UNDUE CAUSE
Breathing in the pollen, she enters
The soliloquy, pulling and snapping
The leaves. The sun is just rising.
Now the tracks appear.
INTO A SALT MINE
A crack of waves on a bench above the ocean.
Words fall hard. Which story is yours?
Every culprit swallowed in Abyssinia,
Where the secretaries move at half-past
Six, where the only spoil is the numbers
On the fabric—set the currency to your clock.
Whose confession is this? Become a vapor,
An id in space-time, that you may tread
The awkward and sinful under the lion’s gaze.
Cast those kernels to the breeze.
SMOLDERING TIME
Extended evenings, the tree becoming
Its topmost bough. “There’s something
Underfoot,” someone whispers.
Was it just as I imagined?
All the time firm as if in a donkey’s head.
“The fig leaves fall flat,” I say.
And the gulls, the gulls far away
In their sometime blues of a slow waking sea,
Incomplete in all strands of literature.
“Come complete into the field,” she says.
Are you infected by the tree, darling?
“Compose us in the pasture,” she says.
Could the rivers run dry in one day?
“No special skills required,” she says.
Or something else that breaks the heart?
THREE CHILDREN DANCING IN A FOUNTAIN
Tantamount to success, divergent perhaps,
The English idiom breaks the heart.
What is life on man? Aside from the
Multitudes of creatures who call us home,
The syllables of the empty land before
The contemptible rivers run dry.
All you who knew the equipment for
Loneliness, open your middle eye, accept
Time’s teardrops, you Cyclops.
The rains of summer rain on them like brutes,
Like the whales great eyes from the River Dis.
Everything is native here. There are
All the forms of spring, the women, the wo-
Man, the man, the Gordian strings.
Do you hear the nightingales?
“Watch them play,” say the sages—some half-
Remembered passage from an entertainment,
A vexing history, something like Paris over-
Turned blue in aromatic seas. Either way,
The lighted house that shines a way
In the oeuvre of evening, the warm heart
Pulsing through the centuries, the well-
Spring in the hair, the you-are-
Where-you-are, the heavy money, all ended
In that wild, that drunken burst of nights
In the shadows. Like the tutor to the pupil
In the center of the turning world ...
And in the shade the old rocks swayed,
And as if spun on sea-glass,
The children played on.
Marc Vincenz is a poet, fiction writer, translator, editor, musician and artist. He has published over 30 books of poetry, fiction and translation. His recent poetry collections include, The Pearl Diver of Irunmani, A Splash of Cave Paint, and The King of Prussia is Drunk on Stars. He is publisher and editor of MadHat Press and publisher of New American Writing, and lives on a farm in Western Massachusetts where there are more spiny-eyed voles, tufted grey-buckle hares and Amoeba scintilla than Homo sapiens.