Definitely Not Lemmings #29

Jim Moffitt’s his name, he hails from New Carlisle, Indiana and when he’s not painting watercolors, he’s a bicycling fool—my kind of anti-lemming. Welcome aboard, Jim. 

A Dedication: Some Poems from My Spanish Friend Mario

It must be an exhilarating albeit exhausting task translating Seferis, Elytis, Eliot, David Jones, Zukofsky, et al. into Spanish and all the while writing your own poems, but this is what Mario Domínguez Parra does, and he does it with all the passion of a Spanish Markos Vamvakaris: When the great rembetiko musician first heard a bouzouki, he vowed to learn how to play the instrument in six months or he would chop off his arm with a cleaver! Now that’s what I call dedication and I’m grateful Mario has it.

Tenderfoot

young heifer nibbling

cane shoots down

long river road, further up

road looking back, tough mama

moo-cow watches on.

Huuklyeand Cinquor on Going in Circles

Somewhere round

Here is a square peg.

Moderator’s comments: The apotheosis of the absurd in only seven words; however, what remains of my frazzled logic impels me to peg the odds at 99-1 that prior to writing this “exercise in futility,” Cinquor envisaged the specter of the great Archimedes uttering his famous last words “Do not disturb my circles” just before an enraged, mathematically ignorant Roman soldier “put him in a pine box” for what he thought was insubordination, when in reality all the good mathematician had in mind was to continue his line of thought undisturbed, outside the box.

Aeonian

Old poems that keep

Coming and going away.

Huuklyeand Cinquor on Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish

Why make such a stink about leaving?

The first and only time you said 

Something worth waiting for

Was when you said goodbye.

Moderator’s comments: At times I can’t help wondering if some of Cinquor’s offerings contain references that he’s carried over from other works of art; take this one, for example. It reeks of something that might have been said by Vladimir to Estragon or vice-versa. But then again, an artist bearing such impeccable references wouldn’t be that heavy-handed in the handling of our cultural baggage, would he? Besides, the image of a fumbling Cinquor decked out as porter is so ludicrously repulsive as to be unbearable.

The Ultimate Escape Artist

               gone

(but
still

               moving
               his
               pen

over

.


the
page)