April 2018
Michael Gessner
mjcg3@aol.com
mjcg3@aol.com
I live in Tucson with my wife Jane, a watercolorist, and with our dog, Irish. Our son Chris, writes for screen in L.A. My more recent work has appeared in The North American Review, The French Literary Review, Verse Daily, Innisfree, and others. My most recent collections are Transversales (BlazeVOX, 2013,) and Selected Poems (FutureCycle, 2016). I enjoy writing articles and reviews and these may be found in Jacket2, The Edgar Allan Poe Review, NAR, and The Kenyon Review, C. V. Mosby, Times-Mirror, and Allyn & Bacon Composition Series.
St. Poetry
Of all the hosts of heaven, the smallest
did not ascend by the usual route,
not nominated by throngs of grateful humans,
not by canonization in a glorious ceremony,
but found by accident when a search committee
of heavenlies out trying to discover
something to occupy the human mind
besides the things itself it seems to find
that so often cause its demise, turned
and there it was, drifting on the far side
of the universe, a pale form brushing
up against the outer membrane of what
is known, a kind of sad, dull bumping,
aspiring as it were to the metaverse,
or something in kind, when the holy band
took it in hand and led it away, lecturing
in Angelese, that sacred tongueless language,
conferring a degree with automatic
tenure to their blesséd circle,
and all the celestial singing of heaven
could not prevent their newest associate
from spending long nights traversing
the great wall of eternal enigmas,
or from entering the black hole of untold
disgrace, or floating over the perfumed
fields of the forever forgotten,
forgetting to return to that circle
of comrades who would dare not trace
their foundling’s journey of return
to be once again near that elastic film,
to behold with luminous eyes, shadows
of rare influences playing
on the elusive screen from the province
of convivial likenesses, circling
about the hub of all grace
and magnanimity, vacillating and stable,
centered in flux, giant and microbial,
itself luminous in the form of forms.
St. Poetry
Of all the hosts of heaven, the smallest
did not ascend by the usual route,
not nominated by throngs of grateful humans,
not by canonization in a glorious ceremony,
but found by accident when a search committee
of heavenlies out trying to discover
something to occupy the human mind
besides the things itself it seems to find
that so often cause its demise, turned
and there it was, drifting on the far side
of the universe, a pale form brushing
up against the outer membrane of what
is known, a kind of sad, dull bumping,
aspiring as it were to the metaverse,
or something in kind, when the holy band
took it in hand and led it away, lecturing
in Angelese, that sacred tongueless language,
conferring a degree with automatic
tenure to their blesséd circle,
and all the celestial singing of heaven
could not prevent their newest associate
from spending long nights traversing
the great wall of eternal enigmas,
or from entering the black hole of untold
disgrace, or floating over the perfumed
fields of the forever forgotten,
forgetting to return to that circle
of comrades who would dare not trace
their foundling’s journey of return
to be once again near that elastic film,
to behold with luminous eyes, shadows
of rare influences playing
on the elusive screen from the province
of convivial likenesses, circling
about the hub of all grace
and magnanimity, vacillating and stable,
centered in flux, giant and microbial,
itself luminous in the form of forms.
© 2018 Michael Gessner
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