- Earl Fowler
Waves: 31-40
Updated: Dec 30, 2020
31) waves: paradise broken, moulded and shaped
Waves: Lank human figures, rag-sorrowful in the river smoke.
Sepulchral cuffs in umbers and nameless earth tones.
Tier on tier of box seats all in the shadows.
dogfennel and bitterweed beginning to bloom in roadside ditches
Wave: A silk leg tossed lazily toe-in between two seats
in the row ahead. A flash of knees under the pearl-coloured frock.
The woman in the hijab stops to pick up a cobble.
there are thieves in the temple tonight
Waves: Fallen stone columns stained with ancient tobacco.
The great cry in Xenophon’s Anabasis: The sea! The sea!
Stars rain sun moon olly olly oxen free.
white hair’d shadows roaming like a dream
Waves: A mingling of colours at a festival.
Heaving and heaping.
Stacked mattresses of the dead.
images of tongues cut out and stolen talking drums
Parked automobiles twinkling on a vast lake of blacktop.
Tides, radio interference, damned little else.
Propped ladders and open windows of elopements.
they linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
32) waves: on their backs, in the meadows and mountains
German males at puberty, watching the sky, yearning, masturbating, yearning.
Corridors long as the sea-lanes back to the green shoals,
slime stone battlements, a million ice points falling at a slant.
messages that weave into a net of inescapable information
Waves: The long rows of sick and dying faces.
Pretty Gretel waiting by the oven for her chance.
Weaving, unweaving, her eyes the colour of stagnant water.
beyond the zero
Waves: A scavenging of shrugging, sliding gulls.
Malachite nymphs and satyrs paralyzed in chase.
A ballerina on her toes, thighs long and curving.
her dappled body always retreating
33) kenoma
Waves: Iron lovebirds perching on iron twigs.
Dark vortices in a shining filigree.
Winds radiate from the centre and gulls fly from the windows.
iron ivy sneaks in and out of the holes
Waves: Skins of glistening rooftops.
Froth of witches pushed into ovens.
Slamming of doors behind them.
sugar smears, flames, and the flakes of flames
Waves: Notions of wraiths or spiritual doubles.
Iron bed glossy white two foot wide all was white.
With hoar she at the top end dying forgiving all white.
a vastation into emptiness
34) the white visitation
Waves: Invisible tattooing needles against the nervous window glass.
Self-enchanted chenille seizures in crotchets and hemidemisemiquavers.
Mirror metaphysics, motionless as any Vermeer.
in clonic clouds the face ivory pallor muttering lips
Mrs. Littlejohn had been washing for some time now,
pumping rhythmically up and down above the washboard
in the sub-foamed tub. She stood erect again, soap-raw hands on hips.
sustained rhythmical jerking
Waves: Jumping from the top step to the sidewalk and back.
Insinuations and cryptic gestures.
Jitterbugging with fading-faced girls.
their breasts soft fenders for this meeting on the grey city sea
35) internal differences — where the meanings are
Waves: A discontinuous, non-causal succession of situations,
or worlds, or periods — scuffling a little.
A flow of no time propagating.
in the hour when the homeless move their cardboard blankets
Past and future meet at the beach.
A crumpled chiffon.
A twitch in the dropsical carpet.
spastic rotogravure grinding to a halt
Of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol.
Wonder ye at the fiery hunt?
Am I not the helmsman here?
bulkington! bulkington!
Waves: The universal form of this commingling of the toy monkeys and wagons and candy in sacks and roman candles of waking consciousness.
Dendritic, branching out, their shadowed hollows falling forward with the tide.
barren mirror altar of every plain girl who breathes
A crack in the orange shade of the illusion that one moment
follows another like wafted beads on a wafted string.
The plaint of a rusted well pulley; an attrition of self.
where’s bulkington
36) homorganic sounds
Waves: Barely discernible tracks where wagon wheels had run.
Mud and thickets cluttered with dead leaves.
The turrets and blue waters, the sails and churchtops.
faille gown flowing beautifully
Waves: Norman doorways shaggy with wintering vines.
The serpent coiled in the teacup.
Plosives and fricatives steaming the windowpane.
a salmon egg flies out of Trout’s laughing mouth and into Maggie’s cleavage
White-crumpled waves written over in interference patterns.
The choppy ripple of passing headlights across childhood bedroom walls.
The dry whisper of spindles and walnut railings and newell posts.
someone breathing carefully. under the bed. watching
37) i mean it must be high or low
Waves: Rainbow-striped dirndl skirt of satin.
Faces serene, unattached, bending over the balustrade of the sea.
Foaming among the black rocks.
all danaë to the stars
Waves: The foolishness beginning immediately on detumescence.
Single vibrations of seraphic and floral embroidery.
Sweeping in behind on either side, looping away in long helices.
buoys riding the swell
Breaths torn into phantoms out to sea.
Them that plants them
is soon forgotten.
a stone, a leaf, an unfound door, scratched and gouged by an ice age or two
38) brownian motion
Waves: A laying away of ironed sheets, dreamlike and telescoped
into rooms with the shades pulled down against the white sun.
Billy saw pink arches with azure draperies hanging between them.
the fierce dead glare of the patent lamp beyond the lean-to window
Waves: Turned pages against the fleeing seconds of irrevocable time.
Circumlocutions, periphrases, drowsing maidenhead symbols, dead verbiage.
Young officers vomiting among the zinnias.
galloping heels of a cossack holiday
Waves: Chiaroscuro wheels in spokeless blurs.
Ten thousand fading and tattered effigies
on ten thousand weathered and paintless doors.
the envelope was pink and had been scented once
39) eternity in love with the productions of slime
Waves: Closed blinds of the parlour windows.
Silhouettes of dancing couples moving athwart
the frogs and whippoorwills from lengthened shadows.
suitors on the veranda, doggedly and vainly sitting each other out
Night-time roads across the mooned and unmooned sleeping land.
Fireflies drifting above the creek.
Good kindling among the jetsam and the derelict.
trousers rolled to the knee
This is the hour when frogs and thrushes
praise the world from logs and rushes.
The music creeps by me upon the waters.
he keeps on rolling, he just keeps
40) waves: intersecting crevices
Waves: Unshaven work crews repairing sections of track.
Air brakes and buses grinding gears the next street over.
The sick and the maimed sweating in sleepless beds.
somebody upstairs practising on a piano
Waves: Drunks coming to the door, drunks and witnesses and revenants.
The sybaritic déshabille of her loose hair.
Indolent avalanches and tumbling séracs.
a green and orange dragger rumbling past the balcony
From the void, repletion. From repletion, the void.
Fast falls the eventide.
Downtowns reduced to Dollaramas and karate studios.
waves fan out to storm the bridges and point me to the stars