Epistemology: Cosmic Buffet

Epistemology: Cosmic Buffet

At dawn, shuttered

eyes blow open 
when I think of you

I think of every impossible thing

and its sweetness, of vision, of occlusion

the scent of earth’s full cauldron

boiling with herbs, cooled 

with lemon and quicklime

its bay and rosemary steam

drapes in mist the

supplicant body of night, an

odalisque black as all Nubia against

velvet cushions of infinity

leaned back lolling in a thong of skysilk

feline with her secret smile

and white sandals of stars.

I clerk your nightly office,

moon of dreams, and sigh

when you pass, trailing a memory

smile of what could never be.

Then, the butcher’s day returns

and the unspeakable lowing

sounds of life passing

through the bandages.

I think of the blind wrinkled

tortoise of each day dragging 

it's shell toward night, the jolting rocket

voyages to the center of the psyche

unremitting in their toll, 

of bell sounds of foreign
lovesongs in the street

bronzing over the cenotaphs

of what will never be recovered

folly’s coin that will never be remitted

in full; lack, that will never be acquitted

yet salvation creamed on toast

is served here 

at this time

daily.

November 2011

For the   Meeting the Bar:Prose to Poetry   prompt hosted by zsa at dVerse:

The poem above was inspired in part by this passage below by Lawrence Durrell, who was a big favorite of mine when I was young. It’s taken unaltered except by the enjambment of spacing and a few ellipses, from Justine, the first book of his four volume hymn to love, sex, sorrow and the eponymous Egyptian city known as the Alexandria Quartet. You could pick almost any page for this exercise, as the whole thing is shot through with poetic prose. This is from the beginning chapters:

Six o' clock...This

is the hour least easy to bear,

when from my balcony

I catch an unexpected glimpse of her

walking idly toward the town in

her white sandals,

still half asleep.

The city unwrinkles

like an old tortoise and peers about it.

For a moment it relinquishes

the torn rags of the flesh

while from some alley by the slaughter-house

above the moans and screams of the cattle

comes the nasal chipping of

a Damascus love song;

shrill quartertones,

like a sinus

being ground to powder.

Now tired men throw back

the shutters of their balconies

and step blinking into the pale hot light

etiolated flowers of

afternoons spent in anguish, tossing

upon ugly beds,

bandaged by dreams.

I have become one

of these poor clerks of

the conscience…

~Lawrence Durrell,  Justine