poetry notebook

[Editor’s note: What follows is the first section of a long poem found among the papers of Rhosonny. Whether he considered it finished or not is unknown. The poem is scattered across paper tablets and electronic devices linked to and from several locations on the web and on several local hard drives. Editing and collating is taking longer than the editor expected. Rather than wait until the whole has been redacted, I decided to release the first section as it currently stands. Whether or not Rhosonny would approve is an open question though in my opinion he wouldn’t. Nevertheless, I persist. The poem in plot and as a whole seems to be a circuit of travel, freight trains and hitch-hiking, while reading the Pisan Cantos. Though he seems to have arrived after already traveling, the poem says nothing of this and begins in the middle. The editor is intrigued by the question: did he begin the poem here because this is where and when he began to read the Pisan Cantos or does he see some relationship between the particular Canto and the action or is it all matter of pure chance, if there really is such a thing?]

1. of no fortune, and with a name to come

As the sun made it’s move to light up the earth

Western cascades, an edge of sun,

The old volcanoes and a

Mount Tai, magnetic

Gigantic nuclear furnace flares over

The glacial ridge, the Pacific Ring of Fire

[“sunt lumina”:

Onto a plain of lava that flowed from the east.

Älsé, Tsanchifin, Tsanklightemifa, Tsawokot

Long before Skinner’s Trading Post

Eugene, that is.

The players:

Vulcan, Hephaistus

Athena, Gaia, Erichthoneus

[Mt Taishan

I walked northwest, Wilamette to the right

[what you depart from is not the way

She’d gotten married.

[neither with lions nor leopards attended

She wanted to see me.

[is that not our delight?

I wanted her.

[the wind is part of the process

[the rain is part of the process

I liked to travel rough.

Aphrodite…

Bathrobe at the door, naked under

Points to guest room

[for this stone giveth sleep

Returned to her husband’s bed.

After a few hours sleep

[with a painted paradise

The husband was cordial.

The husband left.

In came her bearded consort

[the grove wants an altar

“Maybe we should please the lady

Together” he said and she smiled

[it exists only in fragments

But I didn’t have the heart.

Barbara Martel scared me a little

Half Shoshone, a few other native slivers the rest French.

[the Muses are daughters of memory

Dark eyes. Dark hair. Wide hips. Voice of an angel.

[the sharp song with sun under its radiance

Nor so young to love a woman for singing

Carried concealed and two knives.

Athena…

Bully, way back, thought he was tough —

300 lb jock, ugly, mean,

But not club footed, not limping

[thought he was Zeus ram

I’d faced him down long before

Called him “Rich Chicken” —

[the ass eared militarist

Had her cornered, I arrived,

He departed, quickly..

[the root of the process

Since then she’d always been kind.

Ares…

She felt like more than I

Not her stunning beauty

An Emily Deschanel with olive skin,

[cheekbone, by verbal manifestation

Obsidian hair, irides so dark

[and that certain images

Rainbows where she walked

Pupils swam in them

Light lyric soprano clear as a silver bell

[enigma forgetting the times and seasons

With no flaw, resonant, pure, no tremolo,

‘

Nor so young to love a woman for singing

But her mind. Her independence. Her experience.

Part time on reservations,

The rest in towns.

[time is not, time is the evil, beloved

Just couldn’t though at times wished

Here in the not done

She’d married since last I saw her

And I didn’t like her friend

[one tanka entitled the shadow

Though later, just she and I, by the river…

[so light is the urging, so ordered the dark petals of iron