solid ice erected a sheen over
thousands of shipmasts, hundreds of spires
I looked again through black wrought iron
spikes beyond their frozen ocean wave
to the light some faced – others ignored –
beyond the second wall of steel.

orange warmth washed over mistless masts
stark-set against blued half-things, vapors,
half-trees, half-stones, half-beasts there roaming
over that frozen wave of bones.

Above, Diana cloudless waits, her
dogs loose, her virgins hidden, weeping
for those taken too soon – said simpler:
for all taken.

The sea of the dead, they’ve moved each night:
I notice McCullin further down
I notice Harris on higher ground
or do some stones share names?

But tonight, and everynight, frozen
bones-made-stones-made-masts from where I stand.
I cannot unmake the dead, their deaths.

I cannot unsee their ends. Progress
for those few I see fighting the wave
of ice to light is not a fight. It’s
gifted. And we who stand behind grates,
behind black iron plates watching all the
roiling waves of the Styx – clips, slides, snips,
negatives left on the darkroom floor –
have no more to say or show.

So we watch. We watch the dead play down
into frozen darkness, their motion
off stage left

or ride the rigging up into light
box and its thaw.

Our opinions: neither their gain nor
loss. Both now set in stone set in ice,
frozen momentum.

---

 

about the 54 poems written at 27 ::

After much deliberation, I decided to keep the whole tradition of doubling my age and writing that many poems in a year. You’ll notice that April Thirtyish has already passed, so I’m late in posting. I’ve gotten about half of them written and will begin posting this week.

I started this whole mess with 46 poems written at 23, most of which are still up on the site and many of which are awful. Those poems I wrote because I read somewhere that the best age for poetry is 23. I was turning 24 and had an existential crisis.

Then I got over it.

Suddenly I was 25 and thought, “Why not do it again?” So I doubled my age and wrote 50 poems at 25. Again, most of these are still on the site and I’m proud of one or two of them.

Now I’m twenty-eight and it’s almost a principle, almost an undeniable fact of life. When the wild Lancelot is in his native habitat and his age is in an odd year, he will be secreting poetry. I do this because poetry is important, because we must take an active role in the creation of new language or else our language dies.

That means I must write, I must learn how to create better poems even if I’m awful at it — everyone must because the fate of our culture’s at stake. For me, this year, that’s 54 poems at 27.

So I’ll schedule these suckers out and give it a go. Follow along with the category 54 @ 27.

---

image by Adam Detrick

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