2 August 2009 | Vol. 9, No. 2

Not Noon, 1904

by NORMAN DUBIE

– for Meghan L. Martin

1.

Poincaré sits in the turning dark

of the stairwell

folded in a thin nightshirt

eating a dry husk of carp, mostly

all huge brass head, eyes

distraught,

with declining bones like a harp.

An influenza is in the suburbs.

The lamps

will be sputtering

with a soloist birdsong

that separates his thoughts. Bells

like 'little grisha' in low declensions

the white loins of the leopard

in flight through the windows

of the lyceum

washed with vinegar and small sunfish.

The bell rope falling

from the night sky is the last secret that,

and his perspective of the first stanza

as a composition

in six dimensions, the uncommon

equilibrium.

2.

The zebra stands in the back

of the beer truck

eating straw off blocks of ice…

the zebra has polliwogs

on it like lice, field

lines of wiggly sentience

and the pink mice insisting, cropside,

of a plague outside Marseilles

and Nice.

3.

The beer truck drives into the dusk.

The untroubled potato fields

egging on a soloist bird,

at evening; it sings

of the über-frames and the long

long bell rope at dawn.

Grisha, common

monotony of enigma is what's wrong.

It's grisha who now mourns.