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By Marc Vincenz
Edited by Raquel Balboni and Ben Mazer
September 14, 2021
2 min read
Of Cargo
In autumn the wine is pressed; many
Toes give the fermentation a shine.
The ladies in their half-pinned buns,
The men harping on about their losses—
A paradise of tired eyes garrisoned
In the quarters in the form of exaltation;
But their faces are blank stone, etched
In some strange cratered version of the moon.
In winter, rewards are reaped for their
Foresight, visions of wild animals,
Lynxes and foxes, the rutting of the stag,
Even the extinct worlds of the mastodon,
Or the fire-eating wildebirds—the world
Replaced by a few bundles of twigs
Against the wall where the fire passed through.
But, in the evening, a ship at anchor awaits
This precious cargo of mythical tales.
Here the strange bins labeled seasonally
Know no hands or feet will linger,
The vexation of creation is neither
Closed in one landscape, nor at peace
In the rolling hills—everything is proportion,
Stepping ashore on an economy of passions;
These days are passed beyond expectations.
They who cast their fortune from afar,
Willed into the mechanics of the future.
A known thing, a dwelling from once before.
And know again that each season, wild
And fertile or stoic and bare, as it may be,
Recalls a memory—of flies upon flies,
Of a smattering of pollen and dust, of egg-
Laying insects in every form—and even when
Lucretius was blabbering, Amenicus was wandering,
Then Octavia in her flowing robes, Agrippina
Close to the edge, her hairpins and hair
Overflowing in daisies.
—Marc Vincenz
Marc Vincenz has published sixteen books of poetry, including more recently, Here Comes the Nightdust (Salmon Poetry, 2019).
He lives on a farm in Cheshire, MA, overlooking Herman Melville's Greylock Mountain.
Viscous Verses is edited by Raquel Balboni and Ben Mazer (artnletters.com)
*Originally published in-print in Boston Compass Newspaper #138 August 2021