Dumuzi Incipit
Christopher Patton
Out of Sumer, Dumuzi, fertility deity, crushed king. One of a vexed twosome. He and lover-friend Inanna, she of increase, longstanding marital issues keep sending them, one then the other, to their underworld. That’s the kur, a zone of heaped dust, darkness, lethargy. The galla are demons from it who travel with Inanna, after she’s freed from there, to find someone to take her place. She chooses her lovely arrogant abject D, and game afoot.
I make the images by threshing my handwriting on a photocopier. My hand trembles the sheet on one side of the glass as the light tracks the action on the other. The glass standing in as what Williams calls, Spring and All, the “constant barrier between the reader and his [sic] consciousness of immediate contact with the world.” The result’s not quite asemic. I call it aasemic, not a sign assemblage, not not one either. Signal and noise in equipoise. Transliteration possible, needful, meticulous, fanciful, absurd. The light around the edges of some is afternoon sun through my study window; the forms suggesting a curvaceous architecture are the shadows of my fingers.
I make the images by threshing my handwriting on a photocopier. My hand trembles the sheet on one side of the glass as the light tracks the action on the other. The glass standing in as what Williams calls, Spring and All, the “constant barrier between the reader and his [sic] consciousness of immediate contact with the world.” The result’s not quite asemic. I call it aasemic, not a sign assemblage, not not one either. Signal and noise in equipoise. Transliteration possible, needful, meticulous, fanciful, absurd. The light around the edges of some is afternoon sun through my study window; the forms suggesting a curvaceous architecture are the shadows of my fingers.
Christopher Patton is a poet and translator interested in cultural seedbeds, visual and digital poetry, and thresholds of legibility. The poems here are fragments of a recently completed book-length poem called Dumuzi. Video poems from his current work-in-progress, SCRO, have been exhibited at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and the Whatcom Museum. His second book of translations from Old English, Unlikeness Is Us, will be published by Gaspereau Press in the fall of 2018. He teaches at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, and blogs here.
