| Four Poems
by Elaine Equi
Keeping Quietly
watchful through the blindfold
of sevenfold darkness –
the doctrine of Manifest Density:
- bright darkness
- cloaked darkness
- clotted darkness
- the dark gong
- the humming dark engine
- the plush cinema
- the disco bat-cave womb
Ox-Cart Prayers
I try not to think as I speak them.
(Ghosts can read minds)
Sometimes I visualize a sticky, sweet
sunset that fades.
But mostly I let the words carry me
past office-graveyards,
wherever (I’m not particular)
they happen to take me is fine.
Layabouts (for Trevor Winkfield)
Spatial Allegories
By The Birdfeeder I Left You
The Striped Chalice
Cattail Stew
A Thorn In The Storm’s Side
Somebody Left The Fog Machine On Again
What Did You Expect To See?
The Wrong Joshua
Red Dwarf
Five Fedoras And A Fez
Stricter Than Saturn
I Don’t Think In Terms Of Thought
I Think of Those Nimble Seers
so adept at side-stepping
hordes of multitudes, crowds of signs.
Willing to act as interpreters,
they became the translators of one century
into the more rapid speech of the next.
Eternal bachelors --
married to no tradition,
settling on neither side.
I wonder if there are any like them
here now.
Elaine Equi is the author of Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems (2007), The Could of Knowable Things (2003), Voice-Over (1998) (chosen by Thom Gunn for the San Francisco State Poetry Award), Decoy (1994), and Surface Tension (1989), among others. She teaches creative writing in the MFA programs at The New School and City College. |
