PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

[after Fyodor Tyutchev's poem 104 in
the English translation of F. Jude,
Durham, 2000]

Philosophy 101 this week:  define the Soma.
My visit to your room in Tower Hall,
unexpected (and later rebuked
as being without permission or appointment)
discloses you---with your neighbors watching----
wrestling on the floor with the shafts
of the somatic moon's slanted, autumn light
during this night befouled with a mist
that clings like a garment you cannot quite cast off,
a garment always impeding connection.
Someone's faux antique clock strikes the late hour:
the sound is like the knell of a death toll
heard from within, not outside, some massive
sepulcher of your family's numerous dead;
or the memories of your former lovers
of whom I have not heard, nor have asked anything.
Your neighbors find this display diverting.
The somatic moonlight, like a skull's teeth
emerging from the darkness of a rotten mouth,
nibble the soft stripes of your shoeless socks.
You laugh like a proud initiate
to rites of which I shall never be told,
to which I shall never be invited.
Your neighbors know, and rebuff me with a smirk.
Too soon the whole campus will know,
after the days I did not know to count, to

the gossip serve scrambled like the
cafeteria's bad eggs on what would become
forever the dreaded morning after,
January tenth of nineteen seventyeight.