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in our village are short and to the point. While the mourners are finding their seats Etta Andrews plays “Now the Day Is Over.” No one is ashamed to wipe his or her eyes. Then the Reverend stands up and reads the Lord’s Prayer with the mourners speaking it with him. Then there is a hymn, usually “Rock of Ages” or one chosen by the wife of the deceased. The deceased, I might say, is never present, except for an urn prepared by Mr. Torrant, who is always squinting. Next there are remarks by the Reverend. He is a kind man and can be relied upon to say something nice about the life of the departed, no matter how much he may have been scorned or even disliked. The Reverend’s eulogies are so much the same, with appropriate readings from scripture, that I gave up listening to them years ago. Instead, unheard, I eulogize myself, the real picture of how I’ve been in the village. I admit that I was self-satisfied and arrogant. I didn’t go to much pains to provide diversions for my wife. When the children and grandchildren came for visits I lectured them and pointed out their faults. I made appropriate contributions to the local charities but without much enthusiasm. I snubbed people who bored me and avoided parties. I was considerate to the people who worked in the post office. I complained a great deal about my ailments. When I’m asked how I’m doing, I reply that I’m not getting any younger. This inveterate response has become a bore in the village. After the Reverend’s eulogy is over there is another hymn, and the benediction. As they leave everyone, except me, presses the flesh of the bereaved with appropriate utterances. But I get away as quickly as I can. If they don’t bore me I like almost all the people in the village. But as they go, I tick them off. I’ve been to at least fifty funerals. When will mine be?

We are tender and our lives are sweet and they are already over and we are visiting them in some kind of endless reprieve from oblivion, we are walking around in them and after we shatter with love for everything we settle in. Thou tiger on television chowing, thou very fact of dreams, thou majestical roof fretted with golden fire. Thou wisdom of the inner parts. Thou tintinnabulation. Is it not sweet to hand over the ocean's harvest in a single wave of fish? To bounce a vineyard of grapes from one's apron and into the mouth of the crowd? To scoop up bread and offer up one's armful to the throng? Let us live as if we were still among the living, let our days be patterned after theirs. Is it not marvelous to be forgetful?

A furnace in my father’s voice; I prayed for the coal stove’s roses, a cruise ship lit like a castle on fire in the harbor we never walked, father and son, father drifting down the ferned hell his shanty shone, where, inside, in my head, the lamp was the lamp. The market, the park, the library not a soul but grandmother’s morning wash lifting toward heaven, the barrister sun punished my sister, I stared at my hand in a book, the horizon declined in my mouth. My little earthshaker, visored in placenta, wonder of wonders, tremulous in amniotic shield, ensouled already, father in the veritable night, without house or harbor, soon sea in a voice will harrow a scorpion’s blaze in me, to the marrow.

It was something to let him go. It was a having to believe, furthermore, in the voyage of the other, a Ulysses without an Ithaca, was to speak of the sea without speech of the shore— and to have for a body the going away of the body, to have for eyes the going away of the eyes. And for hearing, a silence, where once were people. And for comfort, a dwelling before each steps into that weather of which all strangers speak.

You would think the fury of aerial bombardment Would rouse God to relent; the infinite spaces Are still silent. He looks on shock-pried faces. History, even, does not know what is meant. You would feel that after so many centuries God would give man to repent; yet he can kill As Cain could, but with multitudinous will, No farther advanced than in his ancient furies. Was man made stupid to see his own stupidity? Is God by definition indifferent, beyond us all? Is the eternal truth man’s fighting soul Wherein the Beast ravens in its own avidity? Of Van Wettering I speak, and Averill, Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall But they are gone to early death, who late in school Distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl.

Cecil Touchon’s work is radically post-textual, yet encumbered by nothing but text and the space surrounding it. His technique, as demonstrated aptly here, is to dismantle physical pages of text and reconstitute them in ways that enhance the visual continuities of text and undermine their meaningful sequentiality. This is the ultimate form of deconstruction, a literal (in the hand, of the letter) slicing of the page into pieces that Touchon repositions into a new jigsaw puzzle, different than the one that he began with. This piece is particularly austere, presenting only three colors for our consideration: a mottled white, a red-brown, and a glimpse of black peeking through from the base of the collage. We are invited to consider this poem as a piece of writing transmogrified into a visual field through which we might glimpse what it means to be text, to understand text, and to inhabit text.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry > >

Move him into the sun— Gently its touch awoke him once, At home, whispering of fields half-sown. Always it woke him, even in France, Until this morning and this snow. If anything might rouse him now The kind old sun will know. Think how it wakes the seeds— Woke once the clays of a cold star. Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir? Was it for this the clay grew tall? —O what made fatuous sunbeams toil To break earth's sleep at all?

I was stretched out on the couch, about to doze off, when I imagined a small figure asleep on a couch identical to mine. “Wake up, little man, wake up,” I cried. “The one you’re waiting for is rising from the sea, wrapped in spume, and soon will come ashore. Beneath her feet the melancholy garden will turn bright green and the breezes will be light as babies’ breath. Wake up, before this creature of the deep is gone and everything goes blank as sleep.” How hard I try to wake the little man, how hard he sleeps. And the one who rose from the sea, her moment gone, how hard she has become—how hard those burning eyes, that burning hair.

The body that used to contain your daughter we found it behind the fence It was in a red coat It was collected Is she saved Is she in the system You’re lucky we have other bodies to put your daughter in Come on down to the station

My sister woke me very early that morning and told me “Get up, you have to come see this the ocean’s filled with stars” Delighted by the revelation I dressed quickly and thought If the ocean’s filled with stars I must take the first flight and collect all of the fish from the sky