Switched-on Gutenberg Issue 16
Assemblage
 
In the Youth of Swedenborg

garden in which a dune is behind each bluebell,
a clay tablet written into each yarrow stem
 
enlightenment,
whose machinery could fail?
 
forest lives characterized
 as greater than or less than reason
 as plus or minus error
 as exodus into clearings, therapies of flora,
      anthills of unidentified consciousness
 
words the floodgates of a people
 
buried under Ararat, a hexagram turns up,
'a wolf's time to lie down with the lamb
  is gainsaid from the lamb'
 
the wood of the house a skeleton,
the heat of the house a spiritual work reformed
  from an ark accommodating all varieties
  of spectator plants & animals
(the minerals absent themselves
 in warning barrages & convoluted gems)
 
water circulating the city, the inner & outer city,
in renovation of mortal drought
 & naked moraines: 'this lake
one day in the future shall you take as wife,' haggling
 to bring milk & honey up from a short growing season
 to the tongues chosen for this place
 
(lacks rail, steam, canal,
while the beautiful horsepower could never starve,
sugar of oasis fruit crystallizes on property allowing it
   to be scavenged without a patent
 
the mountains, emotional barriers to Job's suicide,
whose yellowing undergrowth is a rumor
  of destiny corrosive to brotherhood,
scrapped into factories
where Eve lingers in design & in object, an ash
  at the backdoor, bearing no book
 
the king x led each flowering species into his demise,
periods of purple & gold abandon the geography of the fathers,
trade routes heavily overlay changing daylength,
from a pomegranate in Paphos
  an angel contemplates disempowerment of starches
 
laws of heat are claimed prophetically,
strong, weak, electromagnetic, gravitational
formula drama, practical instrument,
geometric plumb, anti-drama,
voluminous results in preparation how & while it can
 
'alive til the ghostly birch withdraws'
draws lines on untreated paper hurriedly
 
aways away from the first day


Copyright 2010,  Dave Shortt

Dave Shortt's work has appeared in the print journals SalamanderMesechabe,  and Bullhead,  and in the ezines Sugar Mule  and Astropoetica, among others. 



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