Fall 2012 Issue

A Quartet Written Upon Reading Eliot’s Four Quartets “This soup tastes like windows” ― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera 1. Infernal Preparation I am afraid, I said. I doubt.

Time present and time future Are both perhaps time past, And maybe tomorrow’s penitential fast Was last Wednesday’s flavorful repast, That wounded strawberry jam that did taste of bloody saliva, And for dessert that sweet and fat godiva That nearly made seventeen of my teeth fall out.

Time future and time present, Extending like a gardenia in spherical cones Within and without, redeems nothing, pities no soul, For the awful commiseration of the Universal engine Prides itself on non-commitment to moribund woes.

Such were my words last night, when in a moment Of infinite despair, beneath a willow tree— Whose roots fed on the bones of the flesh Of the dead of heavy days long since betid On breathing lung and conjuntified eyelid— Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are we all made— I wept against the bark, My heart beating thirty-three miles a plank constant, The tachychardia of anxious resistance against inexorable

annihilation Beneath the parabola of the willow tree’s sere-drained leaves Bereft of life and half-bedrenched by cancerous jaundice, Which I became.

2. Song of the Ice Maiden.

We shall try, and we shall try, 24