Frederick Farryl Goodwin : Three poems

 

 

 

Cicero in October Roman Rain

She looked as if struck by lightning turning grey in a glade in the shade seeking the dowsers of electric water swimming out to a lake of fabulous metabolism with the speed of dry land hands and feet rowing with the tumultuous ground. Then become a bell which chimed with the ancoient rhyme[r]s of the sky tuning into dissonance in the absence of the hours absess of time with the boaters and straw hats who floated by midst weeds and grasses surfacing to a surface which admitted no longer any light or intimation thereof but the memory of efflorescence which teemed with massed filters which were ferreting out the tunnels being burrowed in the fall falling off a steep cliff into the dazzling whiteness of winter and her elks of eiderdown.

 

 

*9.21.17

 

*All attempts are useless. I have tried for many long years to recount what my father told me

on hallowed ground but(I)have failed to give any sense of it. Perhaps it was ineffable. Perhaps I am a poor writer. Perhaps, and this is what I fear most, I was a poor human being at the time

that he told me or, worse, waited until I long had the energy left, or the clear sense of it, to recount it in any detail or way that might have been useful to others in a similar situation who will follow me. I never fully* understtod why he had chosen to tell me, the least deserving of all, his secret which death holds in its right hand and in its left the scent and odors of that ghost flower which immediately takes root within us, and blooms in the human soul, as the spirit ascends with the yellow evening primrose. 

                                                                                                                                                      

 

 

Perhaps the muse has a story for a woman or man of any gender, race or colour, nationality or creed still to tell. When There were days when the earth and humanity seemed far from the risen and smitten sun, times when it seemed humanity was gasping for air or oxygen where there was none, like a fish on the floor of some subaltern place. When The daily rush of news reels spooled out to witness the Trojan Horse of Trump. When The floodwaters returned with the ocean of the spiritual sun.

 

***

 

 

Frederick Farryl Goodwin’s published work includes Virgil’s Cow (Miami University Press), Buber’s Bag Man (The Gig) and Galactic Milk: the Five Questions of Mortality (Miami University Press). His recorded work includes Compendium Maleficarum, a spoken word collaboration with the composer Dan Warburton, released on Incunabulum Records. He lives and works in Groton, Massachusetts.