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Eric T Racher
23
wave
autumn
2025
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the poet
Eric T Racher lives in Riga, Latvia. His poetry, essays and fiction have appeared in Socrates on the Beach, minor literature[s], Exacting Clam, Your Impossible Voice, Literary Imagination, Keep Planning, ballast and elsewhere.
the poems
On the vanity
and inevitability of
the prefatory gesture
or
On the arche-sonnet
as the always-ready
of the sonnet
And this (therefore) will not have been a son-
net. Parentage must name its apparitions
(Desire as lex ferenda’s lexicon.),
attentive to their boundary conditions:
the artifact as fact, the pharmakon
as con (A figment of our propositions.),
though preface, plough and pharynx feed upon
the flesh of definitions and finitions.
And thus for truth, truth-likeness, verse, verse-likeness:
I, longing for horizon’s ‘no’, a vale
of tears embalmed into mere Werkverzeichnis,
rough-hew an end I cannot know, a veil
descending on a valley of unlikeness.
Perhaps the sonnet ends to no avail.
On memory and the sonnet
as a sanctum, or laboratory,
of self and other
I could, I thought, I could just step right out
onto the frozen surface of the sea
in Vecaki, but something—urgency
or doubt or love—metastasized throughout
my body, held me still, it seems. Without
an intimation of the sea, précis
the flesh provides itself, a wave asea
in these ascendencies, the breath will out.
But here we are. So much, alas, is read
into these sighs and silences that lance
the air’s malignancies. The ear is ever
the suppliant; the sky is ever dread.
The sea is everything. The glint and glance
of light on ice or wave revives. However,
the sea remains a shadow, not unsought;
shadow, or she, gave shape to something wrought.
On rhetoric as constitutive
of the body of the lover
If Love, from this unmetered mess, give rise
to dwelling, ledgers, traces of exchange,
th’inscribing of a line, harp-string, reprise
of unkempt interludes in strange arrangements;
if Love, replete with pleasaunce, living breast
of marble arcing into night, should bind
us on this threshold, us divest of vestments,
or dithyramb the reason, heart the mind;
if Love unvessel us, pianissimo
our public burls, or us memento-mori
and alm the threadbare self, all touch-and-go;
then we translated are, transfigured so—
anthimeria, anastrophe are more
than figures, says chi ben amando more.
Publishing credits
All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb