ON THE UNNAMED ARCANUM

I am led into water by the hand of the Wild Man.
though my limbs are still, there is
a natural resistance to his momentary oppressure,
an inborn, opposing buoyancy. But only
with his release I rise, my eyes cleansed
now, and brown — washed with Experience.

He tells me it’s all quite literal, and I wonder
at this delineation, littoral or ritual
border
on the shore of the unreal.

*

I’d discovered
Galena’s remains, veins
of lore
or a storied lead ore
in exhumus.

First gesture
was mine: hand removes dirt. Rebirth
was hers, sunny ‘lixir illu-mining.

*

In illustration, the lone flesh-toned skeleton
reaps in golden wheat,
dischaffing heads, hands, feet.
Brownd and yellowd, red, all flesh is grass.
Bone of his bone in graves of craving.

But I saw him in flood
with his scythe for a skiff pole,
and the distal bits of bodies
gasping, grasping for life.

And somewhere was sound of a faucet, dripping.

As it insists its time upon the somewhere,
it quickens the enclosure or slows the expanse.

*

In his lipless kiss, little death
where words frail,
we affect the decomposture
of the non-verbal thrall —

the unact ending all’s
no-spell, unnamable:

They say Hades felt shame
when the veil to his name
was raised — Dis-covered,
thus enstoried.

Some things are understood
to stay under our standing, unsaid.

*

The early Saturnines elixird their wine
in vessels of decadence, water to sugar-of-lead.
Saccharine preserver which in part led
to the coup, in the fall, all flesh is grâce.

The Emperor Dis-membered,
sur-rended, scarred of the dark,
crying my crown
my crown —
as the Other’s
rejoining yr bones
in the ground.

*

Grace is a space in time
but revolution is only monde operandi,
a golden-eyed gyre
with an oblique inclination, too, to return

to rest, to righteous level, as water
will ceaselessly seek
to fill all side ways a space, a lateral thirst later rising
like a foreign form of prose — a groundswell,
blood wrung from a bone.
Red tide untiring to make the rest
what it is, this

rising — on the undivided horizon — despite.

Chloe Bliss Snyder lives and writes in upstate New York. Her work has appeared in Annulet, Grotto, Caesura, New American Poetry, The Swan, and elsewhere.