Il y a longtemps

Pantoum for Hotel Bedroom (1954) searching.

McSweeney's is taking pantoums until March 8th.

Hang on, off and back

Snow in Turkey, Blue Arrows, Mick Harvey

Ἀμφιτρίτη

Jan Hopkins, "Amphitrite"

_____________-1-________________________

The rip currents are home to her, such is the involuntariness.

Harboring all tide-thrust fins and limbs insulated in a foam
She is a battering embryo, heldfast naked as if embedded in mucilage,

Beneath a translucent skin. Her loud groans grating a rocky berm.

Harboring all tide-thrust fins and limbs insulated in a foam,

Skittering on peacock flounder, keeping a clean house, things regularly

Flushed by her anger--her's is a suite of loud groans grating the rocky bench.

With dolphins throttling, probable cursors to the rage were being tied

To a body that won't take to the waves, rather insulated in keeping a clean
House free from her accompanying flotsam. Amphitrite's clenched
Temples--in a crown of cancer--her hands, pincers enraged of being tied
Suggest the worst. Her wants winnow away in the regularly-flushed depths.

Clenching Amphitrite, clouds with her alkaline love, amounting to a skeleton
Inside. The soft creatures blanching in her wake, swallowed and hollowed
In her sea-churned eyes, where your wants winnow away in the depths.
Wrapped in the sheets, she swims between your legs. Long after her escape.

____________________-2-___________________________________

Such are her corrosive sprays at your offering, to spend a life swallowed, hollowed
As she swims between your legs. In a missing page of the wedding night
Recall how things cooled off as she tried to gore you with your trident. In escape
You at once thought urchins were knitted into the salt-braid of her hair.

As she swims between your legs in a ruined map of your wedding night
Her tears stain the coral bed and bloom into life for the spring moon
To seed. Beyond sham giveaways. Concoct searches for the salt-braid of her hair
Her strong currents and convictions unyoked these shared images of the vase.

Her previously overlooked strain of sex glistens, conferencing with the moon.
Nestling in stinging cells--love the hippokampoi carried off. Ever obsolete, the vase.
She surfaces at night to float on her back, and riding out the storm waves she creates,
In the surrounding third quarter, and what remains in the erotics of waiting

Nestling in stinging cells, vestiges of the nymphs she loved and lost to ensure
Her pinched expression on the vase, with him. Her livid face has a terrifically illicit
Sheen reflecting back the waste of the moon. Riding out the storm waves she creates
Needful of the claim, her body netting all in the acrobatic twists of one vast loneliness.

Currents and Convictions [for a pantoum] circa 2000

Russian fishermen catch Mermaid alien and eat it

Dolphin


My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,
a captive as Racine, the man of craft,
drawn through his maze of iron composition
by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.
When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body
caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines,
the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . .
I have sat and listened to too many
words of the collaborating muse,
and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself--
to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,
an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting

my eyes have seen what my hand did.

Robert Lowell