Baron Münchausen, image by Daniel Y. Harris
A line from Willem de Kooning
Baron Münchausen looked
on & sought for symptoms
& synapses. At first glance an
absurdist point of view, but
those earlier drafts have now
been shown to have significant
economic benefits. Bayern München
opened with a performance of
Palestrina's famed two-part
motet, Sicut
cervus. Then they
played a leading role in New
York's antislavery politics
during the early years of
the war. Ended up winning
everything there was to
win. They were so lifelike.
Robert Creeley enters the water
some
of the time
the line
goes taut
o-
illogical
but I am
beaten to the
body & left
with a grab-
bag full
of glassy-eyed
head-
lines
“…the last day the sharks appeared.”
*
painted my
self into
a cor-
ner
using the
first line of
an other's
poem as the
last line
of my own
now I'm in
open
water
out of breath / out of my depth
&
the
sharks real-
ly do appear
Analectical Chemistry
K’ung Tzu wrote that the
scrutiny of connective tissue,
when coerced, should only be
accepted if supporting evidence
such as large marine eels living
in the mother’s birth canal could
be found. It was a patriarchal
attitude, like so much of The
Analects. A kind
of ancestor wor-
ship, extolling the Superior Man,
the fabled father of the people. Un-
fortunately for K’ung Tzu, the eels
whose presence he prized so greatly
were animists, & showed no filial
piety when they emerged one night
& conger lined up to eat him.
—Mark
Young
Mark Young lives
in a small town in North Queensland in Australia, & has been publishing
poetry for almost sixty years. He is the author of forty books, primarily text
poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, & art history. His
work has been widely anthologized, & his essays & poetry translated
into a number of languages. His most recent books are Mineral Terpsichore & Ley
Lines, both from gradient books of Finland, & The Chorus of the Sphinxes, from Moria Books in Chicago. A new collection, some more strange meteorites, is due out from Meritage & i.e.
Press, California / New York, in early 2017.
