CANTO II. ("Carbon Dioxide")

Silence is safest.
Eternal royal smell love's wounded
with comfort,
the earth in its sooty alb
and stormfronts lapping stormfronts in a chevron
of casualties. I almost
watched the sanctification of a bodkin
like a sad grilse
in tumult;
the apogee of slaughter-cadence
to come. Ev'ry dead comrade
is coming home. Samhain or Bedlam
dominion in the snail slime-wake of orchid
spidergoat challenge,
unctuous
twinkling. As elemental rays roll rugged
the only smarter allele salvo
beheld spork chaos.
Plastic burning choking fugue
post modern
plastic Æpyornis
futility of eyes as regent.
Silence is next to ozone.
Eternally oral elms rouse the pedant
to august
indigence, winter stars still valiant
predawn chill, Starbucks, my old orange luggage
names to mouthe.
The future, plaintiff,
will walk, lorn, in a constant
blue musjid
of slow. The plastic brainwash
will have flown. Scalprum
wizardly, or maybe accident punctual;
each of us tonight is a soldier
a lover and a priest. The gleeful
centuries embark. Our weather swerves, corsned
scorned, jodhpur
of Firestone, shod. Fine structure
constant-share, scoundrel
won't: but all. In this vapor chamber
our trials not soon be over, rove an octave
of woe, wasted breadth,
the frantic morbid polka
blimp whoosh valve.



Just heard that George deMerledied. They don't make artists like that anymore--self taught & theory-free: his later sculptures, of fluorescent-painted gossamer, were deliberately ephemeral, impossible to reproduce, and of an unearthly beauty.


Habitable Planets around Gliese 581? (via Centauri Dreams)