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Poetry • by Concetta Principe
PLAY AUDIO VERSION: voice of Anita Dolman
Ex Nihilo: Nine Uneasy Steps to a PhD
“Starting with a hole” (“The Subversion of the Subject”, Lacan)
1.
Copernicus broke the rim that was ruled by God.
All her invisible spheres that house the stars.
Copernicus maintained that the invisible baubles controlled the stars’ rotations.
Keppler struck the silver spin across our homocentric skins, skyward.
Each cut another astonished dish of newt. Satellite that.
2.
No salamander today, Rasa.
Dig deeper.
Cut Copernicus some slack.
Drive around the bowl and ask for pudding, instead.
3.
Saussure calls.
We turn and see the linguist cutting.
Teeth cut the rim of the lip.
A broken arbitrary sound with bits of calcium.
Suck it up.
4.
Copernicus’s spheres kept the salad tossing, stars and dress.
Pass that ball please and the mustard.
Not the way the boy would, to impress the girl on the other side of the street.
Pass the bill please, so I can pass it.
The Law is conservation and nothing passes mustard.
5.
Not the way she broke the rules and laughed it off as breaking wind.
Nothing natural in a law, Adam’s rib and a boney corset.
Nothing natural about breaking bread.
Sometimes state violence is necessary and bread crumbs.
Pass the salt, please.
There’s a lake of ice on your head.
6.
Not all the cold of a winter day goes around the lake.
I can’t tell you how sharp the sky, thick with cutting light so the eyes rimmed with a universe of Christmas ornaments.
History is, I could see all the way around my face.
Tears melt the right of way.
The car face.
7.
Drive, she said.
Stop, we cried
When the deer —
Poetic license is not free.
8.
Since Keppler broke those spheres, nothing changed but the universe.
The eye is a window.
The real rim is not the deeper rim.
The second rim of his lips and anus and ears and eyes.
The hidden hole, the second person is home.
Deep between his legs, the bits of something deep deep down.
My deer, I have missed —
9.
Keppler wrote himself in omniscient third.
He thought in thirds, avoiding seconds, and without first.
Very down with birds.
Into the hemispheres and folds.
Thumbs and holes.
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[Distillate © HA&L + Concetta Principe | {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]
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