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Littoral


ISSUE:  Winter 1999

One day I looked up from my imagination,
a paraphrase of freedom in the sensorium.
Little star drowned in smoke, little ghost
fuming to ash and burnt grass. The genius
of the camera absorbs him, halts reflective paper
skin, pages of meditative hair: the shutter’s
gleaming eden islands light. I could enter
the surplus of it, make use of
spilled exchange: substitution
hunted down by the unique. History
is a body, “the unbearable deeds
of the blessed gods”: snow under the skin,
the scorched edges of the possible
(the cold under the burn of it).

Delay dangles Polaris from a rusty nail,
the familiar voyage to Naxos
aborted, repeated: Arion, or another
amateur, in love with curve and wave,
god music playing underwater.(The paper
boat beached, reverting to newsprints
of the gone world, slurry
of things the voice shores up.) Summer
opens its ocean miles away, luck
drowns in its labyrinth, and somewhere
something approaching an image unfurls:
white pin-point eyes of grackles,
the iridescent blue-black Negroes.
Despite which falls

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