Issue 12: George Life
from precarity
09.08.13 – 09.17.13
lawn cautiously out of the woods or the three owls one up in the trees
the others in the grass hopping likely hunting this is not a list of
demands it is not an account of grievances this is a gathering
together
of the poor children miracle
of the children this is a constitution
of our being unfinished species a sheaf of drafts merely a preliminary
to of course what we can imagine now is nothing in comparison
to the small words hearing them
you will see the young couples
09.18.13 – 09.27.13
leaving again in rags out of poverty give me a boat that can carry
to and we shall row my love and I moving over the continent the bare
ground without wealth refusing wealth or accepting it
to be free of it
a morality play mono no aware over the waves the play it begins with
the world
out of poverty quoting such simple things this or that from
out of the open air of public discourse leaving in rags so to speak
metaphorically of course the dogs barking in the background
or
09.28.13 – 10.06.13
the primary element civilization of oil of narrative a pile of tires
pile of tears without a language of politics and ideology we will not
in
El Valle as a species
we came across a mola of the sea the we we came
across the shipwreck of the singular the ground of that shipwreck the
course of Mallarmé's Un Coup de Dés du fond d'un naufrage and the
singular the singular that species of actor that struts and
frets its
hour upon the stage and then is heard no more it is a tale told by
10.07.13 – 10.16.13
an idiot the doves flying in flapping and stopping not moving because
I haven't moved and therefore must be thought not to be here
and so
the world full of sound and fury obscurely again repeat it things
and the self the world and the self
before the arrival of Europeans the
Polynesian sits in the warm shade under a palm and he thinks I don't
know what he might think I don't know Polynesian thought suppose
like a Greek he thinks the sun is a molten mass
and he is filled in that
10.17.13 – 10.26.13
moment with it the most intense excitement whenever the mind rises
even a little
it is flooded with happiness in the future perfect the
future conditional poem the first line of which ends the the past
matters not only because of what actually happened but also
because
of that which went that which was and the sealess asail that which in
deference to not that though I am as in
Ibn Arabi that life as thou the
life of change and the absence of the wind rises as with that which we
George Life lives in North Carolina, and over the past few years has lived variously in China, Panama, and Arizona, where he recently received an MFA. His poems can be found online at Spiral Orb and The Dictionary Project. He is also working on a selected translation of the late poems of Du Fu, some of which have appeared in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. He blogs at periplumvia.blogspot.com.
