Poetry
Mead, S.E. & Bankston, Carl L. III
S.E. Mead Summer Vacation The landscape as in a fever: hard edges melting, amorphous anatomy, a rosy illumination. Touchy to mention it, some grand deception passing for passion. Must be the...
...C a r l L. Bankston III Light Along t h e Erie Canal Across the water's surface, curves comer the sun and heave it forth in glimmers, as man's mind serves to catch, reflect a sun-like force in scattered sparks...
...Salmonella's common and, from backed up sewers, microscopic parasites disclose the matrix of a landfill...
...436: Commonweal...
...shared about, like bits of loaves, white fragments broken from a first gold crust and shared along the rows...
...Sockets of empty windows showed the road their aged, sightless stare...
...Above, the birds scoop waves in wind, ripple and pour between suns caught on air and earth...
...A living village spilled from still, dead stones...
...Reflections from the feathers start an echo of light...
...Must be the heat, this tropic's paradisical dream time-golf courses, shopping malls, swimming pools glimpsed through high iron fences in billboard technicolor...
...mocking children and goats traced our tracks through the bone-white dust around their squalid homes...
...alone but for the sun nailed in the a i r - - whose beams crossed through the cracks, everywhere...
...C a r l L. Bankston III The C a s t l e at Santorini Image of a skull, the ruined castle sat there on the hillside...
...Here is the critical stability of somebody comatose, little desultory tell-tale clues tracing aristocracy to a honeycomb swollen only with uninterpretable buzzings, some phantom war's cancer, the slick palm-lined streets elusive undercurrent of struggle...
...From their flexions flash darts as bright as those between the shores...
...But when we reached the top, they left us there...
...We climbed the stairs, bent beneath our packs, as if we were two thieves, hauling our loads of goods and guilt slung across our backs...
...In fact, there is difficulty here: the dialect cultures filter, each keeping contact to bare minimum while flaunting ethnocentricity naive as tourists, yes, unintentionally obtuse--these patrolled memorials waving flags, like leaflets, of Magna Carta ideals...
...Inside the skull, we hung from the hill alone...
...Other courses seize it, toss it, off arrows of bark, edges of leaves, and crooks of boughs...
Vol. 118 • July 1991 • No. 13
