The Sleeping Lifeguard Apollo on the Bechstein Aber wozu dann dieses kemplizierte Ding?
O'Gorman, Ned
Poetry Ned O'Gorman The Sleeping Lifeguard He dreams of windows that flutter open into eddies of sunlight and fillets of spume. I came round on the twentieth lap and he lay perfectly...
...It slid in my palm like the glistening inner space of a peach nut split open...
...I laid my hands upon it and lifted it just an inch off the surface...
...Apollo on the Bechstein This oval magnanimity lies on the Bechstein, all curves, caught, held static as the rubble of rings round Saturn...
...I came round on the twentieth lap and he lay perfectly asleep as the waves slammed against the world's cool belly...
...Yet it is liquid as grass and like it could be troubled into a tidal wave by a nether wind...
...Wittgenstein "But what then is the point of the complicated thing...
...I stood, my hands locked together and thought of ways death might come: an aboriginal wave, a refusal of light, a freezing shadow...
...Now, you see, Brancusi carved it out of the meshes I have glimpsed in the barks of some trees and in lead...
...For what it was seemed not so much a head of a sleeping god but the captive second when I had lain my head against a cold stone parquet by the sea and felt the fire within me that outfurled diamonds Aber wozu dann dieses komplizierte Ding...
...This morning I walked to a small cliff gnawed by the sea to slate ravines and pools of shells and weed where lichen and disemboweled husks of sea urchin lay on the copper field of the bay...
...For as I drove to an island where I'd been given haven I passed a village and could not go beyond it and swerved off in the sun and glare my body and its acrobatic breath contorted like wrens accosted by a whirlwind...
...On the sun's nape I laid my hands and felt my skin shift its hold on gravity letting down upon me a chaplet of lupin and endless waters that can complete nothing but render stable the infinite mountains that rise up beneath the wake of the swans...
...He stirred in his slumber and plunged through the water to the rock bed beneath all waters that reach back into the Eden waters, those thorns of tempest that compelled the whirlpools and fleets and the babble of sperm to speak dominion...
...I have been given a stranger nerve and tendons that carry sweeps of terror through me to a gland where the fool gods made me quarry to the heart's solemities folded like pins in my flesh...
Vol. 124 • May 1997 • No. 9
