Arsenic Lobster poetry journal
Issue Twenty
Summer 2009
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Translating Crickets
Louis Daniel Brodsky

This mild August twilight,
When the crimson sky is awash with frenzied flying
And I, diminished from imbibing white wine,
Once again sit outside, behind this still Victorian manse,
Listening to crickets tightening and loosening leg-pegs
On their Stradivarius and Amatus violins,
In preparation for night's newest fugue,
An inclination bordering on compulsion suborns me.

I take up pen, dismantle whiteness, a line at a time,
Fabricate, from diffuse ideas and visions,
Fabrics sufficiently commodious to efficiently robe
Misbegotten Moseses, wayward Ahabs and Queegs,
Huck Finns, Gullivers, Ponce de Leóns
Frantically searching for homes in "promised lands"
Only the mind invents and hand translates to paper,
By arresting naked metaphors and dressing them in suggestiveness.

This blessed dusk, when my preposterous inebriation
Is witnessed by absolutely no one
And I go outrageously accountable to no code of morality,
Only crickets, doting turtledoves, slugs
Recognize my sedentary shape. I am Joseph in disguise,
Childless, widower, an atheistic ascetic.
My dreams wander through the southern-Missouri Sinai,
As I, pariah poet, translate the crickets' High Mass into my vernacular.

About Louis Daniel Brodsky

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