Hushed Unwillingness: For Nate Mackey

"Vedic Man literally stands on music."

--Antonio T. de Nicolás, Meditations through the Rig Veda

"Each illness is a musical problem."

--Novalis, Encyclopedia

           "And the girls
said, 'sing more songs!' A plague on both your lips
Not Sybils but by syllables shall you be free."

--Charles Olson, "Antimaximus II"

Isn't it by continuing to make the cut
rather than bending around that we do
find those Argonautic periploi Berard
stressed we needed to go inland, finding
"Arkadia" more of the same cut off from
its own geodetic throng, how close a shave
(epic measure) do you want, do you wear
the Kythéran crown of River's daughter
threading her tiara, do you, Poet, ponder
a crooked path in flesh to her heart or
is there another way to peg the broken
Sampo's groan, can you turn a string
without grooving in Acacia to hold song
constantly giving us the slip for her?

John Clarke's books include Lots of Doom (1973), Gloucester Translations (1974), The End of This Side (1979), From Feathers to Iron: A Concourse of World Poetics (1987), and In the Analogy (1997). He taught for twenty-nine years at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

* From In the Analogy (Toronto/Buffalo: Shuffaloff Books, 1997). Published by permission of the John Clarke estate.

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