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Pilot at the helm of a hidden headland it steers free from convergence with the freighter when fog and storm clouds gather Sparking communiqué no full stop ends its broadcast performed in a three-sixty sweep the cycle burning up five solar seconds Midnight eye that blinks away invisibility a high beam revealing as it scans whatever seas or ships return terra firma's landmark gaze
Copyright © 2010 by Alfred Corn. Used with permission of the author.
They’d started meeting by night at the only local,
A seething crowd drawn from among the loudest
Words, swearing, conspiring, over tankards of ale.
In sour chiaroscuro their clenched faces by moments
Looked too grievance or was it expressive for comfort.
Rage drowns out background sounds such as summer
Crickets, the result, that one of them, in humid
Darkness, stops rasping his metal comb. It’s clear
That the rally of Words will turn demonic,
That before night ends they’ll be up in arms.
Met Museum, 1965, the first I'll see, his Young Woman Sleeping. Stage right, bright-threaded carpet flung over the table where a plate of apples, crumpled napkin and drained wineglass abut the recapped pitcher. Propped by one hand, her leaning drowse, behind which, a door opens on the dream, dim, bare but for a console and framed mirror—or a painting too shadowed to make out.
Once a day the rocks, with little warning— not much looked for even by the spruce and fir ever at attention above— fetch up on these tidal flats and bars. Large. crate-like rocks, wrapped in kelp; layer on imprinted layer, umber to claret to olivegreen of scalloped marbling. . . . Not far along the path of obstacles and stepping stones considered, fluid skeins of bladder wrack lie tufted over the mussel shoals— the seabed black as a shag's neck, a half-acre coalfield, but alive.