concatenation

ethno totems

to sky conspire

landscape doors and views

memory an artifact

to a city bar,

snowprints on sidewalk

snowscape lean and pale

collect and exist

what love brings tangible

native ambiance

settled and answered

bring your dances

and embraces

bleak satirical cold

twisted with lime in gin

amid saxophones and guitars

as red flamed resonance,

word labels on her cheeks

written and said

walk out of the snow

into the light

sins well washed with winter rain

glass bowl sun

will rise with the headlines

that make no sense,

the night as always

long with relief,

closing eyes

alaska seemed much closer

http://dversepoets.com/

 

Wolfgang Paalen
Fata Alaska (1937)

 

boxcar funeral parlor

the prairie became an extension of the city

thanks to the railroad

so finding solitude was easy,

in the yard steaming hot

through haze cyclops diesels

rumbled threatening inert freight,

a man nimble over tracks

knew passage between the lines

many years spent here

living on the perimeter,

where boxcars became brittle and fell apart,

it was here he served god

and those others displaced,

god was an argument for cheap whiskey

and sorry nights,

the others came to him

as in his throat he had words and lyrics

written in his own hand,

his boxcar a place for the dead

those whose limbs had ceased in all exhaustion,

he spoke sermon gave a sense of rapture

then would take each body out

to that solitude for burial,

wind caught and burned faces

heaven a casual component,

the sky a vault

and mountain halls echoing nature,

love had evaded him for so long,

passion cast upon the train

making right for those about,

even in slumber he did not crave

the early life that was chest deep in darkness,

fellow man and a swirl of small favors

cleansed his sanity,

he labored as a persistent mouse

to save the dead from further disgrace,

and hoped his dust would find

the same