Nathan Lefkoff

 

Calculated Poetics

 

5/23/13

 

 

 

“Mantis! praying mantis! since your wings’ leaves

And your terrified eyes, pins, bright, black and poor”

 

-Zukofsky

 

“River that must turn full after I stop dying

Song, my song, raise grief to music

Light as my loves’ thought, the few sick

So sick of wrangling: thus weeping,

Sounds of light stay in her keeping…”

 

-Zukofsky

 

“The Rhino is a lovely beast…”

 

-Zukofsky

 

 

Eyes and lips, eyes and lips

now you are a lovely beast

and I, a lonely mantis.

Forelegs folded, stone upon stone

thus weeping.

 

Once for preying, these arms and body pray now

in dream and in sentient thought

for a death or a birth.

Enough with this weird limbo.

 

After I stop dying

I will be borne into my mind that bares the weight of your eyes and lips.

The night sky dangles a faraway planet

which looms like a beautiful ghost

and hopefully someday

will come circling back to these arms akimbo.

“the abstract poem

that cleaves through the glassy heights like the hump of a great

beast, the rising reification, integration’s grandest, most

roving whale: in this way Enlil became a god and ruled

the sky: in this way earth became our mother: in this way

angels shaped light”

 

 

Ammons, A. R. (1995). Sphere: The form of a motion. (pp. 136-137). New York, New York: W.W. Norton.

 

Note: The god Enlil is prominent in Sumerian religion and his name translates to “Lord of the Storm”. One story describes his origin as the exhausted breath of the god of the heavens and the goddess of the Earth after sexual union.

 

 

Sighing, gasping,

Earth and sky consummate to produce the wind; the storm

that scrapes its limpest tentacle upon the crust of continents.

Flaccid and flailing, it makes its way back to the ocean

where waterspouts send humpbacks sailing through the atmosphere

like strange birds.

 

Once a roving whale,

now you are the sun-bleached trunk of a redwood

decaying on the sand under the eyes of some distorted form.

 

Now you are an abstract beast,

bending to the mercy of time and insects.

Insects that swarm and cover the sky

in spite of the lord of the storm

who scratches at his mosquito bites

and sighs a relief so massive

that it sets the milky way spinning

like a pinwheel in space.

 

What was it? That drowning word

or equation

smothered in its incantation.

 

In stillest frenzy

voice stumbles numbers tumble

into zero.

Burning in that sun collapsing.

Incredible masses,

folding, folding.

 

Saturn melts inside its rings

upon a wrinkled blanket.

 

Devouring its greatest digits,

the Cosmic Centipede wraps itself

around a planet, a world, a perception.

 

A placeless point on a lineless plain,

folding, folding,

wrapped and wrinkled.

 

With all this in mind,

we stray through space,

we fold in place.

Nathan Lefkoff

 

Calculated Poem: Spiritus Mundi

 

Inspired by: -W.B. Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming

-research on the 1980 Mt. St. Helens eruption

-research on the bombing of Hiroshima during WWII

Spritus Mundi- “spirit of the world” (from The Second Coming)

————————————————————————————————————

 

Spiritus Mundi

 

Grieving in the gain of loss,

St. Helena tore herself open

and regurgitated like a mother bird for nine hours

to betray 11 million animals, 4 billion feet of timber,

and the man with the cats that could have fled but did not.

A force 500 times the bomb over Hiroshima,

 

the cloud that was purple and flashed internally.

Bodies erupted and spewed their dust and ashes

and something recoiled like the hand from the fire

and somebody stared as blank and as pitiless

as the face of a mountain.

 

That plane was a falcon,

strapped to its master,

and all it could hear was the falconer

as it shunned the gaping

 

its pilot blinder than the bomb that fell

to deafen a nation

and hatch desert birds that were trapped in the chests

of tens of thousands

 

to fly with the wind

and to nest in volcanoes