The Soul of Two Centuries (2003)

He was the soul of his century.
- Emerson, "Goethe, Or, The Writer"

It is one thing
to write the book
of an age. Another
to tome the
seam of two.
Here is not
solus but
saddlae, born
on one beach,
ebbed from
the next. The
words of hybrid
wings must grip
and howl as
if caught between
tectons, each
sentence a stormy
range two miles
up from the sea.
I am not he,
but yammer on
in the heat of
such artistry,
my spume of
Sputnik's beep
and the World
Trade Center's
ghost legs dancing
on Manhattan's
glitzy ends. The
death of literature
on parent in my ear,
some fuse incarnate
yet inchoate my
other sire, a widow
who clasps a
blue rosary in
a drowned chancelry,
a finger to her
wrinkled lips.
Spawn of Jello
and Mao, this next
day is my green
martyrdom, the
world so casually
aflame in the
ordinaries of dawn.
My waking here
at the pad the
repeated matins
of a liturgy only
spread ages
understand, each
poem a prayer
furrowing the foam
between googol
plex and tetrabyte,
no wiser for
the motions which
the well I found
here satisfies
and oceans. Thigh
to thigh I travel,
the rhapsodic
anchorite of
ripe unravels,
a boor angel
of the gravel
ground from
those two ages
which wrap
around me crying
c'mon baby
give me more
make waves for
Dylan's twice-
born roar on
the next more
savage shore.