strollers
jewelried & jacketed
though here and there
a louche jogger
lowers the tone
almost to my level
& a young mother
& a posse of teens
newly gelatoâd pass by
Serena Hearts Lucas
names on stone
TO ONE IN PARMA
The privilege
of even being
provincial,
to know the small
humiliating city,
the ever unfinished
cathedral,
that over there
is the real where:
we had none of it.
No one heard
of anything.
The glit and shine
and scut of it shimmered
on TV the satin crotch
of the metropolis
a 13" square
of already thinned
fantasy.
No wonder
the saints
were martyring themselves
repeatedly, furiously
in imagination.
This was something
to die for
a life outlined
in acid-bit etchings
obsolete as the names
of trees we were never given
to know in the neighborhood.
LEVANTO
salt lips & a buoyed band
binds the sea in loose chains
to swim in. the beachâs
thinned out, the clouds puffing
in, the last ferryâs
debarked a last load.
starting out now
seems impossible
but. the rock walls
break the breakers
in. nothing
cannot be disciplined
or freed. scant pines
stagger the apennines
semaphoring
what. quartz-
striped granite
tells a time
that outlives us.
I am older
than the sea
in me.
IV
TERRAN LIFE
â an excursion beginning with a line of William Wordsworth
When we had given our bodies to the wind
we found bones in the earth and not in the sky.
We found arrowheads in the earth and not in the sky though theyâd flown through the air before grounding.
The era of common sense is over
& finished too the flourishing of horoscopes.
Hey traveler what chart to sign your way? what iPhone app?
All the birthdays have immolated themselves in a far pyre
and no one knows where
they were born.
Earth gods always come after sky gods.
If you could choose
a secret power would it be flight?â
a wish more often expressed
than the desire for invisibility.
âA mythology reflects its regionâ
and a poet sang the sea the lemon trees and pines
the Ligurian breeze salting his lines
and a lightly placed step on a Greek mountain is the goat song of tragedy.
Jehovah rarely shows his face for we would die of it
die as surely as those who looked to the sky in the bombing raid
the underground tunnels a sudden refuge
Out of ash I come                      Out of the earth
Back to ash I go                          He fashioned them
male and female I tell you
they wore the most beautiful evanescent clothes
in paradise so much subtler than the trawling nakedness of heaving giants
hurling other giants to heaven & some to hell
on the restored ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Thus far clones are of earth, alone.
When you say earth you mean land but more than land         You mean the oceans covering âthe earthâ as if earth were the substrate of everything and not also the crust.
I found the ground sound, unfaulted, uncracked, even where the continents have split and will again split the archaic seamstress unable to suture the plates of the earth forever.
âTerran lifeâ: what the biologists typically study but âweird lifeâ is also a zone of research. âIt is easy to conceive of chemical reactions that might support life involving noncarbon compoundsââ
viz. The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems, p. 6.
Earth now supports life but could not now initiate it.
Crawl, sway, sashay: youâre still doing it on an earth
you take for granted instead of going crazy
yr head blown off by an apple no I meant an IED no
I meant an apple.
Newtonian physicsâ defunct but that doesnât mean an apple doesnât fall far from the tree composed of atoms whose dark matter you donât know how to measure, supermodel. Me neither.
Gravity thy name
jewelried & jacketed
though here and there
a louche jogger
lowers the tone
almost to my level
& a young mother
& a posse of teens
newly gelatoâd pass by
Serena Hearts Lucas
names on stone
TO ONE IN PARMA
The privilege
of even being
provincial,
to know the small
humiliating city,
the ever unfinished
cathedral,
that over there
is the real where:
we had none of it.
No one heard
of anything.
The glit and shine
and scut of it shimmered
on TV the satin crotch
of the metropolis
a 13" square
of already thinned
fantasy.
No wonder
the saints
were martyring themselves
repeatedly, furiously
in imagination.
This was something
to die for
a life outlined
in acid-bit etchings
obsolete as the names
of trees we were never given
to know in the neighborhood.
LEVANTO
salt lips & a buoyed band
binds the sea in loose chains
to swim in. the beachâs
thinned out, the clouds puffing
in, the last ferryâs
debarked a last load.
starting out now
seems impossible
but. the rock walls
break the breakers
in. nothing
cannot be disciplined
or freed. scant pines
stagger the apennines
semaphoring
what. quartz-
striped granite
tells a time
that outlives us.
I am older
than the sea
in me.
IV
TERRAN LIFE
â an excursion beginning with a line of William Wordsworth
When we had given our bodies to the wind
we found bones in the earth and not in the sky.
We found arrowheads in the earth and not in the sky though theyâd flown through the air before grounding.
The era of common sense is over
& finished too the flourishing of horoscopes.
Hey traveler what chart to sign your way? what iPhone app?
All the birthdays have immolated themselves in a far pyre
and no one knows where
they were born.
Earth gods always come after sky gods.
If you could choose
a secret power would it be flight?â
a wish more often expressed
than the desire for invisibility.
âA mythology reflects its regionâ
and a poet sang the sea the lemon trees and pines
the Ligurian breeze salting his lines
and a lightly placed step on a Greek mountain is the goat song of tragedy.
Jehovah rarely shows his face for we would die of it
die as surely as those who looked to the sky in the bombing raid
the underground tunnels a sudden refuge
Out of ash I come                      Out of the earth
Back to ash I go                          He fashioned them
male and female I tell you
they wore the most beautiful evanescent clothes
in paradise so much subtler than the trawling nakedness of heaving giants
hurling other giants to heaven & some to hell
on the restored ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Thus far clones are of earth, alone.
When you say earth you mean land but more than land         You mean the oceans covering âthe earthâ as if earth were the substrate of everything and not also the crust.
I found the ground sound, unfaulted, uncracked, even where the continents have split and will again split the archaic seamstress unable to suture the plates of the earth forever.
âTerran lifeâ: what the biologists typically study but âweird lifeâ is also a zone of research. âIt is easy to conceive of chemical reactions that might support life involving noncarbon compoundsââ
viz. The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems, p. 6.
Earth now supports life but could not now initiate it.
Crawl, sway, sashay: youâre still doing it on an earth
you take for granted instead of going crazy
yr head blown off by an apple no I meant an IED no
I meant an apple.
Newtonian physicsâ defunct but that doesnât mean an apple doesnât fall far from the tree composed of atoms whose dark matter you donât know how to measure, supermodel. Me neither.
Gravity thy name
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