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Published Wednesday, March 21, 2007 by Patrick.
These green hills rolling
Grenoble to Paris bound
As serpent roads coiling
The morning pastures round
And the early season's color
Not yet fallen to the ground
Where lingering mud sucks
With a hollow lapping sound
(Small yellow flowers
Are everywhere blooming beside
The track's sloped embankments,
Like escorts,
Like a buttery parade,
Fragments of a springtime bomb
Always exploding everywhere
From here to paradise).
- Patrick
Labels: Poem
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Published Monday, March 19, 2007 by Patrick.
The churches of Paris are all
Underground, snaking under the city
To pulse out waves of flesh
Into the sticky summer air,
The morning crush that breaks
Across the altar
And heaves the rotted carcass
Of the night overboard,
While rails like choirs
Sing praise through graffitied holes
Bleeding oxygen into the choked city sky.
Drops of sweat like bullets
Pressed against the brow
Because all the pews are filled here,
All the seats are taken.
Trains lurch and rumble whale calls
That ripple through their concrete tanks,
Eels through the ether slipping
Drag weird harmonies in their wake.
For in this body complete
I am slippery sinew in flexing arm,
and Montparnasse is ganglion.
And the church bells sound at 7:15
As the parish wakes to pray.
- Patrick
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Published Sunday, October 29, 2006 by Patrick.
In my blood is an absence of important things
And a silver ringing in my ears reminds me
Of tastes best forgotten.
I'll write you at a level
Undergound someday,
I'll send you clay and ash.
I never asked,
You never knew
I loved you.
I never said goodbye.
- Patrick
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Published Tuesday, September 12, 2006 by Patrick.
Wires
The widest prairies have electric fences,
For though old cattle know they must not stray
Young steers are always scenting purer water
Not here but anywhere. Beyond the wires
Leads them to blunder up against the wires
Whose muscles-shredding violence gives no quarter.
Young steers become old cattle from that day,
Electric limits to their widest senses.
- Philip Larkin
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Published Wednesday, May 03, 2006 by Patrick.
The ocean is eating the earth
At Belle Ile en Mer,
And I am meeting no one
Along the sagging summer coast
The birds remark their progress
From a whirling overhead,
And the lighthouse paints a circle
On an ever-broadening sky.
There's a name buried somewhere
In the deepened molten suck.
It pulls the collapsing earth
Through sinkholes;
A silent downward drift
Into the shadows of the brine
As the traffic of the tourists
Melts across the stage,
Explodes on down the street
And then disappears completely.
- Patrick
Labels: Poem