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Primeval Beasts rearing from green slime— an illiterate country, unable to read its own name. Stones moved into position on the hills’ sides; snakes laid their eggs in their cold shadow. The earth suffered the sky’s shrapnel, bled yellow into the enraged sea. At night heavily over the heaving forests the moon sagged. The ancestors of the tigers brightened their claws. Such sounds as there were came from the strong torn by the stronger. The dawn tilted an unpolished mirror for the runt mind to look at itself in without recognition. Neolithic I shall not be here, and the way things are going now won’t want to be. Wheels go no faster than what pulls them. That land visible over the sea in clear weather, they say we will get there some time soon and take possession of it. What then? More acres to cultivate and no markets for the crops. The young are not what they were, smirking at the auspices of the entrails. Some think there will be a revival. I don’t believe it. This plucked music has come to stay. The natural breathing of the pipes was to a different god. Imagine depending on the intestines of a polecat for accompaniment to one’s worship! I have attended at the sacrifice of the language that is the liturgy the priests like, and felt the draught that was God leaving. I think some day there will be nothing left but to go back to the place I came from and wrap myself in the memory of how I was young once and under the covenant of that God not given to folly. Christian They were bearded like the sea they came from; rang stone bells for their stone hearers. Their cells fitted them like a coffin. Out of them their prayers seeped, delicate flowers where weeds grew. Their dry bread broke like a bone. Wine in the cup was a blood-stained mirror for sinners to look into with one eye closed, and see themselves forgiven. Mediaeval I was my lord’s bard, telling again sweetly what had been done bloodily. We lived in a valley; he had no lady. Fame was our horizon. In the spring of the year the wind brought the news of a woman’s beauty. Her eyes were still stones in her smooth-running hair. Her voice was the birds’ envy. We made a brave foray; the engagement was furious. We came back alone. Sing me, my lord said, the things nearer home: my falcons, my horse. I did so, he listened. My harp was of fire; the notes bounced like sparks off his spirit’s anvil. To-morrow, he promised, we will ride forth again. Modern And the brittle gardens of Dinorwig, deep in the fallen petals of their slate flowers: such the autumn of a people! Whose spring is it sleeps in a glass bulb, ready to astonish us with its brilliance? Bring on the dancing girls of the future, the swaying pylons with their metal hair bickering towards England.

I rode him through the village, smiling. He tossed his tasseled mane in distress. The villagers took his gesture as vanity, and made no attempt to rein him back. Camped at night by stream and fire, he seemed to think stories were in order. The ghoulish tales twisting out his mouth no longer frightened me. On leaving, I'd taken on a certain complacency. Later, he'd characterize my silence as merely mean. But what is mean about a mouth that, having no stories, claims it can provide no flower for the ear, no wine for the wind? I tried: I told the tale of him, which he (the version being mine) was not much interested in. But all of us, the fattening moon, the yewey trees, the sharp-toothed stars who combed their glowing backs against the sky like cats: we laughed. And now that I had left, where would I take him? He was vehicle and, as such, responsibility. He was deadening, tiresome, and necessary. I made ourselves a home and kept him gently as a pet. Visitors often wonder aloud, How do you manage to keep such a creature inside? The floors are stained with his keep. I tell them my heart is huge and its doors are small. Once I took him in he grew. Now I cannot remove him without killing him, which, frankly, I have never wanted to do.

I Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the selfsame sounds On my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not sound; And thus it is that what I feel, Here in this room, desiring you, Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk, Is music. It is like the strain Waked in the elders by Susanna: Of a green evening, clear and warm, She bathed in her still garden, while The red-eyed elders, watching, felt The basses of their beings throb In witching chords, and their thin blood Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna. II In the green water, clear and warm, Susanna lay. She searched The touch of springs, And found Concealed imaginings. She sighed, For so much melody. Upon the bank, she stood In the cool Of spent emotions. She felt, among the leaves, The dew Of old devotions. She walked upon the grass, Still quavering. The winds were like her maids, On timid feet, Fetching her woven scarves, Yet wavering. A breath upon her hand Muted the night. She turned— A cymbal crashed, And roaring horns. III Soon, with a noise like tambourines, Came her attendant Byzantines. They wondered why Susanna cried Against the elders by her side; And as they whispered, the refrain Was like a willow swept by rain. Anon, their lamps' uplifted flame Revealed Susanna and her shame. And then, the simpering Byzantines Fled, with a noise like tambourines. IV Beauty is momentary in the mind— The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing. So gardens die, their meek breath scenting The cowl of winter, done repenting. So maidens die, to the auroral Celebration of a maiden's choral. Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings Of those white elders; but, escaping, Left only Death's ironic scraping. Now, in its immortality, it plays On the clear viol of her memory, And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

I have seen eternity and it is like this, a man and woman dancing in a bar in a poor street on an unswept floor. It clings and plots and is desperate, at a point between violence and abjection, between warmth and agoraphobic fear. Let me reverse this and accept the fear. Let me drop all objections to abjection, since life itself  is desperate and has to tread the unswept floor carefully, lovingly, while the bar hovers in eternity. Like this.

Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel— Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens— But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof. Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus, Ballades by the score with the same old thought: The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished; And what is love but a rose that fades? Life all around me here in the village: Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth, Courage, constancy, heroism, failure— All in the loom, and oh what patterns! Woodlands, meadows, streams and rivers— Blind to all of it all my life long. Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus, Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics, While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines?

What god will catch me when I’m down, when I’ve taken sufficient drink to reveal myself, when my words are little more than a blurring of consonant and vowel? I’m drunk on spring: branches of waxy leaves that greet me at my driveway, a family clutching trays of sweets. How can I sing of this? If I cannot sing, then make me mute. Or lend me words, send me the taste of another’s prayer, cool as a coin newly minted on the tongue.

In the temple, a pear blackens in a statue's palm. Birds steal the grain. A man climbs the steps holding his severed hand, but no miracle occurs. His body refuses to reach out and claim what it lost. A woman in a white dress waits to be overshadowed as she plucks her eyelashes—one for the horses, one for the rain, one for the hair on the back of her lover's hands. She wants her virtue restored, to return to a morning when her skin was new and unwounded, when her mouth still fit her mother's breast. You came to ask if it's true, if angels weep until their faces become human, and if the dead can escape their tombs, then— You trap wind as it enters the statue's mouth, and command it to rise, walk.

Nico Vassilakis uses various processes to bring us to his visual poems. In “phabetical” he uses a toy microscope with a built-in video camera to capture highly magnified images of text, often with his hand moving the microscope across the page to capture still text in motion. As he has done here, Vassilakis sometimes modifies the settings on the camera so that the texts are captured in unnatural colors, and he sometimes reverses the polarity of these to further alter their materiality. In this poem, he has used a software process to band many slips of texts into columns and rows, and he has captured these blocks of text in motion so that we can see all of the middle column but only half of the two columns to either side of it. The result uses Greek letters (an homage to his ancestry) so abstracted that they appear before us almost as concrete images: birds, an arm reaching out, a child kicking a ball. He forces us to see not the common symbols of our alphabet but instead the “phabet”: the pictographs from which all alphabets arose.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry > >

She says she had a baby but I don’t believe her Let me tell you the feeling of relief when I started to believe her baby wasn’t real “What’s she getting out of it?” I surrender without a fight Ok, you can have your baby Sometimes all you can do is reify your worst fears What if I can’t have healthy relationships Ever With anything Even your cat Undressing in the open window Like being in public Is it not knowing or not caring? I’m offended reading memoir advertised as essay I give a mini-lecture on insecure attachment from the living room As if to ask Is that what you wanted? Who you think I am Improving my senses You see I was siding with the baby

I Queer are the ways of a man I know: He comes and stands In a careworn craze, And looks at the sands And the seaward haze With moveless hands And face and gaze, Then turns to go... And what does he see when he gazes so? II They say he sees as an instant thing More clear than to-day, A sweet soft scene That once was in play By that briny green; Yes, notes alway Warm, real, and keen, What his back years bring— A phantom of his own figuring. III Of this vision of his they might say more: Not only there Does he see this sight, But everywhere In his brain–day, night, As if on the air It were drawn rose bright– Yea, far from that shore Does he carry this vision of heretofore: IV A ghost-girl-rider. And though, toil-tried, He withers daily, Time touches her not, But she still rides gaily In his rapt thought On that shagged and shaly Atlantic spot, And as when first eyed Draws rein and sings to the swing of the tide.