At Labastide

AT LABASTIDE

We were without a key, and it was pouring as we sloshed gingerly down to the slope leading to the base of the ravine and the entrance to Labastide. My heels dug into the sog, bright red beetles were out, dripping ferns, dead leaves.

It was a Rimbaud afternoon, the gate was locked, but I was to see in the soaring rockwall facing the slope more than I might have, had we figured out how to jimmy the lock.

At a certain point, rain penetrates the mind, one becomes part of the gush, a crippled brook, heaving waves, crying, ejaculation form a lotus of imagination in which, a happy drenched elf, the loosened one sits, double to himself, in embrace, a funny-looking four-legged egg, all tendril and crevice. The rockwall bubbled nature-pressed fists into my eyes, a slime of pearls, scarlet crawlers, violet-tan lichen in fans and cones, a fresh rubblework so old

I belonged instantly

to Chez Maitre Paul,

I was the goose in the cocotte, a streak of snail graffiti, a self-infecting gaze into the quilted spongework percolating in the rain. . .

I belonged instantly to the iron hook in my skull upon which I am hung, that is, my destiny was concrete-and seltzer! Rot breaking out like the giggles in casket drill, and all because of this rockwall which certainly had not prepared itself for the drenched stumblers who were to find no entrance, thus blessed imagination creates exit, each puddle depression gets in tow, all nature has arrived and is bridal,

I am affirmed which beats my affirming nature only barely, a rockwall cares its way in, the crystal of visión leads out, like a panopticon, through mazes of disappearing nibbles, and one who once waited for his fontanel to close over, stretches in mind in Minotaur embrace.

-Clayton Eshleman