The reflections the shipping
Lanes pour sweat
Where all bodies
Meet all waters, below trees…
Mud and flagpoles, mud and
Flagpoles, my god
Is a washbasin and
The clouds wash my hands…
O, pacification! hobbyhorses!
Capitalism belittles
Vestigial organs, the stomach,
Money and blinking…
Wealth breeds use,
Slime and refuse, slime and refuse,
Slime and refuse, slime and refuse,
A blood of Christ red ranunculus,
A blood of Christ red ranunculus,
Shells, dew-eyed
Peels, the mussels pried
Open, by crateloads, cow-eyed
In Hogarth rooms,
Risen craters cater to whiteness, as
Voices ascend the canal face
Up from the severed isthmus
Vomiting the miracles of industry.
Ceremony dead
The beaches exhumed
For a coast, my indisintegration
For a coast, for a maiden métier.
Ashes, awash in waking, leafless,
The sea jerks on
The earth’s chain. Sentimental,
“Christ,” inexcludable from it,
“To leave our gods out of this”
Will, to exist, document it, hell
Means it, answer white canals,
To answer divisions of this bell.
Matthew Moore is the author of a poetry collection, The Reckoning of Jeanne d’Antietam (Nevada). He is the translator of Opera Buffa by Tomaž Šalamun (Black Ocean) and Padova by Igo Gruden (Adjunct).
