Wednesday, September 21, 2011

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.



Tuesday, September 13, 2011

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.



Sunday, September 4, 2011

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