The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by John Barr
Dante at Shiloh
I. I found myself in the aftermath. Cannonades had set the woods ablaze, felled whole trees, swept the earth with canister and grape. From bodies and body parts heaped up by musketry (Aim low and be deliberate, boys.), a strangeling crawled––Blue or Gray I couldn’t tell––from the Minie balls’ last meal. Straining to break their cannon free, dead horses, still in harness, hauled. Voices out of the burning undergrowth wept for water as the field fell still. At the iron dice of war, both sides lost. Wild pigs won, squabbling over their feast. II. It started to rain and with it came a troop of orators––men of God, carpetbaggers of every stripe. Gingerly, to avoid the mud, they stepped from one corpse to the next, crossing the swamp, slipping on blood. One started to speak, “Brethren in Christ . . .” but stopped, perplexed, to see another man wearing his face. This progressed, speaker after speaker, until soon each searched in panic through the group, and when he found his stolen face, that one he mounted and buggered, like boar on boar–– in self-love or -loathing, I wasn’t sure. Water’s Work
It takes 500 years for the ocean’s waters The prodigal returned, a bride running late, it races from the street, climbs the plumbing in the walls to the bathroom tap, then halts. Water is weather. Pulled from swells out where cyclones make the only news, its vapor rises to the poles, refreshes bergy bits, brash ice, floes–– or crosses longitudes to fall as shoures soote upon us all, then drains away to aquifer. Weather is God’s will writ small. Water is extended metaphor: Its antecedent, alchemic character commonly denominates all things, in compound or by temperature. 4 a.m. Fill the glass. Let the molecule from Christ stand again in human state even as it quenches thirst. The Power & Light Company
For MKM
Under the Used and Useful Principle a public utility may charge customers only for assets that are used and useful in providing service to those who pay for it: power plants, transmission lines, the sum total of what it takes to make power and light. Most of those with needs for power and light in their lives work from a different principle. Power—prerogative with impunity—is total by nature, not a thing to sell to customers. Those who gain it keep it. Having it befits them, whether used or useful. Light, on the other hand, is useful when it gives illumination; think how light reflecting off the moon reveals it, renders it. Whether gaining and keeping is the principle or giving is, matters to customers. The one’s cost, the other’s benefit is total. Can those receiving service unbundle the total, choosing the light, which is nothing if not useful, but not the power which is not for sale to customers in any case? Does having the light without the power offend some principle of commerce? If so, are we compelled to honor it? We know from history, replete with it, that power does not abide what it can’t control: total antipathy portends the death of principle. If we take only the light, can it be useful without the power? If not, of what use is the light? That is the quandary for customers. And face it, our lot is to be customers: Something received, things taken in return for it. Light without power or power without light. How do we keep the dark from turning total when we ourselves would be the used and useful? When giving our lives a purpose is the principle? Caveat emptor, customers. The game is total, your lives for it: You will be used if you are useful. But as to power and light, let light be principal. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |