From EICHA II: The Book of Lumenations
The theurgy of delight is a drawing down. The urgency of the light is a
drowning dawn, the resurgence of the light is adoring drawn; a
drawing down, a drowning dawn the urgence, a drowning, a
dawning a knotted dawn the delight of the light resurgent
alight in the urgent emergence; to light
in the days of our hunger
And in the ache of asylum
I have bent my bow
framed in the anchor of candied dalliance —
screaming in strung shadows, revenance
where limning sutures, festooned in sunshift
Lie with me
in the illicit quiver
of knotted conscience
Languish
through whispered harbors’
pressed exile
among evening’s inheritance;
the providence of slipped
semes slants
sucking twilight
of latticed scatter
From EICHA III: The Book of Lumenations
Sheltered in netted inlets
of ripped dyssemia, fleshy sequiturs, wisteria, the taste of broken bans—
Hail the billow of campy siege, the truance of gilded travaille
And make me dwell in the darkened wreckage of feverish dread
In the censored resonance of pliant heaves;
The plated shudder of my parade.
Burn me in the binding bias in torqued harrow.
For I am woke in the swindled aperture of fibrous light;
And I am giddy with shaded want in the quiescence of ludic clues
Naked with his yoke in my mouth
Let him sit sultry for he has laid upon me
Let him put his mouth into the dust
Offer his shackles to the smitten
Let him be filled with peaches
From EICHA IV: The Book of Lumenations
And as care curls / in her swirled whorl’s
spurred leurre / stirred
spur of porous roar
whose flayed fray forêts
flurried fury fiery folly
flares in the florid lore
of soaring horror
in the ripped wrought
raw lot
And in the raging contagion
of the yoked hurrah
we are riddled in thick drift
and drunk with iniquity—
asking whose balletic thirst
is clasped
in the synonymy
of our yaysay, purer than sinew, and wet with dusk
ruddier than choral, sapphire, milking crimson syrups
sifted riffs of spilt surfeits
Whose skin a
buttered vortex of fruited
folds fluted affinities
of ripened whim
crowned in syllabic aberrance
Adeena Karasick, Ph.D, is a New York based poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of 12 books of poetry and poetics. Most recently is Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017). https://www.adeenakarasick.com