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