creon lives to regret it. In Cohen’s play, there is a

bending of passion towards potential, and life thus continues to

pulsate in the very ‘I prefer not to.’ In Cohen’s play, they both say, ‘I

prefer not to see you or read you as you offer yourself to me either

as an image or as a text.’ The move is thus for what transcends the

gravity of words and towards desires that can actualize beyond

articulation or principle.

This reminds us of another tragic character, namely Melville’s

Bartleby the Scrivener, who ends up dying from inanition in a

similar way to Sophocles’s Antigone. He ends up passionately

eating his own words, as it were, but they do not serve him as

proper nutrition. In Cohen’s play, one senses a desire on the

writer’s part to investigate what makes food for thought, and when

thought is articulated, what happens if it is taken back, or eaten, by

the one who articulates it. Quite literally, we often say about verbal

situations that we can take them back, that we can take our words

back, or that we can bury them within ourselves, or that we can

15

Page 18: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

eat them as a way of punishing ourselves for having uttered them.

Here we have phrases that pass from mouth to mouth in a

movement that creates a reaction which repeats itself and within

which thought itself speculates on nothing. Yet, while Creon

thinks that he is entitled to ask Antigone to follow his advice:

“Speculate on nothing / More than strength” he says, it is also

clear that Antigone’s reply to him, by using the exact same phrase,

rings another bell for both ideas, nothingness and speculation, than

what Creon intends for her to understand. Firstly, in the original

play, Antigone has a legal claim to the throne, now usurped by

Creon, and secondly, she seems to know Creon in a different way

from the way in which he knows her. This subtle knowledge is

what transpires in Cohen’s play, as it remarkably captures the

geometry of the thought at work, which is hollow at the core

precisely at the moment when it is stretched in opposite directions

by the ones who use the exact same form of expression to

manifest contradictory laws of attraction. Creon is not an idiot, to

be sure, but he insists on his principles as the person and the king

that he is at the expense of the potential of thinking mutability in

the face of the immutable law. In Cohen’s play it is clear that

Creon’s actions are a way of relegating his own ambivalence and

inflexible ways to what he claims is Antigone’s “essentially obtuse,

and poor philosophy of action.” Only, Antigone doesn’t have a

philosophy. To her it’s all about watching and waiting for things to

happen. Learning, for her, comes from paying attention. If she

doesn’t act, it’s because she is waiting for Creon to act beyond

‘ultimate’ principles. Therefore she says: “to do nothing is

superfluous... at this time.” Also around this point, Cohen’s

protagonists take a Beckettian turn: before their fates fulfill, they

realize that they are nothing. They are not even born, as it were.

16

Page 19: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Hence they realize that nothing can be done for them. And yet. As

a latter day Beckettian Tristan and Isolde, they play an unending

game of chess in which they both have a winning strategy. It is the

strangeness in this paradox and in this ‘nothing can be done’ that

keeps them going, as it wraps around both their passionate

thinking of each other and their rational guesses about who will

speak and who will make the next move. In the meantime, Creon

can keep mocking and Antigone can keep knowing better.

The continuous form of the dialogue between them is punctured

by points at which an implied author’s voice warns about the

dangers of analyzing things to death. Saying too much. The

spectator is thus invited to watch, much in the same manner that

Antigone does even as she talks, rather than make up his or her

mind about what is going on. For what is going on is also a

process in which form itself is in transition. There is the form of

the dialogue, following the traditional adjacent positions — she

said, he said — but then there is also the form that tends towards

geometrical symmetry that takes place within the content of the

play. As Antigone remarks, making meta-references to earlier

versions of the Sophoclean plot, “as it was a story, something else

was meant,” she establishes precedents that she wishes to match

across history. That something else is always meant becomes almost

a mantra that Cohen wants us to be reminded of, insofar as

mis-communication is as old as myth-making. Even when things

change, something else is always meant, and yet it is precisely

herein that the biggest potential lies, including the potential to

actually have some things unchanged in the face of nothingness or

flux itself. “There are emblems of danger in these difficult

remains,” we hear the implied author’s voice saying, thus passing

17

Page 20: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

judgement on the nothing that is and which flows constantly

along the gravity of things placed at the core or in the margins.

In Creon’s relation to Antigone there is a constant tension of

balance, which keeps ambivalence itself in a state of coarctate

transition. He both wants her to die, and yet he wants her not to.

He both fears her, and yet he doesn’t. He both wants her for

himself, and yet he doesn’t. Antigone meets him in all his polarity,

but her swerving between poles is not gravitational but one of

lightness of being. Cohen’s Creon wants Antigone to speak to him

in a simple language that he can understand, but she retorts back

that she would rather be broken into darkness. She knows, of

course, that while Creon insists on speaking in a language that is

below hers, anticipating her descent into the nether regions, she

also knows that he understands much more than he lets see.

Antigone’s knowledge infuriates Creon, because it renders him

impotent and frustrated. As he refuses to speak her language, he is

forced to lie to her. The crux of the play is in its suggestion that

Creon’s core is not hollow. And yet, however much Antigone

insists on banging on it, the sound that comes out of it is one of

emptiness, as she is presumed not free. She cares for her brother

above the law that the potential lover has promulgated and which

holds her in a bind. In the face of Antigone’s situation, having to

submit to Creon’s law, which he insists on upholding, Creon not

only knows what he knows — that there is always a law above

one’s own, thus agreeing with Antigone’s point — and therefore

knows better — that as soon as there is a law, there is also

transgression — but he prefers not to know. Creon’s evading the

knowledge that Antigone’s logic instills in him makes him abusive.

He thus strikes her both verbally and physically, desiring her silent.

18

Page 21: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

But Antigone’s silence takes new forms all the time, as she speaks

the language of transfinite numbers. She counts ad infinitum: “the

silence of the mob is its one lie. / The silence of the soul’s its only

truth.” When they meet in arithmetics, however, as Creon also

states: “I fall beneath the law of natural sequence,” then, they are

fine. The question is thus one of numbers: the natural numbers

versus the real ones. In mathematics, the first set is encompassed by

the latter. And whereas the natural numbers are countably infinite,

the real numbers are uncountably infinite. Because of this

entanglement, and in spite of Creon’s victimization of Antigone,

his discourse continues the ritual of embedding non-transient

beauty that we find in numbers. Thus he says:

We are gripped close in this.

There is a general scheme. A universal calculation,

Which I cannot explain to you.

We two are wheeled on one fate, bolted to a single rim.

We two are carted here together.

We share a tense breaking inevitability.

Together, we submit, the eternal thought.

Before the play’s denouement, Cohen’s structure reveals a few

thematic paradoxes as well. Two, to be more precise, which in the

end resolve in an act of pleading for mercy. The first regards the

question of worship. The more the plot advances, the more it is

clear that Creon worships Antigone, but as he does not want to

admit it, it has consequences for the way his ambivalent feelings

towards her unfold. Now he loves her, now he doesn’t, and yet,

even when he doesn’t love her, he still loves her. On a more

general level, the point is that when people worship other people,

19

Page 22: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

their actions run counter to their beliefs. Which is also the reason

why the worshiped subject can quickly turn into an abject. If

women escape sacrificing, then they become the sacrificers,

engaging in the sacrificial ceremony as a matter of rite rather than

right. They detach themselves from their subjectivity, and hence

relinquish all claims to getting vindicated. Consequently, the more

detached, the more hated rather than revered they end up being.

The second paradox regards the law, or the immutable divine. Also

here as a general rule, when people worship gods, their beliefs run

counter to their actions. Which is the reason why the gods can

quickly provide platforms for forgiveness. We can commit any

crime in God’s name, because it is precisely God’s name that

justifies the act. So we attach ourselves to the name. Consequently,

God always ends up being more revered rather than hated. In

Sophocles’s Antigone, Zeus’s law is constantly invoked by Antigone

as being more primary and more original than Creon’s law. She

thus justifies her act of disobedience by making recourse to higher

orders. Now, the ambiguity that arises from texts that operate by

exploiting the difference between gods and mortals indicates how

high the poetic level is. In real life, how many can claim to

perform ambiguity on purpose with a view to creating poetry of

the highest mark? As the early Greeks showed, ambiguity in life is

merely the sign of ambivalence, and demonstrates, if anything, how

frail rather than how tragic our experiences are. We like to think

that we can dramatize, and live grand lives, but, alas, what we do,

for the most part, is create little narratives, which also, for the most

part, are more insignificant than significant.

20

Page 23: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Cohen’s play demonstrates that the recognition of one’s frailty

rather than one’s tragedy is stronger in its impact on the way in

which we are able to relate to his characters, for it is not difficult

to understand Creon’s agony, as he cries to Antigone not to go,

and not to let go of him. The only invocation that he can utter

and which can counter the law of action is thus a personal one

that involves the enunciation of his position. In spite of what he

says, or how he acts, Creon is against fallacies of discontinuity,

precisely because he recognizes in Antigone a matching potential

for a continuous relation. Moreover, he has her word for it as well:

she will not let go of him, because she said that she wouldn’t. They

are thus both ‘anti-gone,’ as it were. And it is also for this reason

that the idea of return is central to the play, even as it is only subtly

hinted at. Thus says Creon in a broken voice, followed by Antigone

on his wavelength:

Drench me, dear Antigone, rinse me in your sorrow,

Sight me once again with your streaming vision,

Clear me in your dripping seas.

In your revolt you lifted an authority,

Grant me now your mystery in mercy.

Acquit me and absolve me.

And Antigone answers in symmetry:

Behind the surface sheen I sensed a depth...

And a tender pull, a forward secluded and melting...

I looked to search that soft infinity

But, with every movement, my vision blocked my vista.

21

Page 24: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Cohen’s play is thus a lament on the kind of love that exceeds the

ordinary. We recognize ourselves in the characters, and yet, their

mysterious vulnerability remains bound to the ineffable. As Creon

grows more and more confident in his language, however, he

reduces his acts, not to condemning Antigone to stillness, but to a

standstill of love. “Forgive me, my Antigone,” he says, submitting to

her, and insisting on being present for her, and over her. “Know

that I’m here,” he seems to say as he urges her to match his

discursively continuous line. In Cohen’s play, the line: “Antigone,

continue it,” is thus the most significant. Yet, as Antigone remarks a

few lines later, “The plot is at halt,” she thus suggests the results of

her coarctate transitions in the void: her victory, but also his as

well. Cohen marks this moment in parenthesis saying: “(Silence.

Antigone smiles. She has won)” and then letting Antigone speak in

the language of the implied author, thus entangling Creon’s lower

orders once more with the language that is now made theirs:

“fresh tongued and forming timelessly before the infinite, /

Framing ancient passions.”

Along these lines, it makes sense to hear Antigone elaborate on

how, after eluding Creon’s cruelty — “I have avoided your

succession, eluded your eternity. / And I have spun another, in

absentia” — she has managed to create something out of nothing,

an eternity that has an even higher cardinality than Creon’s. At this

point in the play, the dialogue is transformed into a prose poem,

and Antigone begins to tell a story. The lines are longer, the story

has plot, characters, setting, character relations, symbolism, rhetoric,

and all the other elements one finds in narrative. As the play is

brought to an end via an almost fairytale detour — boy meets girl,

girl meets boy, and they want each other — yet with Creon

22

Page 25: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

exiting the scene through the exact same point he appeared and

Antigone sinking into darkness in the exact same way she has

done before, the moral seems to be one of universal indictments

passed on all lovers: nothing can be done. Let them be, they are

merely in love. The test of timeless and unending love is still time,

and still a passing, of time and passion “where knowledge brings

with it a grace,” as Cohen aptly puts it. In this sense, passion can be

either witnessed or experienced, never compressed, never eluded,

never coarcted.

In this sense, one can contend that what Cohen has achieved here

is simply to have written a classic. The text speaks to us all. It

speaks everything, and lets everything itself speak.

Everything ‘Tells’

Why a sad tale Mamillius?

Rather a tale of trust.

— SACHA RABINOVITCH, A Winter’s Tale

The dramatic mode in “Coarctate: Antigone’s Return” is followed

in this volume by logical lyrics. The poems form a similar

incantatory tone as in the play, yet the attention to language is here

even more high-strung. The letters perform words, and the words

perform themes and variations on what we find beyond

signification, beyond symbolic language, beyond geometry, and

even beyond nothingness. Here, one gets the sense that while

thoughts open themselves onto vast potentials, the music of the

words that accompanies them creates a constant feeling of

something being sculpted. And one likes what one sees. The

tension is between stable emotion and volatile ideas, rather than

23

Page 26: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

the other way around. Phrases that suggest a reversal of the belief

in the stability of ideas, or an idee fixe, and the ephemerality of

feelings abound, and the epigraph from Martin Gardner to the first

poem, “The Hollow at the Core,” almost says it all: “There is still a

difference between something and nothing, but it is purely

geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry.” Insofar as

this poem almost performatively seems to strike a hollow core in

the reader’s experience of the transition from the play to the

poems, it can be said to not only resonate with some of the

themes in the play, but also anticipate a continuation of these

themes into the rest of the poems. Thus, although this set of texts

was written before the play, it almost seems to be encompassed by

the thoughts formulated there. At least where the woman is

concerned. There is only one woman who is worth the while, and

she is also the last to last. Another Antigone passes, but not from

the speaker’s mind. Several poems are thus dedicated to a dead-

and-yet-undying-in-form beauty, as her figure emerges

geometrically as non-transient. Although there is no body here,

one senses how the tongue touches almost the visual metaphors,

which are being offset by the music that alliteration and assonance

make. The speaker in these poems sculpts with light on the ruins

of love’s noises. We read such lines in the making in the poem

“The Last”:

The soil has sieved her, drawn her, steeped her, downed

And flocked her to the bedding of its ought;

A granulate, soft sift to silent drifts,

Lit lightning wince of every saber thought.

The seep unsoled her, souled her, sold her sleep,

A gravitate of galaxies of she,

24

Page 27: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

The purchase of the ground, her weep to black,

And percolate into infinity.

The settle fractions strew to grid a term:

The snow of her in melting, sinking rime;

And darkness curls in darkness coils about

The velvet bones beneath the skin of time.

A roll suspension rounding on a dearth;

The particles geometry the last

And trace a correlate continuance:

But every torment figured in its cast.

Mark Daniel Cohen continues in these poems not only a solid

Shakespearean tradition as we find it particularly in the sonnets,

but also lets romanticism transpire through what the language

poets practice, such as the denaturalization of the speaker’s

presence behind the text, and disjunctive methodical approaches to

writing. Just as in the plastic arts, where beginnings and endings

are crucial, where to begin and when to stop is also crucial in

these texts, yet such formal concerns are not expressed at the

expense of what happens in the middle, especially when this

middle is something that not only eludes the writer, but also the

clearly demarcated beginnings and endings. The law of the

excluded middle, the law of non-contradiction, is balanced against

the law of imaginary logic. The worlds of different experiences

and perceptions identified in the poems through an acute sensing

of pain do not run parallel and nor do they map directly to any

non-dimensional space. Feelings are not linear, but rather

hyperbolic and elliptic. As in geometry, where lines can expand or

compress, rise or fall, the words in the poems, with their strict

25

Page 28: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

con-strictures, are like calculated falling cadences. The images of

falling suggest that one doesn’t just follow only gravity, but also

direction. Sometimes one falls right in the middle of things that

are not settled yet, things that swerve in the air. While the ground

may be anticipated — I’m falling down there somewhere — it is

not being grounded that does it for experience, but being sensual.

Senses follow a principle of multiplicity and the array of figures

referred to, from literature and the arts, all adopt a both/and

position. The point is that while we may inherit some clarity of

articulation from following others and their traditions, senses and

emotions are often impenetrable.

In the poem “The Conjunction of the Senses” Cohen, again,

makes recourse to what can only be contained in parenthesis. Thus

he says in parenthesis: “(In all I feel, I feel, I feel myself)” leaving

the very form of feeling suspended in a supplement. Here, it can

be said that Cohen articulates what Walter Benjamin calls das

Ausdruckslose, the expressionless. Benjamin was preoccupied with

why what he thought to be the obvious object of study in

literature and the arts, namely the incomprehensible, always seems

to come second to what other critics identify as the means of what

language communicates, namely a clear and unambiguous mode of

telling. Opposing the view that language is there to always and

only follow facts, address people, and communicate in a

straightforward fashion through clear and unambiguous words, he

puts it:

For what does a literary work “say”? What does it

communicate? It “tells” very little to those who understand

it. Its essential quality is not communication or the imparting

26

Page 29: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

of information [...] Do we not generally regard that which

lies beyond communication in a literary work [...] as the

unfathomable, the mysterious, the “poetic”? (Benjamin,

2002: 253)

We find examples of the way in which senses are put to work

beyond expression as we know it in poems such as “The Hollow

at the Core,” where encounters in geometrics are announced as a

means of being “face to face to fan in symmetries.” The first three

lines disclose both a new disturbance and a new arbitrariness in

the perception of who stands face to face with whom and why,

and we get lost in the sound of “us”:

As os arcs arctic argencies spine light.

A throw’s a mere extrapolated here,

A man’s a mere ascription, nominon.

The likeness of man to no-man, and arctic air with argent

extrapolations urge us on to considering the idea that condensed

thinking is cold thinking. Cohen permutes arbitrary connections,

but he always establishes a symmetrical relation between them.

One can follow the trajectory of the “spine light” through some of

the other poems, as rocks, stones, and diamonds acquire a specific

value. L’argent is both a currency and a crown jewel in the arctic

kingdom where “the world is waiting for a master that will not

come.” What comes in the meanwhile are different likenesses to

the one master, and we go from encountering King Lear to

saluting the return of Antigone who comes back with an

“impulsed” mind. It is suggested that these characters’ thoughts are

as galactic as the planets Mars and Venus, but although grand in

their schemes, they are also flawed. In Cohen’s poems, if

27

Page 30: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

everything ‘tells,’ it is by way of stoning. Stones are cast, meteorites

fall, and diamonds polish the man. As he puts it, stones have tactics,

thus allowing us to see them resisting the artist’s touch. What the

artist can do is put his ear to the ground or the spiral in geometry

and listen. The poem “The Eyes Lear Never Lost” discloses how

language, with its verbal articulation, can also move from the ear to

the eye. This trajectory of following other senses is significant as it

is not drawn at the expense of vocabulary. The words thus

complement the initial syntactical patterns suggested in the first

poem and end up re-creating the hollowness at the gravitational

core of the flux density that a line of that poem suggests: “And

whispered fields repleat in non on non.” Thus enters Lear,

symmetrically bound:

The philosophic gouge, the lesion doubt,

The shiver thought, the eyes Lear never lost.

The aspect of interiority

Condensates to the tears upon, the glance,

Glare mordant burnish of the circum-stance.

The made of matter are the tears of time.

What’s phasing matters, what are phasing matters,

Woof and filler aromatics, steams,

Wolframiums and texts; and death is death,

What’s dun is done, as figures factor out,

As dreamer figures on; what’s time is thyme.

And gone is gone, a door gone is adore.

There are characters who enter through doors as if through air,

while themselves never opening any doors to anyone. As air creates

forms, the forms themselves get shaped by something other than

pure void. Formal alterity is thus bypassed, and it is no wonder

28

Page 31: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

that we have juxtapositions of cold air and hard rocks as settings

for the characters whose integrities are like the integers. Cohen’s

poems are thus both mineral and numeral. They have solid

elements in them, yet they all create beautiful chain reactions in

the expressionless, or the uncountable. Structurally, however, while

the poems may seemingly express, or rather manifest, a solitary

voice, thematically, they engage the reader in a relational aspect of

interacting with the solitary and the coming of others. As

kingdoms come, seasons come.

As the last poem suggests, after winter, spring always comes. And as

in spring, not only lovers go hand in hand, but also their ghosts.

And yet, “Idyll of Spring” is courageous enough to forward the

idea that although the woman is “it” and always there as she walks

along with a strong Apollo, a time comes when she leaves it to

him to grow up on his own. A burden, however, as light as the

lightness of being itself.

With carelessness she kneels to kiss the waters.

Her gesturings are, in this gentle gloom,

Grandiloquence of indolence that must,

Despite the ardency that you assume,

Withdraw to leave you writhing in the dust.

Here one can begin to ask the question: ‘what’s in a name?’ as the

temptation is to read Cohen’s own name into this volume, and

then say, by way of concluding, that the kohen is not a kohen for

nothing. He is the guardian of the arts, writing the kind of poetry

that dominates and subjugates the sacrificial spot. What the reader

wants to do in exchange for being allowed to watch and learn is

put himself to the test as a witness who witnesses the ritual of

29

Page 32: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

‘ashes to ashes,’ because ashes bear the traces of torn books, and

burnt books, and burnt looks. Then he must turn to listening to

the subtle thunder that echoes the cardinals: burn the book, and

the numbers, if you can. And we’ll see what happens. An

intelligent life accommodates change, and pain is always true.

Cohen here coarctates on behalf of all the lovers who want to

keep gazing into the spark of the eternal and ineffable fire.

Holding their tongues. Forever. And yet.

References

Benjamin, Walter (2002) Selected Writings. Volume 1: 1913-1926.

Eds. Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings. Harvard

College.

Sophocles, The Complete Plays. (2001) Trans. Paul Roche. New

York: Signet Classics.

30

Page 33: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return
Page 34: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return
Page 35: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Coarctate:Antigone’s Return

A drama in one act

Page 36: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Each time that a poet looks into himself, as did Narcissus bending

down over the still water of the fountain, he sees something which

no one else can. He sees first a reflected self and then a second self

(Nous fûmes deux, je le maintiens) between whom the drama of self-

knowledge is going to be engaged.

— Wallace Fowlie, Mallarmé

34

Page 37: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Characters

Antigone

A young woman, barely past her girlhood, dark hair, large, dark,

sad eyes, lissome and wearing a garnet satin robe.

Creon

A tall man, distinguished, dignified, strong and still vigorous

though in the last phase of middle age, soon to embark on ancient.

Shocks of grey streak his beard and hair. Wearing a black, loose-

fitting robe of sumptuous fabric, he is a figure regally enriched.

Notes for Production

No props or scenery are to be used. The embers and the mirror

must be mimed by Antigone.

Both actors, but particularly she playing Antigone, should give

their movements a ballet-like smoothness and sureness.

The actors are not to invest. The two roles are written as masks,

not portrayals. The actors are not to provide their characters

superfluous personality, but to grant them the gracefulness of

thought transpiring as gesture.

35

Page 38: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Coarctate: Antigone’s Return

(A light comes up slowly, first to illuminate smoke rising and

dispersing high above the stage, then to form a circle of light

which pools the playing area downstage center. The rest of the

stage is in darkness; it must be evident there is much more space

than is being lit and employed.

The light discovers Antigone curled on the floor in the center of

the playing area. When the light is up fully and the smoke has

dissolved, she unfolds, raises herself to a crouching posture, and

begins to speak.)

36

Page 39: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

ANTIGONE

Dueness is raw.

Amber seething chafes in supple fluxions,

Implicating teeming.

Darknesses lamprey, inch and pull my chamber,

Braid my gardens, curling steep and numberless,

Amethyst and numbness, stitch syncopic volumes

Airless, breathed dimensional.

Linger savors, emerald-dense, and flocking.

Reverie cauldrons, steams to a raveling,

Silks flue, sills fluting, rapt in immuration.

Quails density of stunted tones

And strains to mist in sculpturing ascent.

Stone stars catch the quaver, eye the new night spume;

I, sudden to the night rise, shudder,

Lift to looming gestures, statuary of my various resolves,

Compressed to purposes, coarcted, crushed

To concentrated senses, fume.

Compacted figures fire, as if diamond mind the dying mire.

Coagulate to underset amends my long transition.

The calcic ground streams under broken, unsought mounds.

Proclivity’s cocked to a nod.

New passions urge the soil.

There are emblems of danger in these difficult remains,

Embers clenching hushed and remembering glow.

You can whisper them to vigor,

Musing to foment, flame spoor the air skein;

37

Page 40: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

The nudge of a breath.

These gleam plots lace a logic that reviews.

It tendrils from the onslaught, thunder spate

To track and tramp of blunting consecution,

Sole’s decay, and ceaselessly descent.

The trammeling of dynasties of weight

And stricture tomb the time slung soul in dust.

The syntax eons toll. This no’s the stall.

That vented underwrites articulate,

However, intimate from overwrought,

A pause rear, strangely resonating,

This time right, pitch to constellate,

And fraught of the torrent abound with a vertical thought,

Spray to the sky chain’s meandering spill,

And clip an accent that he cannot tongue,

That heel that tread my schooling.

(With “he,” Creon, thereby invoked, steps into the light, behind

Antigone. She does not notice him and continues as he stands

above her, motionless.)

ANTIGONE

A swooning drag of space is dredged by glances,

Delved by every look, set beckoning,

And plunges into endless distances.

38

Page 41: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

There is a hover in assent. I crest a shimmer,

Mirror a configuration

Hung before me like subtle leaves.

Where a brimming fragrances which haunt, encloud

In feinting colors, portrait vacancies,

Stressed in pastel iridescence from the veiling haze,

Galaxies of crocuses, narcissi seeping luxury

Skirt the colonnades, secerning blends

To bleed out margins, whelm immerging, weft

Infolding, glimmer isochronal undulations:

The depths play pattern in my shadow,

Firm between the breezes, phrased in silence.

As lashes light to tissue, nails to my own face,

My fingertip speculations drift toward a brushing stillness,

Purling through the welling passageway,

Synchronize their sigh to new alignments.

(During her last words, Creon reaches forward and thrusts his

hand through the mirror Antigone has mimed, dissolving the

illusion. She turns and they stare at each other, frozen several beats.

She turns back, hunching over her embers, and attempts to

resume, as if to chant him away. His interruptions hammerblow,

battering off the ending of each of her lines. She refuses to face

him.)

ANTIGONE

Light packed the bone gape to blaze cataracting

39

Page 42: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

The tremble of . . .

CREON

He punctured his eyes with a brooch. He bled to his feet.

ANTIGONE

Peripatetically, steadied, the motion, winking

The astral scheme back from . . .

CREON

You straggled directionless, filing for haven.

From scepter to scepter, you were dispelled,

You and your relatives.

ANTIGONE

Bound by beating echoes, foaming slaver, bruted

Nearly vaporing, and spirited, off, by . . .

CREON

The sinews of the state requested your royal presence,

40

Page 43: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Blood ties your return.

ANTIGONE

Stillness sheering arches solemn caverns

And secreting absences . . .

CREON

A corpse lying in the dust.

ANTIGONE

A waif a ground of exileship of condemnation lay in state . . .

CREON

He shall have no grave;

No one shall have his grave;

You shall have his grave.

ANTIGONE

Done undone redounding, maelstrom scriber,

Columnar charybdic . . .

41

Page 44: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

CREON

Dirt you poured twice on nothing, spun

In an empty whirlwind. But what you braved

Was far more than a storm.

ANTIGONE

The sealing of the sinuates . . .

The damming unto distillate . . .

The canting from the caviling . . .

CREON

The execution of your sentence.

(A pause Antigone relents, depleted and limp.)

CREON

Why didn’t you stay?

42

Page 45: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

ANTIGONE

He was dead.

CREON

You left him for death. Recite the contradiction.

ANTIGONE

Death by its crime resolved him to rock.

Death by its gesture distilled him to essence.

CREON

(cruelly)

You take your lessons well. And we begin again.

ANTIGONE

Devoid to our jointed discursion.

43

Page 46: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

CREON

(gently)

Silence.

(Antigone tentatively reaches forward to mime.)

CREON

A niece.

(grabs her savagely by the hair)

Again, a niece!

(releases her)

You are the issue of redundancy.

ANTIGONE

(rising, looking away from Creon)

A soft recession of patter, as whispered as pity,

Bells the fathom of sequent extents.

Black masses rage the air,

Ring us in their hurtling, commit us to their quaking;

Their wings batter out their noiselessness,

Banter and tongue the nightfall with a bristling frenzy.

44

Page 47: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

CREON

You’ve had a bad time of it.

ANTIGONE

Is this inpressed immensity of silence settled

Thick enough to lodge my surging doom?

Is it damp enough to waive a destiny?

His eyes were wet enough to weep eternity.

CREON

Yours is the last.

ANTIGONE

I recall a movement.

Once in a candle, wincing the light,

Forever stove and corridored

The howling dessication of the vein.

All that was currency,

Drowned with the precipitation of the days,

Cascaded the embroiling rush of liquid twilight,

Boiled the racing stars.

Imperatives in shadow ran grey thunder,

Dragged along the haul of time.

45

Page 48: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

CREON

Cause (indicating their chamber) and effect.

Where did this begin?

ANTIGONE

With me it will be still installed

Beneath the dripping linen.

CREON

You are here in this time, you are now in this place.

Name the thing that brought you to this, Antigone.

ANTIGONE

There was, amid the wracking, center set,

A kindled trenchancy,

Furious densely, endlessly in outline.

This, with another sense, too, I recall.

46

Page 49: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

CREON

Antigone, relapse in her cell.

Confounded by the trembling of her hands.

Pull yourself together.

ANTIGONE

A compounding,

We were a fusing, a reflection on,

The tissue of a radiant intent.

CREON

Concentrate, Antigone, and ponder me.

The door has been encumbered and plowed in,

The guards distributed at watch,

The general disposition has been crafted and disbursed.

The light is kneeling, withered, and grows sear,

Thumbing shadows gouge the recesses of your cavern,

And all your breath goes dark in the drawing cold.

You are alone here.

Sealed by my stamp and buried, as a corpse.

Your wax is streaming off,

The flame of your revolt is waning.

47

Page 50: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

ANTIGONE

As it was a story, something else was meant.

CREON

It was a pounding, a confusing!

That tissue radiated only pestilence

And billowing obscenity!

And the cause was yours.

You, alone.

But, still, you presume the gavel.

ANTIGONE

The wax is a swelling to vault, a moment persisting,

Bloomed spacious to a stay.

By the crease of its vacancy,

Biased to an attitude,

Leaning a feel, an atmosphere,

To reel and angled oddly,

Veering toward the hint of something

That exceeds your range.

CREON

You are dying, girl, by my word.

48

Page 51: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

ANTIGONE

You wallow in biology.

CREON

Ah. In a logical order. Very good, Antigone.

Soon, it will come naturally to you again.

Tell me more.

ANTIGONE

Remit the gods with silence.

(Creon’s mocking laughter.)

CREON

It’s too late for that. You follow me.

ANTIGONE

Brought to this position, spelled beyond the rupture,

49

Page 52: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Cast as asynchronic conformation,

Manifolded trace of everlasting.

My chaste and domal dreaming.

CREON

You are beautiful between words.

ANTIGONE

We have had enough of that!

CREON

There was a fusing, indeed.

(Antigone shrieks her revulsion.)

CREON

Articulate. Direct and to the point.

That horror and contagion, that uproar of my order

Was wholely, precisely, and merely what it seemed.

It streamed from its source to douse and devour the living,

The organed and several body of an entire people.

50

Page 53: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

It blighted the porch and the altar,

Afflicted the scales, the plumb, the scythe.

I will give you your image: the crown is in the soil!

ANTIGONE

The exhalation of my disaster,

I find myself my latency and roiling placidly

And fulgent in the sapphire dusk.

Layer after layer, terrace on terrace,

Tufts of ruby’s sheen, fire opals

Meteorize my ghostly capabilities.

Turquoise sprays, topaz spumes, froths of azurite

Coordinate them to their mapping scintillations,

Rainbow-lacquered suns, arch my setting in with

The spectral tears of the earth.

CREON

Let us proceed.

Antigone, how many sons were there?

ANTIGONE

No. A seizure of the lineal. You cannot escape that.

51

Page 54: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

CREON

None escaped me. I am your accomplishment,

Your only end.

ANTIGONE

Beveled to my depths.

CREON

Time is for you to recant.

ANTIGONE

In that . . . it is my turn.

CREON

Where will you be tomorrow?

ANTIGONE

Damn you. You will not let me go.

52

Page 55: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

CREON

The candle either is lit or not.

ANTIGONE

No exile’s void, he passes . . . elsewhere.

A nulling, your ordinary thought.

(Creon does not respond.)

ANTIGONE

I respect Death its silence.

Something . . . I would steal from it.

CREON

All rivers grave my bosom, drink their moist

Foundations from the tears of my sad, lavish,

Pitying and clement dispensation.

My fingers crescent in the harbors, transverse

Draft and fret my paling, reining in

Proportions, germination rides my breath.

The foaming lilacs ornament the mantle,

53

Page 56: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Flowing grasses fabric out the dress.

Constituent hands moil to draw the textures

Of the loins, elementary eyes

Graze sinews, tendons, bulk, the heft and muscle

Regioning, and every fragment footsole

Pads and combs and curries meek appeals,

Ear, nuque, lung, livers, flexors, withers, hold

A commerce with, in this all bourning court:

All lives are particles of one well being,

Cupped and coped beneath the spectacled

Disposal of supernal contemplation,

Thread integer to integer, gleam-inked,

Concatenated on the skin of heaven;

All deaths returning, dream through flesh to marrow,

Ore the siftings of eternal passions.

I am this very thing, the very thing

Itself and solely. Speculate on nothing

More than strength that stands before your frailty,

The cringing that you character in sidle,

Hems, in import glotta, intimations,

In unfaced, endless, skirting, indirections.

Counter rebuttal.

ANTIGONE

Speculate on nothing, more than strength.

My fluency’s obliquity . . .

54

Page 57: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

CREON

In quibbling senseless quiddities and indirections.

ANTIGONE

In this direction, fluent as my sensings,

Pours to tangents, spheres a quiddity.

CREON

Essentially obtuse, poor in your philosophy of action,

Poured from monsterous obliquity,

Burbling tangential streams.

ANTIGONE

Rank with slab obliquity,

These quiddities you would occlude.

CREON

Yes! Directed by obliquity your quiddities occulted.

(Silence.)

55

Page 58: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

ANTIGONE

To do nothing is superfluous . . . at this point.

CREON

Now.

ANTIGONE

Here.

CREON

Much was done before that brings us to this warrant.

ANTIGONE

And earlier. There was,

Behind the secret flutes of gentian, hidden,

Brewed with fragrances of jonquil, absent,

To be heard, safe and swarmed by jets of heather,

And the hellebore, as rose, as thick

With life, and as intangible as garnet.

56

Page 59: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Their petals filmed and lightly, shook

Upon the breath of every moment.

Packed rich with such unsummable detail,

It took longer to pass through those years

Than any I’ve known since. They never leave me,

These increments of memory,

They clot the vacancies of the accelerating days

And tug the nodding aftward. They wing upon,

Circling and band my sagging time,

As like the ever birds that cruxed

The knot with wrestling savagery;

They argued the air, shattering,

Shivered it and cuneal,

Cycloned in the image, girthed in whorling phreatic,

The imponderous face, multiple imposing,

The cipherous title chiselled in the seething smoke,

Without the courtly progress, core crush-featured,

Portents gored and galed, the nidor in recoil.

And then the cataclysm. You were there.

CREON

I am. And that brings us to this.

Now, Antigone.

Let us face the facts of your confessed recusancy.

The courtly progress has lit you on this spot,

And I have generalled your inurnment.

57

Page 60: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

ANTIGONE

From you, inhumation.

CREON

More than ever, you are in my realm.

(with slowly building malice)

Explain to me your meaning, girl,

Elucidate your framed opacities,

Minimum your art to understanding,

Make this matter plain. Speak to me

In language my ordinary thought can seize.

Let royal tongue pertain the royal ear.

ANTIGONE

I tire of the drumbeat, my lord, metonymic accession.

Break me into darkness.

CREON

In darkness, the hollow of those fallen, downcast,

Face first eyes, in two, I will.

58

Page 61: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

ANTIGONE

That was all it meant to you.

CREON

And I have put you here.

ANTIGONE

Brought me down to earth. I feel myself Eurydice,

Stumbling gardenless in Erebus, woven vainly,

Unwedded to grieve, wrenched beyond the living

Rhythms, plaintive in the tomb.

CREON

Never mouth that name!

She has no part in this, and no relation

To the fell, the filth in your descent,

The sabering of arrogate, thrust

And the harrowing transgress of your line!

Eye her, enmansioned in her rectitude,

Positioned, aired in stately dignity

And lofting, do not think that conjuncture.

59

Page 62: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

(Silence.)

ANTIGONE

I take upon me my past, my lord,

I take upon me my future.

I fold them into me, petalled interior into night

And the limestone smoke of sleep,

Close to shade and vibrancy congealed,

Collected, cradled to my soil.

Against your racing flood of happenstance I stand.

CREON

Expound, dire princess.

ANTIGONE

Confront each other deftly, nape to nape.

CREON

My poverty of means, begging purse of sense.

Let us pursue this line of inquiry.

Drop me in the rapids of your brackish

Atticisms. Have we, heir apparent,

60

Page 63: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

An opinion? Have we judgment?

Enucleate this matter for me!

(With an uncaged animal ferocity, Antigone flies at Creon. He

catches her by the wrists, easily holding her off as she struggles to

tear at his eyes. He laughs, considers her fury, then strikes her

brutally, audibly across the mouth. The blow hurls Antigone to the

stage floor, landing her at the edge of the light pool.)

ANTIGONE

(barely discernable)

Warrant. I had no trial.

CREON

This is the trial. Mine.

ANTIGONE

(in soft horror)

Melic tatters cut and tailored to the figure.

61

Page 64: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

CREON

Creep across your years, Antigone, be dicast,

Mint you to a mode beyond your native span.

Gravitate your means, reel in your voices,

Scion into entity an alien Heliaea.

You are here to judge me for the thing

That brought you here. I submit.

ANTIGONE

Such philosophies of action are

But steam above the kettle, and serve to skin

Our gloving of the pilot hands,

Crooked to spellbind, palpate into pawning,

Dactylologically, feeling their way,

Fingering a tale into kinesics,

Conjuring the signing tyronic

To lessoning chirology.

CREON

I am culprit alone, the guilt is mine, whole.

“You are dying by my word.”

“I have generalled your inurnment.”

“You are in my realm.” I make no plea.

My defense is my abduction;

My witnesses my rotting, dropping shreds;

62

Page 65: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

My summation, my lessening of breath.

ANTIGONE

We charade, some will obscure, to appoint,

That flickers through.

The silence of the mob is its one lie.

The silence of the soul’s its only truth.

CREON

I fall beneath the law of natural sequence.

You hoist to jury because you are my victim.

Not for suffering my sins, these are not my sins,

And there is no virtue of philosophy in this,

Your actions are not in ascendance,

No judgment presides you.

It is merely in that you persist; this is a lingering result,

A vestige of events, the smoking scrap. However,

You remain, you are still here. And everywhere,

From throne to theatre, from temple to tomb,

I must listen to the ticking of your thoughts.

You’re fixed in your damnation and,

Having damned you, you are intimate to me.

I hear the movement of your gentle sadness,

I slide along the slip of your sensations,

My thinking’s thickly topped with your imagings.

You are ever doomed and ever I am filled with you,

63

Page 66: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Minute, after minute, . . . after minute.

Your mind’s the stitching progress of my rule.

ANTIGONE

You would rein me back to the very hour!

Ram me to the sluice and throes into finality!

CREON

Take this hand, Antigone, the middle ring,

Kiss it in your naming censure.

Seam your circuit accusation

And verdict tight around me. Clamp me,

Bond me to your blame.

Brace me in with your conviction.

Absorb me in your condemnation,

Absorb me entire.

ANTIGONE

(despite herself)

No, I accuse you nothing.

64

Page 67: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

CREON

We are gripped close in this.

There is a general scheme, a universal calculation,

Which I cannot explain to you.

We two are wheeled on one fate, bolted to a single rim.

We two are carted here together.

We share a tense breaking inevitability.

Together, we submit, the eternal thought.

ANTIGONE

(tentatively reaching forward to her forgotten mirror)

A configuration . . . lifted . . .

Stable in the conflict vagaries . . .

The mirror-shimmering silver pool of myself.

CREON

There is a ritual I’ve seen will be much used.

On one unreeling line we have come in;

The future stems now from only me.

I bear the ponderous, the tragic weight is mine.

Drench me, dear Antigone, rinse me in your sorrow,

Sight me once again within your streaming vision,

Clear me in your dripping seas.

In your revolt you lifted an authority,

Grant me now your mystery in mercy.

65

Page 68: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Acquit me and absolve me.

ANTIGONE

Behind the surface sheen I sensed a depth . . .

And a tender pull, a forward secluded and melting . . .

I looked to search that soft infinity,

But, with every movement, my vision blocked my vista.

CREON

(closing the jaws)

Once you thought to judge. Which will it be?

Choose, girl, weigh the matter.

Perpend and take a stand.

ANTIGONE

(continuing with deliberate calm)

And I could not see past my own impression,

My face eclipsed my delicate abyss.

CREON

Damn me, my Antigone,

The pounding fist of ravage and upbraiding.

66

Page 69: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Forgive me, my Antigone,

The bending eyes of outpaced contemplation.

(in soft threat)

Antigone, continue it.

ANTIGONE

A boy kneels low and turns to gaze into the glazing float.

He is a mirror facing to a pool,

Transparency returns transparency.

From this there grows uncountable complexity,

Brilliance coils, light rebounds to brightness,

Narcissus ranging wildly, image after image,

Endless as the flowers that nod and beckon

The oracular grounds.

CREON

Did you ever think to look behind yourself?

ANTIGONE

You were behind me.

67

Page 70: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

CREON

I was above you, I am above you now!

(pointing to the mirror she has mimed)

That is where you fold into yourself under the mass,

The crush of my imperial retribution!

There you couch and shiver, little girl,

Winding in your self-absorption!

Your last salvage, a soul it is my power to erase!

You wallow in your own tautology!

(Silence. Antigone smiles. She has won.)

ANTIGONE

(not to Creon)

Yes.

The feral wisps umbilical to blank and instinct,

The marble absence wound in silken

Cerements and deathless. My apprehension

Foundered once and tried to tear an empire.

I peer, and empty to its filling witness,

Before a polished vacancy, before the mirror’s

Frozen stream. The ice clouds of my memory are yours.

I recall your estate. The clarity is mine,

And more. The drowning torrent of fear

Furls to the curling, the crooking of fingers around

The blood-lined, eye-impaling hands.

68

Page 71: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

The boundless combustion of outrage storms into

The steal of bending knees before the raining earth.

The onslaught of sensation, fluidity in pique,

Rush in flux and animates coolly

The figures of my feelings.

I see the fixtured gesture of my mood.

The shape is its deep, field and feature fused,

The next and nether, never and near,

Infolded they inside itself.

The feature cast, as in the ductile means,

Ceremonied in the stone, fluent in the verging tints,

Choired in the carving; the field it amples,

Swamps in welling, radiating out the radii

And tresses over bound on bound.

I see myself, for I am ardent,

Brutal, seething, and meticulous,

A fathom close to bestial,

A ravaging placidity, a delving in immobile,

In density indelible, springs into intractable

And forever winters come to me recurring.

Exit absolute.

Here the grave has given gravity

And massed a firming mask,

Conforming to an antique governance,

Fresh tongued and forming timelessly before the infinite,

Framing ancient passions.

The issue is born still,

Antigone’s the product of compression.

69

Page 72: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

In time, I saw a boy, walking a street of your city. He stopped and

looked at me briefly, looked at me directly, but his face betrayed

no expression, it offered up no register, as if he hadn’t noticed me.

He glanced around him, trailing some unheard tone that had

assembled his attention; an almost imperceptible sneer lazed across

his mouth, a slight grimace twisted his cheek, and it was gone. He

turned forward again, his face eased through its slow pivot, stopped

to stare at me again, impassive for a moment, and he began to

laugh. At first it was quiet, almost silent, and then the laughter

grew louder, grew raucous, it began to shake him, as if it siphoned

some well of vigor in him, transcribing his very vigor. And it was

self-aware, the laughter of a boy who thoroughly knew himself at

play, knew only that. I saw this, but I can’t say what triggered it,

what started him to this strange, caroming laughter, this laughter

nearly rioting to delirium. It does not matter. And I can’t say what

he was laughing at. He was laughing at nothing, and moment by

moment he caught the laughter from himself. This thing he

suffered was hermetic, self-sealed, self-perpetuating, it fed on its

own infection, as laughter is contagious, a contagion to itself. I

searched his face again, I tried to capture his eyes, and then I saw

his features virtually had dissolved, been wiped clean from the

quaking egg shell, all except that roaring mouth. Its ends began to

spread and crack levin threads across the then convulsing nacreous

rock. Patches of his skin began to pustulate and rot, stumps of

muscle liquefied to pulp, oozed and spattered to the ground.

Maggots and vermin broke through the skin at his joints, hideous,

teeming in the seeping pus and bile. And still the laughter grew

more hysterical. Valves, finned tendons, suckers on atrocious flora

70

Page 73: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

that erupted from the thighs and sides, reverted in the stenching

air and grappled with his flesh. Crumbling skeletal excretions burst

through black and scorched. Loathsome violet serpents strung and

flowed the loins, the iris of the fundament was fouled with the

sweetness of tears. Larvae deposited the larynx, dazzling worms

bored the spewing gut into torturous spasms. Dried blood on the

hands smoked in poisonous mists that mingled with the bellowing

laughter in the blazing white helium. Out of the pavement around

the howling carcass, enormous spiders arose, with phosphorous

blue eyes, cattle snouts, and formidable profiles, devouring the

rancid droppings. The sky flamed silver, three suns scoured the

heavens, buildings gnarled and bansheed, whole cities chaosed in

crimson horror, breaking their habitual assortment. Florid vertigo

gurged us, a dimming nausea choked off the acrid sting of the

swirling fog. In it, he had been dispersed, he had lost his shape, his

very living soul. Then the smoke began to slow, and to dissolve,

And, winnowed slimmed to weaving strands,

Eddy and tenuous, in curtainous phrasings,

Wafting tortuous and supple. The sundering,

Raging, reft, and stipulation ebbed,

Lapsed, and palmed me, necessary,

Lissome from shock waves to wavering mysteries,

Abandon in vaporous richness, out of wretchedness

And wedging downgrade, quiet into transport.

Then I saw, composed in the lulling veil,

Inlined in the haloing, heliographic glow,

Reflecting on me, static in agile, arc in serene,

My own face.

And I strove to gaze into the eyes I strained to lift.

71

Page 74: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

CREON

Narcissus cracked like fired ice,

As you will in time.

ANTIGONE

That turbulence was your descent.

That boy was Haemon.

(Creon howls out his horror, his hands claw at his face, and he

crumbles to the floor, writhing.)

ANTIGONE

He will not be coming here to die,

This time. The plot is at halt.

(Creon remains on the floor, incapable. Antigone considers him

several moments, emotionless. Then she gazes off to the wings.)

ANTIGONE

I remember craning at the heat of distant fires,

72

Page 75: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

They pearled a thunderline.

My course was snarled and Gordian by your enterprises,

Smeared and clogged with your commerce,

Your bartering and merchant skills,

Bladed in the valley of your riches.

I was not left to follow through my simple purposes.

Uprise was the first endeavor, renewing the triumph.

The first was in your time, for here is purity.

Damn you! Damn your reign. Yours is the past

In death.

There is a world betides between two breaths,

Bubbles up to globe, it fancies, falls,

A bay of wonder transitted between

The expirations, rumination’s den.

Within each one that instant’s atmosphere

Stages out a drama; converse, parries,

Adverse, soliloquies and arguments,

A cause discoursed, a tormentor returned,

A victory, sculpt an emotion, anatomizing

Attitude, imaging a mood:

A wish reacted, the fabling of gilt,

The myth of a brood, the legend of a sigh.

Dreamt at dawn alone before a grove,

Before a lover, before a coming death,

Subsists a second and subsides, followed

By another, every time but once.

73

Page 76: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

But I will chrysalis in capture, spill

Up, percolate the vacant, fisting into

Misting riveted, from circuit’s cell,

And pass through to the inverse out of time.

I will exalt me, escalate, escape

Into the momentary still imagined,

And endow me out above the belting,

The horizoning currents you have cut.

It is . . . the one place left for me to go.

And what if all’s . . . And what if God,

And what if death, and what if all creation

Is not criminal, what if it is the victim?

What if the resonance I’ve felt in everything

Is the trembling of a child?

(Antigone stoops and returns to her embers. Creon rouses himself

and turns on her, weak and infuriated.)

ANTIGONE

But breathless they deflect, the ending seize in languor,

Linger flash and phrasing, frozen in,

Scintilla set my bay of speculation,

Finalized . . .

74

Page 77: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

CREON

Longer! I’ll fray, in my unending siege,

I will fray and raze and finish your implosive selfhood!

ANTIGONE

(detached)

Listen to the augment of your stricture.

CREON

You will not crack and shiver to my stricture?

You will not deign to totter from your horst,

Crack and shatter to my flaming stricture?

I will make you topple! I pronounce the sentence!

ANTIGONE

You bay your cacophonous naught.

CREON

You cannot elide from me!

All I state is utter!

75

Page 78: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

ANTIGONE

You wallow.

CREON

The accession’s added to by every will to dam the run.

Every thought tails to the last.

ANTIGONE

Guide the river, my lord, if you will;

Helm the torrent. Pass me by.

CREON

Run by will to dam it.

You have encircled yourself.

ANTIGONE

As you say.

76

Page 79: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

(Here the two freeze a beat. Then Creon rises to his feet, entirely

calm.)

ANTIGONE

I have avoided your succession, eluded your eternity.

And I have spun another, in absentia.

By virtue of my passion.

CREON

By virtue of my crime. Fare well, Antigone.

(During Antigone’s final speech, Creon slowly steps backward out

of the light, vanishing at the precise point from which he entered.)

ANTIGONE

In silver smooth and coruscating, glistening

The only motion, back, the mirror inverse

Of the punctured night sky’s mind.

They punctuate and scale in frieze of light

The dungeons where we age and wrestle,

Lay the ice and diamond claim.

77

Page 80: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Like a crucible inverted,

Lanced as sacs and light evacuated,

Abjure to abscess, relegate as aposteme,

Clamped back to the soil and socketing the earth.

So sinters the dross. Locked to its landing,

Leveled by its conflagration,

Pressured by pressure, pocked, smote and bitumen,

To a politic bulk and bearing pressure’s mold.

Its what hums to vapor’s concentrate, the rarity,

Strained on to distill, shudder to shimmer,

My lifting surge of quiet rise,

Will coalesce my resolutions’ statuary,

Firm and drift into the compact and the breach.

Like fallen, drifting leaves and petals, blown,

Emerald shreds and shavings of spinel,

By his billowing. But lofted

By the acquiescing birds, slit along the air lanes

That they crosstide, stream, and carry on,

Discipled to the harvest, prophets to the sowing.

Tatters to the fall deposited,

The thirst of dry leaves sizzling in the throat of doors,

Astride of the star scheme, pattern past the clamor,

Constanting, con-sequential, clot the shrines

And altars, heap to muzzle the cult’s state

And light into regalia of permanence and cease.

Like the veiling of garnet, arras the hang of the garment

78

Page 81: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Void of its victim, lunged down, and softly,

The vertical still of the dark, a stall of the vacuum,

Sheering the centering absence,

As if reflecting silence, absence set in verse.

Pulled out of life, unpawned, unpuppeted, unanimated

By no breeze, no breath, no hand,

Expressed beyond the vary and retort and immigrant,

Cast to unravening, as by the Dactyl,

Where knowledge brings with it a grace,

— The clamor and mesh of reluct is related

To webbings relucent, found and founded

The antique to come — returned to whence I came.

Laid to the pull and accorded,

Last to the gravity, left and imponderable,

An empty robe hung in an empty room.

(Antigone is still for several moments, then folds into herself. The

light fades slowly and

Blackout.)

79

Page 82: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return
Page 83: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Selected Poems

Page 84: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

82

The Hollow At The Core

There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry. — Martin Gardner

As os arcs arctic argencies spine light.

A throw’s a mere extrapolated here,

A man’s a mere ascription, nominon.

The hyal cyan slits, shoot iris shoal,

And flutes flowed florid, asps of scarlet apse,

The squint rose sprays to layers membranes blaze,

The world whorl whirled bowl by concurrent seas;

A hand to glove, a Chinese box of eyes.

Or space will spiral spied by site unscene,

Or orifice will orb the common scroll.

Or porcelain resigns a mating hail,

And face to face to fan in symmetries,

The specular repair to rhyme in tiers.

A glaze will glance to gain the puppet gaze,

Or rivet to the glare in coupling sheen.

Pane clarified the fetch fled and relapse,

And plunge the spread refuse and folds reply,

And whispered fields repleat in non on non.

The rain ran runnels down the pulsant wail;

The curling smoke of genius wraps the night.

Page 85: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

83

The Last In memory of Rhoda Spielman

The soil has sieved her, drawn her, steeped her, downed

And flocked her to the bedding of its ought;

A granulate, soft sift to silent drifts,

Lit lightning wince of every saber thought.

The seep unsoled her, souled her, sold her sleep,

A gravitate of galaxies of she,

The purchase of the ground, her weep to black,

And percolate into infinity.

The settle fractions strew to grid a term:

The snow of her in melting, sinking rime;

And darkness curls in darkness coils about

The velvet bones beneath the skin of time.

A roll suspension rounding on a dearth;

The particles geometry the last

And trace a correlate continuance:

But every torment figured in its cast.

Self matricied and gentle to its gone,

And damped, dissolved, devolved upon the earth;

The thunders whish her breathing, storms converse

Her generation, seas beat on her birth.

Page 86: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

84

Tremor

reflux de vie en toutes fosses, hommes debout sur toutes dalles, et la vie reprenant toutes choses sous son aile! — St.-John Perse

The night she died three stars fell.

Mulling under dormant nascencies,

Cobalt and recumbent, unconcerned,

Glister-chipped and pasturing my moods.

The glimmering sands gash, the sky keel caves

Shore beads, still blazing, sheen scales, seething schemes

In scatter, rider gleams, on flowing skeins

The glance skates, flake, skim, and die, skip back:

The diamond trails. The heavens hazard light

And rock. Sculpture powder luminate

Hung gravitating foams, bleeds brilliancies;

Incendiary lace, jewel steaming rib,

Barreling beauty to the closeting

Lips’ edge, — fast vapors gem the hemisphere,

Cut figures in the night, — recombinant

Star sleeve, meridians a maw.

Out from the choke of graves,

Page 87: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

85

Close and clot of sifting dynasties,

Cool whisked the burden dust.

The rush, the thunder, rumination ran —

The dark a range and laving — long and limned

A genius swell.

The diamond spattering,

Scintilla shot the clarity, the breeze in sheen,

Vibrancy in gleaming speculation, spumed

A churning hush of luster in the lull.

One diamond rimed a phrase in preface,

Clean as triumph, lord as flung,

But then the ghosts were breathing promises.

Black winds wound the sand weeds,

Restless at the steep sea edge,

Splintered, bristling as the weathered ash.

Trident cracked by bolts of blinding ire,

The rife of every splay and seething spread

A talon flashing, cnidoblastic cleave,

Abruptly sidelit latent architecture,

Dark’s girders, roots, profiled foundations for

The simmering ukase. Light breaks like glass.

At base black ordonnance, while white weal crown,

Strike silver geysers, flame and blare the stone

Rake, train the slab of cloudwork, brandle, known

Page 88: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

86

To quelling, bombard back the river’s tone,

And in unheeding chase with all unending

Consequences of conceiving, seize! —

A corps to bore, braze, close the tempered glow,

A battery for the core quietness.

A tatter rags a bay wind, beats and snaps

And dangles to the hush of thoughtlessness.

At shattered woods, winds, broken stones

The fuming, preying bone breath coiled

Sentences, plaited a pillared loom, walled

(And vapors lift like souls) a mass, a musing cavity,

Within the nearly crystallized enclave, almost silence,

Almost scorched to glass.

Ash stunted, fusion flexed and solder masked,

His marrow graphite as he signatures the breeze.

Consecutively strands unclasped the auricle,

Rung down on the vitrifying masque, rung down three

times, —

She wove and stormed the vacuum fisted distances

That throat the clutching, every movement making maze, the

fear wrung forms;

At air shock grasses stiffened, fingerstalks uncurled.

From Nausicaa he wafted free, launched by his beneficence.

Page 89: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

87

These forged and fragmentary runes have strewn the sands.

The strands were plowed by thunder,

Continented, valed, and river snarled,

Grimaced in a hissing mesh of foam,

Engraved to lace the late geography,

Resound the lay of hollow competences,

Thread to map the slipping empery cut in

Diminishing relief.

Brass pantomime and lithic colloquies

That echo by a casting generation,

Wrung out, rung iron, mere reverberations,

Sized, a dying fall.

Scraps of light clatter, beam broken memory,

The blood and cinder stub scrawls, spangle ooze exuding,

By oscillations in and out of night,

Reflecting, vibrant to a tone.

The hollow resonates with its own depth,

The cinctures drum and range caverns to

Absence; white acid grinds the sand tract; breath

The lotic hope slips back, uncorridors

The flood to stall, evacuates the cope.

One stream the sparkling grume smear draws and veins

The venom line, the stemming scar, the planets,

Page 90: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

88

Sick with their redundancy, light hot

To bite the sky curb, cool enough to rattle

Moon thin tissues, leaf the tides.

By three roads, tapped by three names —

Dorje staggered; tombstone looped:

The slowly pooling slide to swirling

Witnesses, the spinning pit, the quarry,

Belting torrent of dissolving rock

Throng lunar ancestry and auditors

Deposited in every hell, the mind —

An estuarial confluence of flows;

There’s one I can’t recall.

I’d thought great heart would pump life into apertures of

mire,

Tide a vital light;

The mouths mound merely ceca.

Reclining, cratered brash, crumbling talus spokes an ebbing

web,

Awkward, angled over his implicit crypt,

Beatling his doom.

At nearly silver shore, at broken palings,

White thumbs cracked to the domed densities,

Jawed by channels, mandibled by sheens,

Page 91: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

89

Gripped grains dribble to the still wave amassing.

Granule by granule, stone by stone,

Tremor to treble,

I took this to the near dawn end:

My hourglass dialectics.

In stilled, in stable midnight,

With folded wings the granite fates like lead,

The blown, star scalded bays,

The Theocritan hounds,

And all my precious people dead.

The gargoyled soot,

The embering wale,

My dire people burning in the air.

Écoute, écoute, ô mon amour,le bruit que fait un grand amour au reflux de la vie.

Page 92: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

The Eyes Lear Never Lost Une description ou représentation exacte de le qu’on pense — comme d’un phénomène — suffit à ruiner toute métaphysique. — Valéry, Cahiers, 28:540

What’s all that’s matter mats what’s matter’s more,

Laired inward let long low hum stallsome stilldom awe sum,

Chamber laid like lay low vein sew staid so thought sow,

All so, stressed, breath feathered, canistered

A heart subcrest and bedded to arrest,

Compressed vent, ovum-auraed, nucleaired,

Ore-aura-awed, core-aurum-aired, decorum

Underlie declare. Thought thumb threads etch,

At impress updraft, fume from draw, sit squints

The site, the bite bit cream green pucker, blooms

In vinegar run involution, mints

Indelible to grave, lay intricates

Voluptuous, dealt daedalus the gouge;

Come cauterize cum vacancy, accaust

Acuity incise; displacement dales

Through drawing on, an involute’s volition’s

Will, rist involute’s incharacter,

Transmission in inevident direction,

Socket print appropriate to thumb.

The glove’s the hand inhabiting the glove.

Endow induces seemliness to seem,

The rectitude re realize, the real

90

Page 93: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Of eyes read relative to undersee

(The labyrinth is struck upon the sea)

Submerse’s axioms of gracefulness.

Like live wire wormward lamps what’s vacant amps,

The frame alit lasts brackets in, as twine

Through skin, form fingers, fashions as a hand,

It tungstens flush fasts facts and figures, fleshes

Cues wills watts with lines of paradigm:

The signing out of cite play underlay,

The under breath, for say; writ rightness of

A disposition, cleanness of a cut;

Put patterning musts matter makes aware.

For crystal drench the turn and crook of grate,

The crystal lays in latency, the resin

Of the resonate, the standing waves,

Stood understanding, white lace nets to turmoil

(Introspection funnels down this skin),

Turned tangency turned graph, grown graphics, strokes

To siteless graphite, irresoluble,

Confusion, fusion, formants, turbulence

For controversy, paradigms preveil.

Well wetware whelms in wondermeant, so soft,

Sum set coordinate, coordination

Plan plot pulleyed, gear winch work the blush.

The hint purusance hunted through the door

Still stands behind the door. More mood enmesh,

91

Page 94: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Most atmosphere dimensions, compasses

Con vergings, drafts protracts, determination

Morphic made, the vague irresolute,

Place in the pace of perpendiculars

(Lost legend at the bottom of the drawer).

In order’s psyche, stall’s still patience, make

The matter, imaging imagining,

And patient paints in patency, as plain,

As plane, as sensible as algebra,

As state as territory to deter,

As architecture as dismay, as scrawl

Recalling, ward with wary atmostfear.

His fingers to the air, the stub is stump,

Is stumped, a wall touched is touched by a wall.

The factor out forever beat, forefeeling

Fourth of axial or fathom fall

Or logic logarithmic to a lore.

A butterslab of dark keyholes the hall

But every beat that bats through black abuts,

Their soundless wings wave water night and spasm

Light, the smoky current hemicranic,

But’s the batter, battens back, the muffled

And concussive slams, the cotton rams,

The pressure packs, the hammer thuds. The shocks

Of an unnatural air. The feel full cotton

Wadding wades in punctureless supernal

92

Page 95: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Close. So solid is the solitude.

The oil, the seeping rich, the surface slick,

The thick of it’s what’s lubricates the pass.

The buff of burnish buffets back and busy

Busses, nudging press against the head,

And stresses dense, with languid floral force;

And wing shear prickles fibers at the nape.

At startle distance, fed afar from, fathom

Float, the limbs pulse rhythm with the wavers,

With the waves, what, with the winds, the grazing

Drifts, the algorhythmic afferent shifts;

The wadding tides and tremors with the winds.

The fiber feelers tease the thud to thought;

Profundity’s a plummet sound, and faintly

Found: the drumming of dubiety,

The deadfall of the doubt. And every swerve

Of depths is stomach deep, the sweep of shadows

Fluming cobalt drowning into greys.

The metaphor’s, the meta’s for sweat swelling

Of distinguishments, in bellying

Auxesis, teaming merisis, for somite

Be the nuances, since surging rares

Of vertigo, by dilating dilution.

An I by eye? gurged absence viscous tense

Immensed braced concentration of a gape,

Coagulation clod the pleaching wisps.

Dark pivots and unlocks the door.

93

Page 96: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

What’s more than matter’s matter made and maps

In memory, remade is, moments membered

Into’s, strung on veins of once, remind,

And memory’s remembering. A thought

Will manufactures feel, feel factory

Through thought, conceive by broods, digest, reflect

Reflection, mime mentate, amok of metrics,

In affect an ideation, ape

Prehension, visceral intends; to see

Is grasping what’s pronounced; name tensible

Growth wordward transmits; thinking makes it sow.

The mind makes matter matters, matters matter,

Mat´·ûr(s). But an idea is a fact,

The soul’s in fact, and time. A term’s a tangent

Tangible. The period’s a word.

Now, naught but neurons are but neurons are

Inferred, inknown in noun, a noun’s a host

And in declension heard: a knower known’s

No knower: knower non, nor knowing none,

Now nowhere known: anon a noun aknown.

It’s pranked and bowed by levering. So souling

Hand fans phantom. Brain’s branch fantoccini,

Fantoccini catered with an eye.

The piercing thought transfixed and framed full fractions

Of discern. The drink of velveting

Of sense, informed, infused, to making sense,

94

Page 97: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

And seen, unscene, the circularity

Of pointlessness. Think it through. It dies.

Aridities the venture of a sound

Regard the serious untempered mind.

The sense of sense concentrics keys the mingle

Everything with everything, corruption

Falls the all with all, call calculations

Figured into veer in, sere in, frothing

Wadding packed in back the door, but passage,

Prone, to turn to wadding packed behind

The door. And instincts twine and twine their feelers.

Mist of charcoal dust in billows fogs

And graze between the trees, and dusk the evening

Into sober deeps, the choking sleeps

The marshfire of the named erase, the noteless

Trace, or order’s ordinariness.

The fading photo phantom-fails and ghost

Entrails and trickles down the mindment maze.

To ruminate is ruination. Smudge

Of knowledge, what is after, smears across

A folding screen. The lasting hum aware

Is worn and selves the particles of wake

That hinder in the gelatin of swarming,

Nest the hive of pillowing replies,

Hover to the destituting foam,

And turn as sleeper, smother in and settle

Like the gelid hand of absolution,

95

Page 98: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Spectral soft descending in the sieving

Snow, pollinating nothingness;

Given in the gravitate of grave.

Leave green pincers into tan, canaries

Caliper in slate, the marigold

Is bled cerise, the calcium’s distressed.

Indigo and naples yellow, turquoise

And the orange lake. A lake’s a ground,

A jet’s a hurtle blank, and lemon banks

The Dresden blue; the auric lazes, tendons

Lapis; viridescence crescents shades.

The mandarin, not dun, rose madder, hoared

His silver, sanguine grown, he burnt sienna

And the ochre of the Florentine.

Monsignor’s swathed in plies of saffron, speaks

Of puce and blent to whin. The salmon peaks

At peach, the flaxen tarts in mignonette,

Electrum wavers come incarnate. Mauve

It gazes at the damsel in cyan.

Monsignor spatters ash. Ceruleans

In orchid sleep, in lavender retire.

The fluency of gold is lost in thought.

The seep Cezannes a tissue into wash

And tints to rice paper transparent seas.

A double hinge heard disappears the door.

96

Page 99: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

The grid recedes in ocean waves, the butter

Wire cut, departs through churning batter,

Struts cross struts, hatch halls the voiceless clamor,

Towers loom, and magister by blocks,

By ranks, the air between withstands in damp

And drumming dusk, their warp weft weaves to tidal

Slides, the rinsing lines, the hazing shallows

Flourishing, the washing cees, the running

Esses, undulations synergies.

The minarets of vantage ornament

Mathesis of delight, the run of tear

Refines the curl, precisions spoke the light;

And wave on wave on pane eradicates

The reign, dissolves the dreaming, vistas drain,

Returns to geometrics of the night.

A mannequin is stalling mid step through,

To turn again, to turn back to the door.

An echo rhythms closure down the hall.

Musty light cat crawls the alley grate

In hunching glides and hungers after flames.

A numb is thumbing fire out of thought.

Towers loom a cenotaphic doom.

And moving rights, rutwrit, by fingers, soul

Sets center to the censure of its sense;

The nails across the wall hatch nibs that scrawl.

The grid is writ in water, writ in waves.

A pin has written age on faces, neural

97

Page 100: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Traces trim the play across the outward

Plasm splay (the street lamps arc in grins),

A scrim of skin, caress is carcass, stroke

A fingerstub, and fingerstub a sheath.

But whether wind will finger through the cards

Of harvest, toy the scrap of alley, scrape

The chisel of a wedge and clinic breach

To ledge, the foottread is an alley carbon,

Carrion a cleft. The flesh is chess.

The media are night air, rainpause pats,

Slow indigo piano echoes, glisten

Sills, and listen, snow ghosts whisker vapor

Lacing ghost, and neon fragrance rinses,

The lift, in pitch, the ocean orbs, what wallow,

Rise, in lilting waver raise, in scale,

A candle lit corona nape, the ripple

Shadow greens, the coral carnadine,

The lingeringly undulate, the well,

The wadding lip, the felt, the putty numbing

Of the fingertip, and distance chiming

In the trees, the breathing of anxiety,

The tick omit, spaces as expanse,

Expend, the ominous of monotone,

Accession of the monodramas, rustlings

And the sapphire drift, and memory,

And firelight. The set is mediated

And the media invents. Invention

98

Page 101: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

As in protoplasm. Every verging’s

Circle, circuit closes, circles chaining,

Rimming prison cell. Lorn lingers lace,

Four fingers case a case for, spaces space,

For tensor mysteries. For every tremor

Nears a technics, spasm is insight.

The hand that trembles pleads the door lock, wincing

Is its prayer. Hands tremble at their close.

A pathic reasoning, a need, a dream,

Hypothesis a wake left being dreamt,

Dream figures flesh and figure out the dream.

Futility of thought well thought, whelm felt,

Pasts passionately lent (what’s left is lean

And lean into is curling, curling cees):

The philosophic gouge, the lesion doubt,

The shiver thought, the eyes Lear never lost.

The aspect of interiority

Condensates to the tears upon, the glance,

Glare mordant burnish of the circum-stance.

The made of matter are the tears of time.

What’s phasing matters, what are phasing matters,

Woof and filler aromatics, steams,

Wolframiums and texts; and death is death,

What’s dun is done, as figures factor out,

As dreamer figures on; what’s time is thyme.

And gone is gone, a door gone is adore.

99

Page 102: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Conjunction Of The Senses

Alles Lebendige bildet eine Atmosphäre um sich her. — Goethe

In jedem Nu beginnt das Sein; um jedes Hier rollt sich die Kugel Dort. Die Mitte ist überall. — Nietzsche

Das Bekannte ist das Gewohnte; und das Gewohnte ist am schwersten zu »erkennen«, das heisst als Problem zu sehen, das heisst als fremd, als fern, als »ausser uns« zu sehn. — Nietzsche

There are no relative densities of here;

A hammerblow recoils a latitude,

Occurrence curts extensity and curls

The view round to; finger drum, pierce patience

Through, englobes, entones entirety;

However far rains whisper in the ear.

Core looms, a muteness clots, appear’s within

A circuit: subjects object aggregate,

Inhere, they nave the felloe, play deploy,

Coheres, the pillar swings surround and jars

The sloven, ports in current lay in line,

Glass cylinder can disabuse the eye;

And fragrant textures rush the halls of sound.

A life are loci for the pith of time

And stories in the tendency of flow:

A boy enroll, in toll, the spirit’s sole

And every each that cinctures all’s an utter;

100

Page 103: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

The boy inturned immensity, concerned

The tow and themed the role of history

(The point her touch’s would be filigree),

He closed the door and sored the broken wheel;

And drops will crater wave a way, a world.

The rain drop rings the water globe.

Event winds what was west left, vests bereft,

It sweeps the ocean rim of light, it cables,

Atmospheres, enalls; and so, content

Reforms to content, extent lie of extant

Foci pleat to superimposition,

Being in position: so an augend

Is its sum, each utter argues, augurs,

Is, each ardor, every spot is here;

Soft spots of sound closed round the step of thought.

And night range folds in rain lights, simmers faint

Felt fiber cracks, and droplets douse the seemings,

Satin thunder patter, draw the house,

The lawn, the eaves, they recollect the leaves.

And he’s as many me’s as memories.

Splay fountain spray’s concentric resonance

And mercuries in thrilling hushing down;

So in a sense, a moment’s, sense construes

(In fluid intimate) in tenor, tone

(The tenor’s tone) and vehicles a sense,

(In all I feel, I feel, I feel myself)

Wrapped aura, all recall’s a redolence:

101

Page 104: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

A suffered thing, a thing done is a tone.

But memory deposits memory,

A time upends a time. The pivots place,

Fact simple situates (effectual:

Affectual) and chemistries the outposts

To a fold (and drips its linen tones).

The splash’s (equaling) the only moment.

Any lit cognition trains in thus

And filaments the hemisphere of fore:

Remarks remark, unarc, resign, a line,

No utter’s more an axiom than other,

Laterally, latterly, or late,

Without us, ask us, Ascus, for Lycurgus

Grounds the earth, or else, the endomorphic

Transformation of Antigone.

(And she’s as many me’s as memories.)

The quantum’s a society. In sum,

Perspective withers in the ear. Hear,

The single stitch of place and lace is ever

Referent; and darkness spatters wisp

Of lull allure (in heart-height nearly herd

Alarms); and every sound regalaxies

The infinite macadam crust; (the moisture

Pace, the trace) and tattered lace is shred

And falling stains of clarity; one,

And after, one. And memory reposits

Memory, a time appends a time.

102

Page 105: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

The tear drop wrings the water globe.

Therefore; for every thought’s the point of touch

(The mind’s I is a fingertip), and instant

Is the premises, a logic lodged,

And what’s approximate is absolute,

And memory is hereing. Particular

Is singular, acute; and water gutters

Like a flame; or harboring in patient

Weight; or conjugates centricity.

In all, a moment’s a philosophy.

Recall: the moment whole, the moment gone,

The moment missed, the moment hole; absense.

(But barely breathéd tufted pounds pulsepause.)

The world is a redundancy of world.

Reflection’s written on the night-smudged glass

Of actuality, centrifugal,

Ellipsing luxury. A null imports

Without, and being cored, and every cycle

Oughts to magnet counter nucleate.

But distance delves, unearths, so sounding sounds

Unsound, unseen, undone and innosense.

The weightless hub, the capital regard

Forms fixture in the intrados revolve,

Such pageant light the spill and transport drift;

Hence, through a casement septuary stills

Congeal for foreign, far forms ever else.

103

Page 106: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

To Tender

tingling of the lips and tongue, loss of motor coordination, floating sensation, hypersalivation, numbness of the entire body, muscular paralysis, difficulty in swallowing, weakness, nausea, vomiting, convulsions, about 60 percent fatality in humans; no known antidote — Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition, Volume 14, p. 613

For I have seen the blowfish face fulfilled,

Et sein, und arrondie, with slapping, sucking

Sounds: the membrane boom a fumarole,

Thrustmass open-grinned, engorged — and gorgeous

The inflected lashes, febrile tendrils

Foam gesticulating lacings — flush

Flood-lunged and fluid-forged; luminous

In taeniate midnight, humid lamp the lower

(Surging is stropped to a stoke on the capuchin glower),

Lunar funicular; fore the gore’s agape

A waiting. Prickle fibers of a loll,

And fiber jolt at whisk and whisper (def.),

But a bauble of juice-tensile shimmies and murmurs its edge.

Fused mongrel warp the tugging street and bandy

Yahweh’s figure, lunge-locked, overlapping

Loiter, in the shiver frame of lane.

Tear hand as the tore arm drug by tendon

Thread, pendulumed by a tissue string,

Viscera-twist and perilous by a hair.

Valence-intricating intercepts

104

Page 107: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

And trends into intussusceptive blends;

Nodule of mammal brims its filament,

Giddies tear, drops, spalshes, crawls away.

And burbles glint and carom down an endless

Unastonished stare. Just; so, soft

And gave (medusae throb in basin sobs),

As such conger seas a congeries.

So, pliancy and dilate pitying —

A bed unbend to laze and flourishing

Ateem (the grotesque’s tumescent and limpid) a languid

Ghosts, adream, apulse, a pulmonary

Inspiration (the siamesed made mirror) —

Eye salt seas the paralytic gleam —

(And tumid for slaught), in lieu’d, plasticity

(They unite, untie, and toe unto

An undulating corps in creasing ever

Dormancy) — die, late and lurid of

Alighting, dunning, coreward ease, a turmoil

Seizing, furling, teasing out of rhythmic

Tick, time’s talk; to torrent the lacking, the laving,

To laking the torments, doused, drowsy, beating, downed

Into the solvent, darkly twining heart;

In dolence (valves logic); as organa

Coral falters, opal altars nod;

By wrath in wraith; of verging, callosal and Orpheus,

Starlight and tackle, carbon and gossamer cycles bonds

Phosphor and rife. Ours is not the life.

105

Page 108: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

La Pièga: A Gio’ Pomodoro

Neoß ef hmerh hlioß. (The sun is new every day.) Hrakleitoy

The instigation of the surface wrecks

The plate self-mating mind. The convolutions

Interfuse and flag the conflagration

Drags, the ruffles mountain contours to

The fold. They ridden, scaling, billow, boost

And hidden ridge in viscid mull: the mind

Amoeba jelly snaps and withers to

A pulse. A reflex through a light’s impress

And through an amniotic ever spirits

A dispersive tactic in convulsive sheens

The shudder thought: One thought by thought it shimmers

As it pails and plunges, plash, in creases,

Serpentines a film a touch recoils.

Pushed surfaces in ripple sinews supple

Currents flex and press, the tendons and

The cartilage of stone and casting spasms.

Black and lactic skins the balks and girders

Running to, the geometric jutting

Through, an architecture pressure its

Relief up through the flesh. Convenings lip

Conversant brims and mercury precession

106

Page 109: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Lathes (Congealing seethes, the insect feeler

Teeming rooting shoots in time, with labyrinths

Stowed in the puzzle haze. The grip

A multiple of grip. Futility

To steam the ice.), for boxes formulate

Themselves in algebraical device,

To clock the frieze in algorithmic rime.

Sun’s serpent rears for Galileo, eye

The spindle to the sky, when winched with highness

By the fathoms, by the comprehend.

And undersea unseen sensations pillar

Felt and movements ooze recesses to

The depths. Bacon trickled blood eruptions.

Bloodless curdles in the slow denote

Deep featureless upheavals roil and furnace

Blast the vents. The vertical intents

In tensions jet the heat degrees in torsion

Reify aphelions, vortex coolly,

Slap the syrup coal, vapor round

The gimbal, sift and settle through the lens:

Diffraction to orthogonal to shift;

The lateral of latency to drift;

And softly Debussy’s submersing down.

And then the coiling of the Euclid sun.

Paces swabbed with velvet black have crimped the alley grate.

107

Page 110: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Her hand has half reached out in prose,

Her hand in pause, feeling forth descended

The unenvisioned city of the lair.

Behind the air has shed the brownstones

And the wholesale bricks upon a street, still,

Dispensive sediment impacted, devoutly undevolved.

The air has drizzled down the fashionable rubble.

The night’s a sawtooth cataract. She seas

Remembered moments, drinking subtle coffees,

Reading Berenson among the hotel flowers,

On the viewside of Fiesole.

Handmade pages, bound in leather, blank,

Closed upon the table. Remembered just in time.

Recalled, she never saw the moon in daylight

Then, never just the moon.

And tried, to choose between the ardency

Of Renaissance of Florence or

The imperatorial of antique Rome;

To choose between the sentiment and the will.

The cradle of her neck has now gone cold.

And she has half looked back perhaps, perhaps

In flections out of curiosity.

The spikes and spires and vectors bunch and batter

Bout centrifugal, the scaffolding

Infists. The mental squared, compression to

Emulsify, encounters through: the contours,

Cramps, and flutter ribbons, crash of sequents,

108

Page 111: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Slapping belts and cracking to the rolls.

This justice pairs irreconcilably

The matrimony of the flash and sleight,

The flesh tones, flux in weave and overwhelming,

The very and veridical deny.

The sun deposed to melting heaps, the runnels

Simply run and snake the wreckage of

A stonish mound. And then the foments and

Entangle, meticulous and to the lacing

Bind, and to the lacing borne.

In memory a resonance returned,

To broach and slow the repetition shore.

The watch has stopped, the grit streams from the docks,

A grip in flicker, purchase of about.

The Vladimir wing wraps the breeze without.

109

Page 112: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

The Planetary Flaw

The deadly misfires scorched the lawn of languor,

Vagaries, and hate. The frozen cascade

Stands occurrence. The astral gate has slammed

And sand has broken through the glass and strewn

To lock this time machineries of noon;

Successions stammer to geography.

In faery fields, past mist concorded straits,

On distant islands, nowhere, does she wait.

The fearsome and dismay redemption chats

Retick and grin the installation map,

For what you wield can’t be which will wield you.

In meantime, skin is flaking from the skull.

Forlorn for circumstance, for me, for fate

It isn’t floats the fever stains of faith,

The vector grimace inclination trait,

Or parametrics of the levitate.

And Venus hasn’t risen with the dawn.

110

Page 113: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

The Radical Of Mars

The wind has picked by miles and descends

Upon the flue and combs and fingers through

The drifted ashen particles construe,

The patency of gardened discontents,

And mounds in figures bundled into trusts.

The fuse has blown the radical of Mars,

And drawn, and starlight breathlessly arriving

Vaporizes in the stew of argyle,

Blatancy, and rest. The sizzle fizzes

Steam into the rue. True heart is blacked

And sooted through credentials of the means.

The ligature of visible retain

Contracts to fragrant intimation cusps.

A single atom figures out its thrust.

111

Page 114: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

White Tactics of the Stone

The mind rides high and spites the sainted coils

That spike the vinegar of spasm, spur

The skeletal remains behind and bends to wrack.

The streets of ruin track the serpent’s guts

In labyrinthine smuggle of the phantom

Hounds in fathom downs to slip the tooth

To comprehensive throat. A hand breaks through

The ice to tangle ligaments of thought

And pull them to. The ligature of spiral

Binds the snake of intellected column.

Child mind abouts the blundered grave and solemn,

Pule and purling drifts of innocence

Are geared to increments of the omit,

And ratcheted to lapse, the red balloon and bloody,

And unencumbered by the flight to drive,

To recommence the fantasies of done.

Ice splinters tick the netting of intents.

The artisan in dreaming act obtain

Invisibly white tactics of the stone,

Strategics, pressed in darkness, fold alone.

And braced to bronze and poured to spine, and Donatello said,

As boys rehearse their music lessons by the severed head.

112

Page 115: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Museo Missionario

Convento di San Francesco, Fiesole, Italy

The fossils of the social beast

Have etched the repetition self.

Where polar slabs have slit their teeth:

The Cadmus strown along the shelf.

The mirror shaved the worst to least.

Some pharaohs rose up from the wood.

They letter out identically

The Bacchic spell of quietude.

The sunshines scald afflation wheels,

The sand in back their vitrine home.

The figurines their must can spleen.

In aeons now they stand alone.

Behind them grind the slipping grist,

The fisted gaze, the palsy burned.

They flying buttress elbow list

The moment that one’s back is turned.

The Kewpies standing stalwart fan.

Their regal faces pock the glass.

The mandible erects the grin,

113

Page 116: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Incisors whish the warm command.

The oars reduced the turbid sheen,

The obelisk helium lit,

Cartouche sand scored in absency

The labyrinthine tombs omit.

The temples hollowed through with wind,

Colossi crumbled through to dust,

From Thebes to Thebes the pillars thinned,

The mind Antigone impulsed.

The fatted calf walked water lanes

And shattered down to salt the waves.

The casting wade bred settle grains:

Benignity’s ten thousand graves.

The chorus line turns back to bow,

The gods to take the rahs, the murk

Of ferment seas foamed faith and brow,

Beatific missionary work.

They will not see, they will not speak

And more than three for they repeat.

The ghosted backhand butts the meek;

The fatid ponder quits the seat.

114

Page 117: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

By peer on peer they melt a door:

The savage glass imposing sun.

The world’s a fido waiting for

A master who will never come.

115

Page 118: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Twice

No stone remotes the smoke in being made.

The hazes play to animate,

Inphases fade through multiplate;

Some riven into galaxies the writhe,

The star stream flows in bullets of the night.

The powder steam storms, thud thrown dust forms figures

Flicker feint, ghosts of hand articulate

In mime, remind, pan flat, and dispirate.

The pounding spray grooms imagery of grace,

The waft to settlement congealing down.

The guttering of squander rains in black

To quail to pulse of mean, or near, or meant,

Float gaze back punctuations through to rent.

Each shudder to the hollow of the bone.

Such snow on ink. The snow does not descent.

As marble slopes absorb the marble pour.

While still stone stands, forms foams at mallet rise;

The cloud ways waver, hammer at the eyes.

Eyes puncture to the running liquor night.

Curbed constellations quiver at no breath,

No beat, no peace, the florin resonance.

Thoughts chewing at the corner of the mouth.

Each incarnation, each incarceration

116

Page 119: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Drinks and preens the slam, the tensile thought,

The drill bite, bit with antiquary shunt.

The momentary intrigue bides the binary of hence.

The spuming of the calcium, black ink

Streaks charcoal streets, while white chalk phases fail.

Cerebral re-creations claim selfsame disparity.

Medusae shrill the visually air.

The chisel slit, the hammer ram, the blow,

Among the dissipating merge, the verge

Of vaporizing trails, confirm the ledge;

Twin faces stood at quarters to the hedge.

117

Page 120: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Ravel

The hand that unintended lifts

The mirror to the fingertips.

The mouth disposed to glazier sips

Indues the understanding rifts.

The knowledge of deployment hangs

The kettlebar with polaric hands

That rayed concentricated bands

Beneath the corticated bangs.

The roil up foamed the planar ball

About the dislocation oar

A hesitation riveled or

Arrhythmic arithmetic pall.

The intersection of the round

Bay slit and cleaved the wings in doubt,

Performed the pas de deux devout

And consecrated on the sound.

A turbid thought immovable,

Firmed fuming fixed centrifugal

Omits the fourth orthogonal:

The spasm of intangible.

118

Page 121: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

The palm that calmed the forehead claims

The vapor dissipate remains

The scarp of memory disdains;

An ovoid hovering the frames.

The volume stacked of echoes such

That binding clouds and pores to sup

The mesmerizing coffee cup;

The paper thickens to the touch.

Reflection’s whetted at the mattes

And hues, recall’s the humid pass

That jarred the smudge upon the glass:

The spherical before the flats.

The passing to forever was

The passion gone to kingdom come,

The bearing slipping from the thumb,

Now done undoing what it does.

And tantamount to being facts

Remount the febrile hand to act,

The sculpted forms resound and blacked,

And music seals the thumbprint wax.

119

Page 122: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Terza Rima

The sucking pit the sea in hollow thumbs

The gouge thalassa gurgitates in thought

The crags of castle rip tooth through the hail

And granite tatters cobwebs into time

The grains abrasion gravel scours air

The vinegar pinch squints to pressure dent

Serration is the furrow of this brow

The pucker drubbing pushes back the give

The shifting of the totter ticks the seethe

A barometric smattering of sunk

Through intermittence honeycombs intend

Amazement labors labyrinthically

The grottoes of the mulling roil the stew

Gnarl gorgon concentrations mate the streams

The play of mind is pattern in the fray

So daedal condign by vapidity

The freedom plunging packs to make a scene

The fault of falter fails infantasies

The acts commission sets by their constrain

120

Page 123: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Hands strain to raise against the blazing squall

Sulfuric destitutions dilate haze

The waters of depression drown the seas

The drift is lost in matters ruminate

The thresh in wishes trundles fluencies

Retaining walls re-semble in the mist

The blow is balanced in exact by wait

A composition magnetizes drone

The sea is tears acquired into lapse

Dispel discharges charge is block by block

A milk white wind and gusting razor smooth

For mirror reifies eradicate

The slice of life and in take equaling

Exhaust but wind will while it doesn’t knot

A soul’s abillow bellows to its leave

The slit through slid stamps sliver to the leaves

In clenches drop corruption to its sheen

The shiver shaping shelters in as sheath

And rhythms static serrying its team

The tremor breathes back terror in its teem

121

Page 124: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return

Idyll Of Spring

The scented vapors mingle with the breeze

And cooling dusk swells, smothering the day;

They gather up the wine-drops of the trees

As I walk with Apollo by the bay.

The quiet waves drink in the thundercrack

That dissipates above these sons and daughters

Of robes of lavender, eyes ivory black;

With carelessness she kneels to kiss the waters.

Her gesturings are, in this gentle gloom,

Grandiloquence of indolence that must,

Despite the ardency that you assume,

Withdraw to leave you writhing in the dust.

122

Page 125: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return
Page 126: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return
Page 127: Coarctate: Antigone’s Return - egs.eduegs.edu/genericPDF/Coarctate.pdf · love, identity, and reason in e.a. poe by bent sØrensen (criticism, ... coarctate: antigone’s return