Time of Tyranny, 49
We live in toppled times under a feat of tyranny; let’s not
fake getting lost, let’s do it, let’s not do it intermittently, let’s be
lost, disoriented and never to be bound so all can hear
the hiss of the adverbs we shoot into tyrants’ eyes, quivering
shafts slippery from limbs and aimed by eyes under feathered
lids. Our features are like stale bread, my headache bad
as a blueprint for butter. Windows: how stupidly the intensity
of glass returns to us the terror of love. Things diverge, separate
like the forks of the Eel River to which the competing lies
of two tyrants are but split stones shaken by earthquakes
of stupefying times, of minutes through a glorious forest, of women
who are personal friends, the flanks of a prevented rabbit: to scatter
and ambiguate, obviate, surreptitiously
flesh and hurry to find things to recombine.
From Tribunal by Lyn Hejinian, published by Omnidawn. Copyright © 2019 by Lyn Hejinian. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Lyn Hejinian
Lyn Hejinian was born in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1941. Poet, essayist, and translator, she authored and coauthored several books of poetry, most recently Tribunal (Omnidawn Publishing, 2019). She served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2006-2012. She taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a professor and John F. Hotchkis Chair Emerita, and lived in Berkeley until her death.