Paul Violi
Phenakistes Urges His Crew Onward
To reject years of sporadic nihilism
(nec hope nec fear)
and then sail down the Nile itself
on a soggy, fly-blown raft, carried all the way
by the same wave; dreary days
beneath the taunts of snide cliff-dwellers,
rancorous-eyed vultures, dim-witted natives
pelting the slack sail with apple cores;
oars jammed in purple mud, stench of wet dogs
and the river fanning out finally to the sea:
a morning where it will be impossible
to prove or disprove anything, a sky
that retains the stars of the previous night
hours after the dark evaporates;
white stars above the sparkling sea,
dream-winged dragonflies gliding in the warm wind,
delta reeds vibrating, a-sway
then the soundless, level end
—your masks burning to a glossy red ash,
shadows flowering into reflections . . .
Or to follow another route
perched on the edge of a glacier,
a frozen river that pushes the days
ahead of itself, to sit there
and maybe applaud as if it were a seat
in the front row of a new language
that was creating valleys, disrupting societies,
shoving them and their slot-eyed goats aside
in order to stay on the verge of a white flood
and despise all nostalgia except
the quintessential longing for another arctic,
crater-like stadium, islands
covered with lava, snow and steaming wells,
flames and ice prospering together,
a splendor brightened even more by a lunar envy,
the mornings red, the earth rounder
and the unobstructed call of voices
skidding for miles over the ice.
Paul Violi, Selected Poems 1970-2007, Rebel Arts, 2014.