The Poetry Corner

Vertigo

By Paul Cameron Brown

We're travelling down a carnival road, are met at intersections by varying faces: poets as eyes in collapsed black holes, even the universe as extension of the stellar poet. Then, they are transformed, become worm-pickers, masons, longshoremen who subsidize their poetry with the real task at hand: making waste, laying trestles instead of women to prove a point. This is necessary. I'm defending it, find it both believable and interesting. Meanwhile, troubadours and wandering minstrels eke out a living on storybook memories, join Marco Polo if he ever lived. Seek out the Great Khan in a box of cookies or within a magnum of champagne depending on circumstances. The GrandLunar is watching. Her pallor commands true poets to roll over, gaze at silver buttocks make a commitment to the art beyond spray painting, ghost watching, navel gazing. The sky is the final home of the soul, the Sage himself a wanderer announced. It was a warm spring evening. Lilac bounded from antler brown twigs only recently inert. Everything dissolved at once into crying. The world itself became a tear.