Tale of a Tub, Mad Moon & One fine summer’s day in Mystic
by Jesse H McKnight
[ poetry - july 12 ]
Tale of a Tub
The mindscape of attrition is a John
Constable landscape puzzle losing its
Pieces after countless communal hours
Of careful placement and straining toward
Totality - a careering of hard
Enterprises toward soft entropies
Revealing emerging visions beyond
The picture perfect givens of last snap
Completeness - the crab nebulae of
Disappearing sphericities, the fouled
Mitochondria of molecular
Implosion - the squalor of plenty, hours
Emptied of feature and function like the
Face and form of a leper, like the world
If neutrinos were the sum total of
Existence - the determinism of
Sameness, the grisly painlessness of arch
Predictability. Expression is a
Tub, the walls of which are tall, slippery
And shimmering in their dull unkindness -
The rim looming and foreboding in the
Sharp fact of its unreachability,
The resounding din and pounding reverb
Of its rotundity unbearable
And then one fine, clear day in spring, fatal.
Mad Moon
A pale sign, solemn seal, sallow wafer
Of the transubstantiation to come,
Prowls like the Prater the rim of the toy
Horizon only to shrink in grimness
In its rise to the stars, disrupting their
Gala Fourth display with a smoking hole
As buckshot as the sky portal of the
Pantheon - as begrimed as the scaling
Blank clerestory windows of St Vitus,
As darkly smeared as the tainted lifebuoys
Of Alexandria, as steeped in gloom
As the shadows of pigeons over the
Pillars and pavers of St Peter’s Square.
Galileo and I got cricks in our
Necks - He in glee, I in world-weariness -
He in revelation, I in wonder
At this exact smudge print snapped onto the
Once and future gleaming king at teeming
Court and worn now for some mysterious
Purpose for some seventy-two minutes
In some four hundred and fifty-six years
Like the minister’s black veil. Then at last
A rind of light slips from the grip of the
Eye patch of occlusion and starts to smelt
Salvers of belief from the dross of doubt.
One fine summer’s day in Mystic
The red bulb of the clown’s tale-telling
nose
Flickers just slightly as the Brownian
Motion-motored infinitesimals
Of self and dominion break off and slip
Away - Queequeg’s gasp before the bones - the
Crack in the perma-ice, (in God we trust)
Whipping before our incredulous eyes
Like a seven-hundred mile-long black snake
Portending the all fall down of Larsen’s
Shelf and our lesser selves. The weak force of
Decadence in the observing eye of
The hapless flatfoot lost in the back streets
And rotten boroughs of the marathon
Blossoms only when the leisurely long
Rays of evening are well under weigh at
The summer solstice, when the dogwoods are
Heavy with blooming lachrymosity
And the deep daylight dreaming and heaving
Rapture of selves blessed with an absolute
Absence of self-knowledge. Toilet clams from
The grave-seeped creek, rusted windlass,
Testy man-haters leaping from the bush
Claim their dues and take their toll but cannot
Get at the soul in the hole of its sole
Hysterically crying out, “round the world!”
