COLLEGIATE SCULL
Regatta on the Cal-Sag:
flotilla to foil Dutch Masters
despite rowers named Toonstra
and Vroom
The channel is nominal -
bargeway (once a scraped canoe)
from Sanitary Ship Canal
to toxigenic former slough
No Maastricht flint, graphic kine
gold light teratogen-cast:
low-country ancestral kin
were lured by unrelenting flat
Boats rest on spill, emulsed varnish
of imperceptible pulse
any fish - reflected car glint
from Camelback Pratt through truss
Our photographs, painted by Cuyp
a gull in every view -
the V of oars and bridge supports
blown across the clouded brew
HERR KEPLER'S NOTEBOOK
Time is the bully anchor of the opposing tug-rope team.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
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"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
-------------------------------------
"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
:-)
ReplyDeleteLove this. Cal-Sag, what's that?
Part of the glorious Calumet River system: where lacustrine meets Super-Fund. The Encyclopedia of Chicago notes that the chief engineer celebrated the opening of the Sanitary and Ship Canal in verse. Obviously an evocative subject!
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