Chauvet, First Impressions
by Clayton Eshleman

The depth of body.
The depth of a hollow
        animal belly
imagination fills out to an agreeable
    convexity,
and the tenderness in a bear drawing
like a loom within the stone,
seesaw pitch of breath and stasis,
my heart pounding Take Heed
halfway up the mountain to Chauvet’s entrance.
Scared the shit out of me,
to almost be stopped within minutes of the cave.
Olson in Hotel Steinplatz feeling
the World Tree give way in his giant frame.

Cradle of art?
Roar of images in cascade along the wall,
rows of larger-than-life lion heads
voracious for
a vertical totempole of aurochs heads.
90% of Chauvet is virgin floor.
One bear skull is enveloped in
stalactitic casing, a polished white
    sarcophagus of sorts
with a stalagmite a foot high “growing” out of
    the cranium dome.
As if the skull sends up its pillar,
opaque column of words.
10% of Chauvet is metal walkway.
“charter’d Thames” nice to keep all that floor
    virgin but
it is as if the primordial labyrinth has been
jigsawed with streets. Meaning:
    no wandering,
no “lost at sea” in being’s immensity.
Like a solitary hanging fang, near the cave’s end,
the rock with vulva and worshipful
Minotaur, with a drizzle of fingers,
drawn on a large feline body
drawn there earlier.
            Some panels boil with activity,
as if they magnetized Cro-Magnon soul,
sucked animals through Cro-Magnon bodies.
The 32,400 year old male rhino
in clash with maybe a female
has a fat, pointed erect phallus.
A chaos of animals, like
    “a paradise of poets,”
one masterly horse fingerpainted in wall clay,
    stumped so carefully
to ull the outer edge in,
the limestone shows through
as if nothing that special has happened since!
As if man were an afterthought of
    a humanimal brew,
still beating in my chest
like a wedge of lions crafting a kill.
Asking why certain spots were chosen for figures,
like asking why lightning here, not there?

Why are you here
right up my nose,
as if a tweezer carbondated, on the spot,
    a bit of my brain
and came up with the abyss’s
invisible but definite bottom,
death, as a feline gush of misercordia,
beauty and affinity, lined within
the notion of being —
    how did I manage to walk
that last 20 minutes up the mountain?
Why can’t I get over that pounding
    halo of serpent breath,
unexpected harpsichord,
haruspex enigma,        breathe and
    be grateful for
the various ranged
quilted within, and the many years
    with Caryl, thought of her
on the mountain side, panting,
did her devotion and utter decency
    lift me on?
Loss now seems like white corpuscles,
an interior nucleate every moment is
    at incline with.
At Chauvet there’s no recovery,
just being breaking out like measles,
animal rash through rock,
softness of a horse’s head like a filament of
    the heart,
all is similie to
explosion’s miracle —
how many centuries to move from cupules to
these animal rafts? To pluck
out of nature’s indifferent rage
       silent form, to bend mind,
hooop, about animal staves,
to create a cask for appetitional elixir.
Here, Chauvet hands itself over,
dream into love as a road with womb –
— a road with womb?
peristaltic burgeoning,
reckless, restrained,
and I’m still here, before the hotel mirror,
following the wisps of word eels
as they ray through heart’s reefs.