poem || Jeff Harrison

Settle for Dryads' Graces

THE KING IN YELLOW is your
doing, Herr Bibliothekarius?
bleakest reading, blackest life
fire there is curiously soft


here is mention anew of Virginia
a sunny subject is Virginia —
a ramble of a catastrophe, me the snarled:
"the bareness destroyed, Virginia who
shapes anew what shepherds rescue"


me, to whom oldest breath is freshest bread —
in the bleakest reading, blackest pastoralscape
there's a V where the space, & me, should be


living in mysteries were Dryads,
chasing familiarity am I still, still I
foolishly stroke old branches that,
glistening, are to become your manuscripts,
Herr Bibliothekarius!


fineness a-sink, brain feeling is sweeted,
lost, started anew, & ever for birds behind skies
your manuscripts contain sandy & mossy plays
moss spell'd to sun-black-charmed Egypt


what's un-numbered dropped from
counted hands (four hundred & sixty-two)


the final hand, unwritten by Herr Bibliothekarius
nor mentioned under smeared-inky tongues, is the
glove throning Virginia, my world-historical sock-puppet


echoing, we'll be disease together, orally I can mirror
simple dryads destroyed in the lumber mills, me the snarled:
"do you love that body appointment? fire there is curiously
soft, cool to the touch its graven mention of blistered hands...


          THE TAIL-ECHO OF VIRGINIA'S SPEECH:


to Herr Bibliothekarius,
the hangman of one copyright,
the sun's sanity seems the seas


the luminous part
of Herr B's dream is
the lacuna, filthy flashes


'well-barked,
splendid, so
splendid, you've
dignified mud!'


quoth my dryads, to
whom sandy & mossy plays
aren't very sepulchral, until
filthy flashes knotted with mud,
prowl their skies, they creep down


stone steps to find Bibliothekarius doing
the King In Yellow, piercing dryad lamentations,
but the loudest voice here is his own death-distress
four hundred & sixty-three, -four, -five, -six, -seven,
all possible readings of future numbers having promised
the KING IN YELLOW's scenes will meet w/ fire


indistinguishable from fire when in fire
his own death has eyes on our thoughts
the next time, his poems come down in sheets
our own words in strips of his GRAVE dialect —


'my prompt mouth cut with vines,
my hands, rabidly fiery, unbound still'


uncurtained scent
under white stone
steps, further under this
blanche is the black mud —


without lutes the dryads, & Herr
Bibliothekarius knocking them aside,
parched all, run their lips to the marsh
under that black mud it's all pearl"