Maggie Zurawski

Poem (for a Polsih bus)

A stranger to journeys I fish towards the rear in morning light.  I
feed on some angry old titan's clear face.  It may move me towards
history, a no place where horsemen ride deceptive, and the dark mood
of the ocean (losing to panic) hammers a limp into my gait.  Still
surfacing now and then in ophelic fashion is the idea of a cloister, a
way of blowing rain into the wind while hoping for a flood to call my
own.  And while my mind busily constructs itself, the nether regions
are a fairground besieged, an unsettling tableau for the blind eye, a
blindness rearing its head out of the sad spring.  In the twilight of
grinding joints, I sing, set up, to pledge intoxication.  My face in
those sails, with my history elsewhere.  My father was born in a
wooden house in the provinces of poems.  A rider from a rusty Camelot
won through pity, sleepy, hanging his flag with penance.  Who has
become larger than the wooden door? not I.  The lurid birds wake
riddles when the night is too interested in my chance sympathies. 





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