a filthy pallet propping up my spine
where fleas infest my hair, my robe, the hour,
and stalled above me like a rutting ox,
his nuncio, despair, with thrust and burn,
engendering in me a bloody styx
whose bastard, melancholy, must be born.
Direct Your drifting child who rows alone.
This quill
r
cling to like an oar will shear
a sea of vellum, break in crested lines
which sink to foam and whisper on the shore.
r
steer by night
The Hope
if
Hope,
a buoy
nestled near the waning Lenten moon.
Where is the other coast?
r
f blessed be
the weak, the poor-in-spirit, they that mourn,
raise up Clothilde. With ebony on cream,
the taste of salt and wormwood in my mouth,
Lord, let me tongue this holy leavened crumb
of art, sustained by history and myth.
FORREST GANDER
The Provinces of Mars
from
Wild Psalms
r
ordered this blue paper from a catalogue
from Barcelona. Do my words get crookeder?
So they do. All I have eaten
since Saturday is malt liquor
which imparts an omnigenous sympathy
and makes me blind as William Tell.
I have been listening to opera.
The soul is a kind of sound: Maria Meneghini
Callas,
ava dolce e serena che regnavi
. . .
in gioia pura.
And after Dame
Joan Sutherland first heard Callas sing
