G.M. Quinte







Lunch Codes

 

I.

 

"She were keen on

the wetlands, and so were I."

           

Cap-sized bobs and chafing dishes

 

                                                bobolink tenders.

 

Leguminous butt-ends deliquescing in the nurses' breezeway,

a quintessence of small-A ambrosia.      

 

He peeked at your ballot box and something about aversion,

a nimbus of donut sugar, your lead-white aureole.  Displaced

from the doghouse, a hardon-shaped piece of air.

 

The entire fountain was made of water and you, my muffin-hatted

Swede, educed a dozen thought molecules. 

 

Mangroves are puppets, you said.

 

I haunted your ghost. 

 

Remember?

 

I threw peonies at the shark (distracted)

and at the regional dishes of your forebears.

 

We've started thinking again.


                                               

 

 

II.

 

We were the taffy guild—

Time was our confection.

 

We shared in common—

Dread of the moment.

 

Our figures embraced—

Dense cloud of impurity.




 

III.

 

“Scores will perish.”









Pleasure Craft

 

The time has come to pursue the leisure

Activity, to be deer and divide

A planter of pomegranates.  The night

Has no volition, no audience.  We glide

Past passing flakes of interest.  “Civics lite.”

Cameras close and open sans pleasure.

 

Can we invent a new kind of pleasure

Craft?  Are we making fine use of leisure?

Can you open the hatch so the light

Armored battalions might divide,

Might confer upon us the right to glide

Like bodies in bodies in bodies of night?

 

Night after night after night after night

Aubade splits and beach-kiss pleasure.

Feel the mystic collapse: we’ll just glide

By on mistakes.  Smallish gods blessed leisure

Seekers, parked our Lotuses. Who can divide

The thing from itself and bottle the light?

 

I must not change my life, he said.  No light

Have I ever witnessed…even at night,

He said.  Watch a boat divide

The water.  The folding pleasure

Is an enormous unfolding leisure,

Vees into which we always glide.

 

Cored and peeled afternoons glide

By, an eternal sinecure and light

Lunch by Mom.  They’ve discovered new leisure

Forms active only at night.

The days are broken.  It is your pleasure,

Introducing the great divide.

 

Time versus other-time: pieces divide

Pieces over parts, a pleasant glide-

By, brandishing the medal of pleasure.

Come about, come about!  There is no light

To these pieces.  Ptarmigans infest the night,

Forage for the seeds of leisure.

 

Clear air with air.  There’s no leisure

But speaking. Ripe basket of night,

Features on features spilled pieces of light…








[step back to issue 3]