:: 2005 19 November :: 12.11 am
:: Mood: high
:: Music: The Beach Boys, California Girls
[ edit | delete ]
Normandy
Concrete keyholes; a marsh at odds
each a squat watchtower’s carcass. Scaling agelessly
oxidized rungs; Tess’s
toe knows swerve and gash, the mosquito’s Bacchanalia
by sickly thickened night.
Penobscot
Dark salt clotting the canthus
of one darkened porthole, like a broiling pan
toughs my canvas shoulder.
A wet breath and shirt sleeve
wipe the fog from our plane
but a film of filth remains;
Tossed in the spit and etched by harbor grain
we appeal to the breakwater,
its slim finger in the sea,
toppling. Perpendicular
it has never looked so stalwart.
A decibel gust;
A wisp of smoke from the Plymouth moon-roof,
Isle au Haut is felled – now –
By slip, my grandfather’s hair and the curl
from his pipe
which remembers the harbor winch.
We corner aft the Appledore III
Jostled by recycled tires
gone to swing
or a ferry’s lover.
and then there is one that is not by me….
Sheffield Ghazal 4: Driving West (by Galway Kinnell)
A tractor-trailer carrying two dozen crushed automobiles overtakes a
tractor-trailer carrying a dozen new.
Oil is a form of waiting.
The internal combustion engine converts the stasis of millennia into
motion.
Cars howl on rain-wetted roads.
Airplanes rise through the downpour and throw us through the blue
sky.
The idea of the airplane subverts earthly life.
Computers can deliver nuclear explosions to precisely anywhere on
earth.
A lightning bolt is made entirely of error.
Erratic Mercurys and errant Cavaliers roam the highways.
A girl puts her head on a boy’s shoulder; they are driving west.
The windshiled wipers wipe, homesickness one way, wanderlust the
other, back and forth.
This happened to your father and to you Galway–sick to stay, longing
to come up against the ends of the earth, and climb over
sent this 371.13 miles west like the wrong way slope of a long run ATC curve. once there was a newspaper clipping that fit; i hope this will not be feared the same way. tonight i bought furry antlers and wore them to a danse party. hudson sway, hudson sway.
