Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Tuesday poem #141 : Pete Smith : CONDITIONALS: on not divining Dendroctona Ponderosae (mountain pine beetle)



i.
If creation is plosive
and death’s an archive
whose eye measures desire?

If ejaculate coalesce
and alphabets don’t flow
how can metamorphosis?

If lured across space & species
what distance binds
nursery and morgue?

While toxin resonates ambrosia
sweetens genocide sports
a forty-minute girdle

If homed in sapwood, basked
in bark’s pasture, can companion
cells right insurgency?

Tell: if scatalogical
tracings trace eschatalogical
signs:   the story

ii.
Whether Samsara breed illusion
or Hungry Ghosts are filled with transmigration’s
waste, repine

If design if chaos if history
if prophecy if scripture if heresy
if unholy babble say

While the masses had not hatched
the plot contrived to twist
until entropy’s blue dye

Were something else lashed to the mast
were the dancers not such hollow
tumescence

Had the epic orgy of pheromones
not flared, had vigil been kept,
the thronging lines stopped

Sing: while all fall down, while lame,
sans antidote, dote & lament
until the teeming rings:   despite



Pete Smith, born & raised in Coventry, emigrated to Canada in 1974. After a long detour returned to poetry in the late 1990s. Has published poetry with Wild Honey Press, Poetical Histories, above/ground press, W, Great Works & Oystercatcher among others; reviews & essays in Agenda, The Gig, The Paper, The Capilano Review, Crayon & elsewhere. He has given readings at the Kootenay School of Writing & at the final CCCP in 2006. His first full-length collection, Bindings with Discords, was published by Shearsman in February 2015.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

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