And He Filled His Mouth With Pebbles,....

Eumaeus 617

The king remarked to the wind,

"what good is the boatman to the gatekeeper?"

in this elder country

no trade is without its nautical concern

from the start we sort

hearts of the unfortunate

and make sober the evil shirts of those

who need their competence explained

(not sufficient that I should know it- but

that you should know I know.)

Of course, you believe yourself to be

a wind merchant - a noticer of

vague creatures

who ought put stop to desire

and such matters of the soul.

Eumaeus 618

O, Galileo, now fingerless rememberer

of belief

you reached for god and were stirred by the sun

contrived you a business of differing

hearing the far horses of truth

you engineered accidents

and arranged the evidence

finally blind

you wrote us a demure sonata

celebrated in simple time

and we were annihilated by its possibility:

the moon is only an opinion

not shared by forgers

the fault, dear Mike, lies in our proverbs.

Eumaeus 619

Madam paid the madman

pianoplayer conspicuous by his

suggestion and observing the friendship of

useful knives

our point-blunt taken up and handeled

was to cut the wind

(or at least break it)

to be remunerated

for our stolen palace

to work against reason

to speak in a low voice

to collect the hands of wives

and to require a difference

between reflections and memory

Slipping Glimpser*

Eumaeus 614

"Exactitude is not truth."

- Pierre Matisse

Achieving the North sea

and tired from this business,

I, possibly cease.

sinking into wet sawdust and junk,

the fates still sing-

they sing in the laudable service

of all those contrived secrets

of all those special cases

where heavy gratitude fails

and flesh is scorned

where boats dream of pastures

and salts reminisce, grimacing and

sinking in heavy water

where the walls give up their stones

and hell is full of empty lifeboats.

still, someone sails into glory,

at least for this day.

Eumaeus 615

we expect to be torn

to be shorn of our daughters

to lie and be lied to ,

becalmed for the day

seeing shore so far in the distance

dragged into the storm

when mariners throw their knives into the sea

and black winter is a time of forgetting

Eumaeus 616

glimpsing slipping I smiling

rather vague and idiotic the tempting moment

the look of direction

without the skin of erection the

pied number stretched in admiration

washing paper and picking the moment

reason has lost us

in preposterous costume caught

putting on some special face

a calm but fleeting space of partially sunken

allegation and resumed organ of expression

without reason or outward duration

eaten alive by longshoremen

and briefly detained by the questioner

and brought to the object of begging

soiled in love and loving

the fingers of skin in the

hat of sighs

*Willem DeKooning