Memoria Visum

Eumaeus  626

Eyeless navigator

spawning flightless dreaming

refusing love

performing the trick of life

lucky, those fatal

 lies

inflict a burden of mortality

welcoming some savior

in many different skins

striking out in confidence

takes its shadow for fact

reminding of the shape of rumor

served as transparent history

Eumaeus 627

Trouble is a glance an

offender intolerant of form

it takes the shape of the world

boastful but often right

as it delivers the wrath of war

it speaks in questions

laying down, disguised as second comings

unable to stop itself,

it spreads the rumor of flight.

Eumaeus 628

Priests of poverty

measure the progress of the day

into indulgence they watch

small birds

and wonder if they suffer.

Jealous of heaven, they

are unaware of its emptiness

They surprise themselves

with the sound of their own voices

they thought their eyes were glands of honor

they could not swim in untasteable  waters

they once had homes in the arms of their mothers

but forsaking them,

went sailing instead.

Second Person Plural

Eumaeus 623

so you bring your foreign committees

your launched disturbed sentries

you leave with your fortune intact

but humanity left behind

over, over this brief space

when we describe the invisible

the tolerable wrecks that

easily tether us

rather out of close improvement

and all this evidence of noise

we are watchers we

composing knowers of fate

and we find our footholds

in sleep.

Eumaeus 624

a lord comes in forms of agreement

disguised in brass and toy hat

chanting a song of increase a

surplus of watery success

but we do not regain

all the sunken countries

the crescendo of air

instead the steam of night

pays down

and we find ourselves falling

through the market of history.

Eumaeus 625

The years depend on a bit of doing

they extend so privately gem-like

and advise tidings and signs

of simple circum-navigation

the tarpaulins that cover our lost sisters

are wishes for land.  There are also

jumpers who have a chance to do it all over,

then jump again, anyway

would they try to land

in the place of their birth?

we are lost in the explanation of all these fools.

An Old Man Is But A Paltry Thing*

Euameus 620

herding the coincidence

with these giants, killing time

knee-deep in bullshit artists

hacks and cramped con-men

what was that thing that

reminded us of mariners? Oh

yeah, it was in our hands

the thing that lied while it

gave names to the gospels of melodrama

in a quiet mind you may

describe yourself as a straightened

resident of imagination

a bowl-legged poet in love with spelling

an inventor of crimes meant to pass as probabilities

Eumaeus 621

In the eye of night

we fall through the ice

it is the shape of our want

the splendid blood and

the number of our days

we pass under the sun

forgetting to mention it

even in the museum of the unmistakable touch

we confuse phantoms for fish

and a fish for a shoe

we are washed in the waves

of the beautiful shore where

we harvest triangles for

the listeners of reason

(For Gerry Dubuque)

Eumaeus 622

heavily slowly piously passing

working the wrecks of

the splashers of viruses

and makers of rain

marking the sailor's last visits

on the courses of the temporary

this morning is cured by

composing committees and

and cleansing our limbs of

all that's amazing

we wait at the bay

as it easily lies to the water

watchers of horses, we

sing of our time in

this brief space of day

*"...An old man is but a paltry thing, a
tattered coat on a stick,...."

W.B. Yeats - Sailing To Byzantium