Evan Isoline

EVAN ISOLINE

The Letter I

It was no sunrise. How did they know it was

something like the zero-god story in the nursery,

so beautiful to everyone who wanted to tell it?

Even the perversity of this digital pastiche

remembering only that it was one of those times

we'd been trying to do the right thing, and we'd been

caught out in our recalcitrance. We’d window the hubris of science and love

frightened bare, and carry the drudge towards the day

so it becomes not a hopeless event but a pinnacle of high art

which was the first murder I ever felt.

We were tasting of valley and mountain in the nullity

of dispersal, compressed into the vagaries

of the mould, of the castes and ills

of drama,

of epoch,

I can see the subjunctival color illuminating the funnel and whorl of system in source

or indeed the dip in temporal proliferation

about the edifice of the bloodshot

jism of the sun, I can see flaming freeways

effecting the serial descent of millions into the substratum

confounding or taking back the teeming interspace;

in magenta serpents of interproximal pain

—to be seduced or not? Who is to know?

Bright and radiant poplar

red cedar antlers

pointing down the hill

buried crosshatched into granite's blueprinting a prelude

the words of intrepid analogics

racking up mock sweet-nothings in cerulean teeth

doubling off and shackling back in salted circles,

composed only of tension and fugacy, fully submerged—

They’d contain said ephemera, in the paucity of detail

the cambium staining fluidized on the old leaves, or find an emarginate

dollop of fluorescent horns in the infructescence.

After an infrared nap they’d rise from sleep again to bare

the flat-tipped flutes sine wave by sine wave

I wish I had words

just for this length of time to become an un-swallowed

amphibian hurled across the cave wall of the body, tinder paper of skin

off-muted hue when I've yanked the cells from this

fossil of a landscape, I think the poem’s in there somewhere

though it has rotted away to seaweed-smelling spaces between my ribs.

I can’t remember the whole of it, the nouns and modifiers

reversed into hesitation, canted only by the tiny carbon

voice

of taxonomy, its base and mass spore

extends over the crystal grass with fractured rhizomata

sampling and seeking recondite interrelations of fruit, petal and prism

from the baseline, from the tremolos of singularity,

somewhere up in the nectar-velour of night,

a pimped country

anomic and starting over and
erasing, the trace of impossibility everywhere my thought falls

a bruised plumor, blindfolded and in a dungeon.

Two new paradigms—one vast and behemoth, the other small and warm and brilliant. One utopia, the other dystopia.

One my unutilized

expression, two my sole appendage of iambs, an

autogenous

colony of organisms self-herding to the incipient

technotheism of pubescent primes, adrift between the imperative and the perdurant

inceptions of pre-datum, emerald bracts

round the abaxial

hanging among bats with gold gems in their throat-holes

before and entries after

the creeds

and pelts of wet emeralds

of flame

oblivion I mean the flame

soaring above my blank

sunstruck eyes.

Oh let me not be on fire.

I’ve only told what is in my heart

that has travelled from chalkline to chalkline

and of all the topics of philosophy

this one’s a splinter working its way through the tongue

& how the slyest had come here and done just that from the outset, used the electric maggot how

extant or obtect

I at the same tincture of omen, I at the same tradewind athrash against futility & deceit & arrant failure, a recusant question mark, a fogstar, in all possibilities

longing for bolides of crystal icicles to tear off

and by everything not divisible by gravity,

by every taste for recurrence,

in concrete of the greyest reich

speak hussy and god the chow is ripe, so sizzling out, thick inside the oblative girth

I spent ten hours scavenging orange dunes from pre-macheteed melons

where the mule wretches by day and who is that who is

map-black at the petal margin

in the ragged brogue of dread, of which I guarded you on,

of what was once, then is not, now is, or just how,

how scurrilous, conquering the vomit of pomegranate seeds

inside the vagina of revolution

a slip, an ulcer from the miscellany of cubes

a numb cloud, skeef beneath the valence

of dispersal, of gradual deterioration

into smaller isometric figures

contralateral to the burden of one-note simplicity

between lust and banishment,

no knowledge is more perfect than one’s own

My voice My monologue My move

transformed

by an aesthetic osmosis of forms

so there is nothing left but the versatile idea
and its watercolor tongue

a song of translation—a desire

will never or soon will be. Light, for all your platitudinous nonsense coming up exudes from every cell in the picture window, the naked gold star of my baneful ghost, it is and it was always there. I know it’s something I need to understand about myself, not the self I thought I knew, not the self I imagine me being, but only for the uncaring universe and lastly, for the letter I, which I said
I never was.

Evan Isoline is a writer and artist living on the Oregon coast. He is the author of PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY (forthcoming from 11:11 Press) and the founder/editor of a literary project called SELFFUCK. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 3:AM, Full Stop, Ligeia, Witchcraft Mag, Surfaces.cx, New Sinews and more. Find him @evan_isoline.