Jeff Harrison


Sunrise

it is from silence, verse,
a wolf wished out of sleep
follow, Shepherd, with an elegy,
brief as epitaph, to Repose

think you gladness knows its parts?
Gladness, spacious as your pastures?
Ulysses, me!, you, Shepherd, do feign —
what does a shepherd know of shores?

nymphs upon sunrise primly depart,
and meadows are purer, by twice, for human step
Phoebus all golden hangs above and pursues you,
Shepherd, companied heavenly!, with praise


To The Harmonious Spheres‏‏

Bedeviling celestials, aside from fortunes you proffer notes inaudible and cryptic as a shoal of paramecia. Those who put words in your mouths daren't score you. Your speech fabular, spheres, your song phantasmal! (Special to Neptune: What star, Memnon, serves as your dawn?) Restless Sirens, who is the mariner you, coordinators of every doom, look to whelm in the depths?

Arcadian Earth

And you picture pleasant their earth, you who mourn words long of heavy regard weightless today as the sun, and imagine Arcadians are hidden in a shoulder of ivory (ivory gelid, though once warm among cries, and figured, though once unmarked as silence) under the hand of Mnemosyne... Shepherd!, speak up!, lest... who turns Her eye to you, and of your reverie She speaks Arcadia.



Jeff Harrison has poems in all the issues of Otoliths except the second issue. He has publications from MAG Press, Writers Forum, Persistencia Press, and Furniture Press. He has two e-books at xPress(ed), and one at Blazevox. His poetry has appeared in The Hay(na)ku Anthology Vol. II, Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics, Xerography, Moria, NOON: journal of the short poem, Drunken Boat's Oulipo issue, and elsewhere. He has an interview blog with Allen Bramhall called Antic View.

 
 
 
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