6.16.2005

Today my name surfaced in Ron's blog history of the po-po-universe. It must indeed be Bloomsday.

  Fire licked the Rome
  of your smile, indivisible
  Petrogram – where RW
  touches Jerusalem

   
  and threads knot
  above Las Cruces.
  The nef rows, rows...
  palms, heartbeats, light.


[Nota: the long poem Forth of July is bookmarked by the homonyms rose/rows - Empson's emblematic antinomy in 7 Types of Ambiguity. But here it's more like a 7-sided pun, because the poem (out of Mandelstam's Voronezh) emerged from Rus (Kievan Russia), a word some think stemmed etymologically from the Russian for (Viking) "rowers". (A nef is an ornamental miniature ship.) Rus - and Rhode Island, that is. Double vision.]

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