Roman Exercises


Clarksburg

Consider the marble quarry in Clarksburg,
how bits of Africa collide in a mélange
                    of continental plates.
Abutments and clefts of great depth.
Our host fabricates books "On Sex."
His wife glazes salmon with honey,
                    Follow the shunted waterways
to a collision
with a Chinese fighter jet
Huang Yong Ping's Neapolitan mastiff
pisses America on the wall.
Buddha upon Taishan
fish in the maw of that Gonawandan trench.
Crucified Christ for bait (Beuys).
On a scrim within a compact jewel case,
a platoon of black children, hardly nine or ten years old,
crowds a corner of the desolate parade ground,
hardly wanting to come forward.
Hampton Institute 1900 (Carrie Mae Weems).
On the mountain road to Florida
unremitting curves, vistas
that swallow the onlooker whole.



Apocrypha

Was it a mastic or a holm oak
in the garden where
Susanna bathed?
Clever elders unwisely trapped
in webs of deceit.
One tree bleeds transparent sap
turns white when chewed,
flavors ouzo.
The other glorifies its village
on the Duero, land of spicy wine
and neighbor to Navarre.
That smudge on the sky
is bees returning to the hive



Havre-aux maisons

Houses on the hillside,
scraps of colored paper;
boats sail on grass.
Strong women keep watch,
safeguard the homeward course.
Day of lowering skies,
sympathetic, unmoving eyes.
If the sun breaks forth
with bright spokes
like a section of a wheel,
shield your eyes.
Herons, bone gray sentinels.



See bees,
marigold,
brush legs,
fur thistle.
Poor in land, his
be first to breed
Bonfire,
aerial dance,
firefly
Perseids.
Frosty nights,
amber glow,
honey-hearted
mead.



Coerced

Ephemeral in the slipstream of time,
there are gasoline receipts.
No human subjects.
Postcards from a translucent Miami,
pink flamingo sunsets.
Art deco friezes
excavated from the heart of Egypt.



Restraint

Day light moon nearly full in its most southern transit
The river roiling darkly, twilight silk, the dog
enraptured by newly thawed
fewments and carrion. Beavers
have felled several ash, rowan, elm.
Today I visited a locksmith, thinking to replace
hardware on the front door. In his wisdom, he advised
restraint. No one manufactures pieces like those now.
He said he could rekey the lock. I said, fine.



Funeral flight

Red sandstone, red brick, watchtower and arch
through which your dad entered,
grammar school. Architectural subjects
in search of an idea...
In its ballet with death, the mind
wheels in an August without air.



Roman mother

Shadows of autumnal red and mauve
Wind prints
the salt marsh
Reeling with tropical force
surface waters
snake between yarrow and fescue
At the edge of the sea
inscrutable messages
about to be erased, old conversations
renewed



El Greco angels
wings that look like ax blades

... for John

Ekleksographia:
Wave Three

May, 2010

Poetry

Donald Wellman

Donald Wellman is an Ahadada author, Prolog Pages (2009). From New Hampshire, he likes the idea of being identified as a Boston area poet. He has been actively engaged in Boston-area poetry, off and on since the 1981 when he found O.ARS in Cambridge. His book-length poem entitled A North Atlantic Wall will be published in the fall or winter of 2010 by Dos Madres.