Five Poems

Hello friends,

Five poems this week — three textual and two visual. Enjoy! (And if you do, please consider supporting my work by purchasing my latest book The Robots of Babylon.)

VENUS (Palindrome-Haiku)

Pure Venus, asleep,
slid off a daffodil’s peels,
a sun ever up.

---

VOLCANO (Palindrome)

A vale, 
sirenic.

Its alps 
a red net’s atlas;
a bared, nude summit, 
pure.

Pools loop, erupt. 
I’m mused —

Under a basalt 
as tender as plasticine, 
rise, lava.

---

To make the following visual poem, I recorded myself playing my “Volcano” palindrome on guitar (a=a, b=b, etc. — letters h thru z as pauses):

SEISMOGRAPH

---

This next poem describes shadows forming on a horizontal sundial, between dusk and dawn. It begins and ends with the same palindromic stanza. In between are six univocalic lipograms, each of which uses only one vowel — in order, y, u, o, i, e, and a.

THE HORIZONTAL SUNDIAL

Laid,
an onus set,
a gnomon gates sun, on a dial....

Sky rhythms fly by, wryly,
by my crypt —
by syzygy.
                              
Sulphur sun succumbs:
Dusk dulls us, murmurs,
blunts us up.
                                                          
Soft glows of hollow moon
grow gnomon forms on
ponds of rock.

This night is finishing.
Its vigil lifting, nitid shifting
gilts this dish in twilit stirrings.

Restless edges represent:
The steeple’s lengths lessen when
the flexed degrees descend.
                              
A raw and rampant
dawn attracts a waltz.
A vacant patch draws back:

Laid,
an onus set,
a gnomon gates sun, on a dial.

---

THE VERTICAL SUNDIAL