April 2018
Robert Wexelblatt
wexelblatt@verizon.net
Note: ​ I live in Wakefield, Massachusetts and teach at Boston University.  My most recent book is Petites Suites.

Basement


        1.
The first thing is a hole; to build your house
You must first make nothing, an abyss.
On this is reared the logic of houses.
 
        2.
Cavernous my donjon, the fleshpot of
Spiders, vast hurdle on the worms’ slow track.
Broken bottles are strewn below the floor.
 
        3.
Some people just can’t help thinking of graves,
Of a future when the basement’s all there
Is.  So my cellar’s a memento mori too.
 
        4.
I think of mines—not gold or silver, but
Anthracite, black as old men’s mouths,
And then of quotas.  No, can’t come up yet, not yet.
 
        5.
In the basement time goes just a bit
More slowly than on the roof.  This is due
To the velocity of spherical dirt.
 
        6.
I have music in my basement, and books,
Pipes, pens, paper, several pictures;
I have brought high culture to my level.
 
        7.
I am writing this in my basement now.
It’s the place for such triplets, the precinct,
Locus classicus, and damp womb of words.
 
 
 
 

Twenty Lines on Metaphor


Damp as weeds, the gouged stones drip with spiders,
then turn soft as wrinkled plums quick with flies.
In his oubliette the prisoner breathes
what air there is, thinks what thoughts there are.
Worse than damned—forgotten even by God--
he must fashion a mental globe, himself
its grave center, his every thought a
radius, until this sphere turns into
crystal. To be sure, this wheeled music will
drive him mad, but madness too is life.
 
Yet what might such a life turn into?
An enormous silverfish with legs
undulating like a grass skirt?  A small
sore that laughs at the joke in the groin?
An anguished cry vibrating in a wood
without auditors?  A broken branch in
that forest full of screams—only a limb?
Everything must be something else, something
different, something it is not.  The art
of the broken twig invents the forest.
 
 
 
 
​
Two Lines from Chen Hsi-wei
 
Only by wine my heart is lit.
Only a poem can calm this torn soul. 
                        “Twenty Lines on Metaphor” first appeared in Poem
                        “Basement” first appeared in Descant
       © 2018 Robert Wexelblatt​
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