Our Lady of the Caves
   dressed in rock,
       vulviform, folded back
           upon Herself, a turn in the cave,
                 at Abri Cellier
                    an arch gouged in a slab
                        makes an entrance and
                          an exit, She is a hole,
                           yet rock, impenetrable,
                            the impact point of the enigma
"no one has lifted her veil,"
                            the impact point of the enigma
                           yet rock, impenetrable,
                          an exit, She is a hole,
                        makes an entrance and
                    an arch gouged in a slab
                 at Abri Cellier
           upon Herself, a turn in the cave,
       vulviform, folded back
   dressed in rock,
Our Lady of the Caves

       As She folds back
 I sense a long sentence dissolving within itself
and when it ends, it is just beginning,
               a presentiment that Her sign is
         one turn, uni-
  verse, end of the first line, curved about
   a vaginal gouge, as if what is bent about is foetal
as if She
        is a foetal arch bent about a slit
    that goes in one quarter inch.
                              Our Lady may be the invisible archwork
                         through which all things
         shift gears in the dark, at cheetah-speed,
at snail-struggle, on the shores of Russia
   where paleo-archetypes compressed into radar
 gaze around with dinosaur certainty.

Before Okeanos, continuing through
       Okeanos, before the uroboros, continuing in it,
 Her gibbous half-circle tells me She was,
                before an association was made between fucking and birth,
                before a bubbling parthenogenesis was enclosed --------------
         but to what extent She is
    in self-enclosure, in my beak triumphantly
      raising my penis to the sun,
 to what extent She neatly
   slides Her slit between my self and its point,
I do not know.

                              For the self has grown so enormous,
              I look through literal eyes to see Her
                         on a slab chopped out of Abri Cellier,
             in a cool limestone room in Les Eyzies.
   She seems only several inches tall.
                    It is a funeral to be there,
                        in a burial-chamber where first otherness
                         is displayed behind a rope, with written instructions
                         which only describe the age of the shape.
                 And I who look upon this am immense,
        encrusted with all my own undelivered selves,
my skeletal papoose-rack through which my mother's
 85 mile long legs are dangling, out of which my father's
    right arm with a seemingly infinite switch trails
                    down the museum road, across France, to dissappear
  in the Atlantic, and I jig around a bit
                                          not because I have to pee, but because this ghost dance
                                       starts up as I stare through the hermaphroditic
                                    circle the snake made, so self-contained
                             but what it and I contain, the "divine couple,"
                is the latent mother-father who
has taken over the world.

          Our Lady moved about
           like a stubby pitchfork,
   yellow fiber gushed out from between Her prongs,
She hobbled, toward image ----------------------------------------------------------
      what lurked under Her vulviform was the trident
        yet to come, for men realised that not only
        could the point of Her slit be hurled
     but that its two bounding lines could be too,
_the_whole_woman_could_be_thrown_into_the_animal__
 At Les Trois Freres, only meters away from the "sanctuary,"
is a huge bison abattoir.   What is now sealed over
was a ravine at 15,000 BC.      Was it because She
was nearby that this ravine
                struck,        like flint,      "abyss"
    off the rock of those hunters' minds?
           And way in, trident deep in Le Portel,
                did Her three prongs close?
                  Was the uroboros hammered shut
when those hunters at last hacked
                                 themselves free of the animal sinew?
                              And was this the point at which
                     the wilderness was mentally enwalled,
          serpent the outer circumference,
to teach, and banish, our Adamic Eve?

  Below Our Lady, on the wall of my mind,
    is the foot long rock phallus Her devotees may
   have taken inside them while they chipped in Her sign.
I have been straddling,     all poem long,          that insistent,
         rapacious thing,      of phallus,         the tooth-phallus,
        the borer                  for the tooth-phallus is insatiable
                                   male hunger to connect at any price,
          but not connect,        to cease being an island,
                    a speck before the emancipatory shape of
                the birth giving mainland,          to build a mole
              to tie fucking to birth,               to cease being ticks
       on the heaving pelt of this earth,           to hook
  their erections to the sleigh of a howling starvling.

                And they did
                         get across, at around 10,000 BC,
                 one night fucking and birth were connected by a mole
                burrowing right under the surface of a full moon
             boring a red mortal line from the edge
      to a point equidistant from the circumference
The corpus callosum was suddenly filled with traffic.
The last Magdalenians were aware that Our Lady
has closed.          They padlocked Her
with the uroboros and planted the key.

    She now grows on a long handle
   out of ground at the edge of the abyss.
         Some see Her as fly-eyed radar.
        Others feel it is to Her prong they cling
      as the gale of monoculture whips them horizontal.
                   Many more on their knees inch along the cathedral pavement
                    toward what they believe is her virginal compassion
                  which will somehow make their manure-colored
              barriada water pure,              their nipple blood,
        their insides-of-their-bodies
      muscatel in which their children play,
     miracle and misery on which my index
    touches,                    to stir for a moment Her
     gouged rock socket
         octopus current of
             faceless suckers Veil.