The houses by a canal in a city
briefly glimpsed and so remote
that even now the place remains
and still goes sans its name
were in some deep and dear way
reminiscent of that village far
away and its homes under bright
red roofs—for they have all
admitted to their porticoes and
through the panes further inside
a part of the Heavens arched
on that day above as God himself
must have wanted it to happen
and so ever held, remembered.
Some poetics is vacuous—no soul in sight
or ever heard or ever listened to—no temple
opened for the heart—either high or deep
or widely ample—but the verbose tower
still could be vast, enormous like a Babel built
with bricks of New York City’s phone books.
Then there is the other poetics dipped into muck
(though there is another short word people love
to use and put their mouths into), the weighty stuff
and blackness that sticks and smells and feels like Styx,
something where Thetis might have wanted to dip
her son Achilles’ heel that to anti-soul gets as close
as Gods or Hell would ever allow us—if the point
were to enlarge the creepiness of nether powers,
and there—since so much is darkly dyed in gloom—
the meaning, the say, must be tortured out of mind
almost as much out of the verse’s secretive behind
for, to be honest, in there, when all is done and said,
isn’t that much of love—but shades of seeded hatred.
Then there’re poems like those of lovers by the Ilisus stream.
