Rosmarie Waldrop / Enclosure

The act of watching, surreptitiously.  The illusion of intimate understanding.  An approximation of love?  Like ventriloquy.  One abyss inside another.

On a spherical surface which, says Einstein, corresponds to real space, every closed curve contracts inward.  Closed eyes introduce an erotic quality.  (Hedge?  Palisade?)  The inner workings of the body.

On the spherical surface, inward means all directions.  There is no outside.  (No outcry?)

In one city, this takes the form of a street ringing the center.  As if to mark another year in the tree.  Outgrown, it curves down chimneys and screens for deep tissue.

Subways hidden underneath the street.  A man’s idea of a womb?

See also skyscrapers.  What grandiose gestures start up in the heart.  Before settling into an economy of reflex and wreckage.  Orgasm as such?  Crosses the mirror.

By dint of attention, could a reader implode?  Into a vicious protagonist?  Without coming up for air?  Deep thicket.  Whereas virginity, though fragile, allows no entail.

Cf. the illusion that we can analyze nature, physical or human, with eyes closed to the means used.  Unhinge the shadow barrier without cracking the wall.

The inward contraction of the spherical surface can be mapped upon forgetting.  As the home of consciousness.  The orgasm in the next room.


CUE:  A Journal of Prose Poetry
Summer 2006 Volume III, Issue 2