Ideology of Sky by Eric Wertheimer


Regulus by J.M.W. Turner

Regulus by J.M.W. Turner

There are gobbets
glimmering on the windshield
 
not rain. I divide the
pecan forest, the neglected wonderground,
 
windbattened unmothered animal,
Chiclayan Airbase in Arizona. Struggling sun.
 
Movement droops
in the road, asks why
 
passage twists odd and threatening,
apostrophe itself as
 
a form, earth’s reverse creation, poured
from the blue, unassembled gravel.
 
.............................................
 
Then her face began to snow, or
to descend in a field of small bailings,
 
she underplanted her roses thereby.
My sister, on the other side of this dash,
 
even still at the back of my eye.
Organized in pairs, pawed from the sky,
 
four companions haunching through the dwarves,
A B C lined by Rhodope and Erigone,
 
they’re up there and blanching the sun in setback darkness.
But it is probably dense and white,
 
and directly unobservable
the blue white companion of itself,
 
a spectrum of a pair at length,
the accident of a guess against
 
the hazard of a shower
of many-colored air: abduction.
 
............................................................
 
There is a line of beaded charms
that encircles the spatial eros
 
of the maps that led me here,
the reluctant morning
 
in which the pulling off of the lid of night,
and these hard-to-look-at
 
loved things, made the
globe slow its oceanic washing.
 
At the 15th ecliptic constellation of Babylonia,
where horizons sprout horizons,
 
the gems ambiguate Carthage;
they guide me to heliacal rising of the
 
morning, and the slunk storm of your brow.
I found a meridian cloud
 
angsting in repeated apparitions above
and curved to the dusty fields and the
 
orange-banded hills, grape-spilling valleys, sun bomb.
A canal and the exploded star
 
that sets fire to it every September,
behind solstitial colures, the stringed tune.
 
There are four great circles up there
—Venant, Satevis, Vascheter, Hastorang—
 
gravity darkening the vowels, pausing
in the cargo of time’s distance.
 
.....................................................................
 
Some called it basiliscus
and it stood for the entire sky, chording back
 
to the womb which is its inversion, its negative,
but its identity too, all the same.
 
Wake to nothing
aside what is bluntly hidden
 
by positions of chance
Belleville to North Bay, to Why to Chinle.
 
Each day is misshapen close, oblate, very short
by nine hours, so the length of your self is spun farther,
 
while thick and rounded,
Bahia’s river, the have-to-be
 
that flows south of the meridian.
The day is nothing but day
 
And inside you, the day is nothing but its absence,
occult eye, the sky.
 
 
 
Eric Wertheimer is Professor of English and American Studies at Arizona State University. He is the author of Underwriting: The Poetics of Insurance in Early America, and Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature, 1771-1876. He has published poetry in Exquisite Corpse, Perihelion, Diagram, Shampoo, Adirondack Review, Muse Apprentice Guild, among other journals. His book of poetry, Mylar, was published by blazeVOX Press in 2012.