"cupolas" poems
Green sea-tarnished copper
And sea-tarnished gold
Of cupolas.
Sea-runnelled streets
Channelled by salt air
That wears the white stone.
The sunlight-filled cistern
Of a dry-dock. Square shadows.
Sun-slatted smoke above meticulous stooping of cranes.
Water pressed up by ships' prows
Going, coming.
City dust turned
Back by the sea-wind's
Wall.
2.4k
Bells overbrim with sound
And spread from cupolas
Out through the shaking air
Endless unbreaking circles
Cool and clear as water.
A stone dropped in the water
Opens the lips of the pool
And starts the unovertaking
Rings, till the pool is full
Of waves as the air of bells.
The deep-sea bell of sleep
Under the pool of the mind
Flowers in concentric circles
Of annihilation till
Both sight and sound die out,
Both pool and bells are quelled.
2.2k
Its baroque eyelashes still obscured
By the vapid, nocturnal turmoil,
My city rises from sleep in the morning,
To the acrid smell of taverns
Opened too early,
Where garrulous, ***** drunks
Resume their heated quarrels.
My city awakens at dawn,
In the suave perfume of flowers clouded by dust;
Those tender, resigned cupolas, waiting
For the midday summer sun, to ooze over them.
Bent backs and furrowed foreheads,
Large crowds trotting on the sidewalks,
Greet each other absent-minded, on the fly,
Hurrying on, forgetting their pitiable heritage, their history,
When, thirsty for blood, their ancestors,
Greedily slaughtered each other,
―In the name of mother country and of different Gods―,
Under the shadows of rival cathedrals.
It took me a long time to be able to discern
The time corroded voice of my city,
But today I understand its madness and its error;
I cross it lovingly, with a lithe step,
And I am saddened by the sight of lifeless, white kittens,
Lying on the pavement, snuffed out by the spirits of the night,
Red poppies blossoming from their muzzles,
In the morning light.
Flavia Cosma from * Bucharest Tales*
Dec 10, 2016
Dec 10, 2016 at 3:09 PM UTC
There were a surfeit of items
Sufficient to raise eyebrows or cause comment
Among the few staid members of the Mulligan clan:
The appearance of siblings or cousins assumed (or at least hoped)
To have preceded Thomas to the choir invisible
Two or three women genuinely surprised
To discover the existence of one another,
One young man with an extremely disconcerting resemblance
To his “Uncle Tommy”,
But the entire affair carried on with something akin
To the requisite solemnity
Until such point that a couple bottles appeared
(The consensus being that the good Mulligan
Had somehow found a way to secret them in)
The end result being the proceedings
Subsequently devolved into an Irish cop wake-esque teleplay,
And in the midst of this fol-de-rol, Tippy Phelan,
Who had framed walls for generic bank buildings
And grunted and swore while cobbling together
Unnecessary cupolas and wholly superfluous cornices
On the McMansions of the small town well-enough-to-do
With Tommy (as well as, on Friday lunch-times
During the slow season, sharing a thermos
Containing a mixture which drew narrow-eyed stares
From lenient if still unhappy foremen)
Stood the final toast for the good Mulligan,
Intoning *There’s a land of the quick and the land of the lost,
The trick being to build a sturdy span between them
So it’s only proper that Tommy was a ****** fine carpenter*.
Nov 29, 2021
Nov 29, 2021 at 2:26 PM UTC
What God has put asunder, I have joined together.
He chuckles at this somewhat self-consciously,
His clientele comprised primarily of gentlemen of a certain age,
Most of whom have stepped off to the altar
Twice or thrice, some even more,
Whose wives will be, at least pro tem,
The mistresses of the Moorish bastardizations
Being commissioned by their husbands,
Vaguely Iberian grotesqueries
Christened Sin Cuidado and Villa Tranquilla
Festooned with cornucopias of cornices and cupolas,
Featuring vaulted cathedral ceilings and open-prairie floor plans,
Impossible to cool in the ninety-degree dawn of August
Or heat during the all too frequent cold snaps,
(Such being noted to him by a visitor
From a staid Boston architectural firm,
To which he replied, *Save that for the classrooms, pal.
I give the people what they want, dad,
And these folks are first, last, and forever
All about the façade.*)
It is not, however, his effort to turn Florida’s East Coast
Into a giant movie set for the stories of Don Juan or El Cid
Which inspires him to utter his inversion of the marital vow.
He has moved beyond being a mere designer;
He is a man of substance, a builder in the larger, cosmic sense,
And so he is here, in this sticky, sweltering venue
Which disappointed Spaniards named after a rat’s oral cavity,
To make a new Venice, complete with electric gondolas,
Cloisters which would put any in the Old World to shame,
Gesturing, bellowing, and cajoling,
A Prospero of sawhorses and steam shovels,
As displaced Seminoles and colored laborers
Sweat and swear and stumble
As they dredge swamps and hack down stumpy mangroves
In the service of his vision, the aggrandizement of his bottom line,
Arm-twisting the caprices of drought and hurricane
To serve the pricier whims
Of a gaggle of DuPonts and Wanamakers.
It’s not that I don’t believe in a higher power, he will demur,
I’m simply not averse to some slight enhancement of His plans.
Aug 20, 2021
Aug 20, 2021 at 10:18 AM UTC