Poetry by Scott Wilkerson

Scott Wilkerson teaches at Columbus State University, holds an MFA in Poetry from Queens University of Charlotte, and has twice received a Lillian E. Smith Center for Creative Arts Fellowship. His books Threading Stone (2009) and the forthcoming Ars Minotaurica (2012) are both published by New Plains Press.

Pasiaphë with Baby Minotaur

after a 4^th century BC kylix

Here then are longitudes

of a certain life in parallax

adduced as monster motifs

in the spun worlds of

Etruscan clay.

That we might have been

unloved children of artistic

habituations seems this far on

somehow a churlish and

ungrateful proposition.

It is true enough that

we have had Keats enough

to thank for a vision of the poetic

drama in these arch fabulisms

of encoded space.

A cut lip to the drinking cup

is occasion for

this world to evince

the rupture of its unattended chasms,

dread cracking, riven deep into the

plate tectonics of

consciousness in blood ruin

where is hidden, from

civilized view, the misshapen

dream of our decorative loves,

mutant torpor in dark seams,

all you can ever know

or even finally need

of degenerate beauty suckling close

its sweet and ghastly truth.

Minotauric Equivocations with Squalid Referent Machine

I

We cannot finally discern whether the claim is an imperative “…fix problem: nomenclature” or, rather, merely an indicative: “[the] affix problem is one of nomenclature.” We feel like fools asking this, but isn’t it just true enough that removing this frightful mask of epistemic modality would make the whole 

encounter easier to frame, you know, in a seminar setting?

II

On more than one occasion, this felt like a manifestation of our own complicity in the algorithmic view of hide-and-seek games scaled up to mythic enterprise. One argues for the aesthetics of standing around, another the polemical force of turning always left or that it is right to leave turning for those heretically agitating against moving at all, except perpendicular to some putative “given,” which we take to mean a punitive “taken.”

III

It will have been an editorial decision:   plasm¹

                                                                        Greek²

                                                                        Labyrinth bone code³

¹ the dream of flâneur, Orphic cosmology in certain stochastic streets, unmappbly thus

² Euripides in fragmentary love keeps sparse notes; Ovid—Roman, abstruse—won’t say which

³ fissure, fracture, constitutive games or your ludic impostures, deep Lyceum of the splintering horn

for (i = 0; i < max; ++i)

maz[i] = 0;

(void) mazegen((x + 1), maz, y, x, rnd);

/ replace the 1's and 0's with appropriate chars */

for (yy = 0; yy < y; ++yy) {

for (xx = 0; xx < x; ++xx) {

i = (yy * x) + xx;

if (yy == 0 || yy == (y - 1))

      maz[i] = hc;

else if (xx == 0 || xx == (x - 1))

      maz[i] = vc;

else if (maz[i] == 1)

     maz[i] = fc;

else if (maz[i - x] != fc && maz[i - 1] == fc

          && (maz[i + x] == 0 || (i % x) == (y - 2)))

     maz[i] = vc;

else

    maz[i] = hc; /* for now... */

     }

}

return (0);

Five Minotauric Motivics

nor implaced strictly as light

node clasticity mirrored has

is a principle subsumed by plunge

and go thence from portmanteau

to double integral affect in puppetry

down through as true shadow is

some corner to complementarity of

point to point is intradisciplinarity of

what will have been born and horns of

these false sweep trysts inside

quadratic love or weeping outward

a gravity a material density

turns rigorously into

in two ways in three

lines to which is appended a

line much as dark in modulo 

Displacement Theory Song,

sung by Theseus (unmappably)

in a stochastic mode

Or, rather, I should say

there are other forms

of imprisonment, that is to say,

of holding one, the Other one

in place, if indeed it is a

place holder for yet other

names and this will have been

as far as I could get without invoking

                                 how it was that trees

                                 reconfigured the ambiguous

                                 moon in its discoverable phases

                                 as looking up through cracks

                                 in lives plunged too deeply

                                 through concentricities of desire

Or, rather, I should say: the lyric reflex, bound thus in chains

of molecular

revolutions, conceived in the body

                                            in some open range of credulity

I wish I had kept                 marked by heat and blood

better notes                         driven through the syntax of my head

                                           dimpled with fissures and dislocations

                                           the evidence of some spilling fugue

if not just around this corner,

then surely the next.

a point concealed in the vertex of an angle

your angle, I want to say, is perhaps

an architectonic of humility, but my own,

an architecture of stone piles, trace, mark

Or, rather, I should say

that failure is my signature

move in the dark.