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Shearsman 61 |
Jon Thompson
Three Poems |
XIIII The brovvyllinge of their fifhe ouer the flame
They spend all their Art
& reserve nothing—
Manic the fire
That leaps to lick—Mouths find only
Openness
& Blindness
Dulls every Open'd eyeBy the broiling flesh
New bodies wait their turn
Staked to the ground
All their fatHangs down
Slipped through the head
The stake fixes them fast
To a lowness between earth & flame
XV Their feetheyne of their meate in earthen pottes
& what if the land the rolling hills
The land of the long dead
Were to be taken in flame
What if the flame that feedsThe last ones tumbled up
In dark billowing clouds &
Became a Shade that fell the earth
What if those who tendedIt found
their time engraved
As a Picture on Metal
(Each line another Kingdom's Spy)
Then there would be an Offsetting
An offering of hands to the
Uxorious fire—smoke—which
Makes a wife of death
XVI Their fitting at meate
Too late, too late what absence
Says to Fear my heart a Wilderness
& this my Art has cost me
Empires of wrack, voyages of Ruin—To make a map of the Unknown
Is nought, none may map
The ache that grows in me is
An Ireland ungovernable—The woods are cut with signs
Unreadable the green world
The green light is steel
In my fleshThe land lies down
I cannot hear her voice through the trees
To see is Agony
Ev'rything I fathered
Copyright © Jon Thompson, 2004.
Jon
Thompson is
Editor of Free
Verse, and teaches at North Carolina
State University in Raleigh. The poems here are very loosely
based upon the remarkable drawings of the Algonkian peoples near
Roanoke in the first English attempt to establish a colony in
the New World in 1585. The drawings were done by John White and
later made into engravings by Theodor De Bry. For complicated
reasons, White left his daughter and grandchild in the New World
as part of a colony and planned to return. When he did, two years
later, he never found them again. Jon Thompson's book The
Book of the Floating World was recently published
by Parlor Press, West Lafayette, Indiana. |
