2 by David M. Pitchford


Before Breakfast November Morning

night has forgotten to absent the earth,
though the sun somewhere behind these clouds has
as they say risen.          dreams shattered on the rocks
sometime in last night’s silent tide cycle,
not so much fragmented as obliterated
completely annihilated and given
over to oblivion:                         the empty bed,
shadows sans partners dancing sans expression,
passionless moonlight denies gods exist,
silence no longer a sound but the absence
of music, which fell to half-note ruins and
mere myth of itself somewhere in moonless
immitigable night   .   .   .   and from this dank
morning mist, color drains away into grey.
quatorzain 461
I can see armageddon in your eyes
my whole world asunder beneath your gaze
laid waste as the forest fire the trees, so
life and renewal can take a firmer
hold, reshape into new perfections what
once was desolate, verdant, desolate
again and now burgeoning . . . yes, this stir
feels like metamorphosis’ beginning.

perhaps the loam landslide in your eyes brings
the blackbird’s omen, perhaps harbinger
of evolutions unforeseen.          perhaps
they hold but the echo of what they see
deep into the hollow of the human
being who stands transparent before you.

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He Speaks of Mermaids

mermaids must by anatomical
necessity be virginal, he tells
his audience. as such, they are most apt
for symbolism, for seduction, not
merely seduction, but a hopeless sort
without possibility of fulfillment.
so she is, in truth, the quintessential
harpy, the agony of tantalus . . .

from the freudian perspective, mermaids
represent fear of sex as addiction,
of sex as a finite resource, to earn,
to withhold . . . in the sea, which represents
sex, the mermaid is promise without hope
of satisfaction, she is celibacy.