Opening to the first page of Peter ...

Opening to the first page of Peter Riley's Distant Points (1995) the first body in an ongoing series of what the book's jacket describes well enough as "prose-poem in which any singular voice is constantly interrupted by means of itself in another guise, and a whole theatre of masks collides for position around the central condition of meditation," we find sum of two units "poems" or passages which contemplate like this:

1

the corpse in its final commerce: regard with affection and despair for a complet memory or oral heart enclosed in a small inner dome of grey/drab-coloured [river-bed] clay,