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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Clayton Eshleman
Clayton Eshleman
Clayton Eshleman is the author of more than thirty collections of poetry, as well as essays, prose, and interviews, and award-winning translations of César Vallejo and Aimé Césaire, among others...
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Dot  
by Clayton Eshleman

Unicellular sac pressed 

fingertips,

two dots, a me
row--or a herow? a meandering
red moist

blastospore, a multicellular
dot-filled wall,
lubricious prefiguration of Hermes
who swings with

heat of the amoeba need
soldered to sprout

desire, an earthworm psyche
spiderline, tunneling on the leash of the
to-be-peristaltic

boundary seeking

something to curve
about, zigzag,
bear claw hut rain,
diagrammatic boogie-woogie of Hermes
flowing in the boundary catastrophe
when the animal was separated out

*

Dot, doorbell
Summoning Hades through stone.




From Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination and the Construction of the Underworld, as yet unpublished. Copyright © 2000 by Clayton Eshleman. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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