A Tapestry for Bayeux Poem by George Edwin Starbuck

I Recto

Over the
seaworthy
cavalry
arches a
rocketry
wickerwork:
involute
laceries
lacerate
indigo
altitudes,
making a
skywritten

filigree
into which,
lazily,
LCTs
sinuate,
adjutants
next to them
eversharp-
eyed, among
delicate
battleship
umbrages
twinkling an

anger as
measured as
organdy.
Normandy
knitted the
eyelets and
yarn of these
warriors'
armoring—
ringbolt and
dungaree,
cable and
axletree,

tanktrack and
ammobelt
linking and
opening
garlands and
islands of
seafoam and
sergeantry.
Opulent
fretwork: on
turquoise and
emerald,
red instants

accenting
neatly a
dearth of red.
Gunstations
issue it;
vaportrails
ease into
smoke from it—
yellow and
ochre and
umber and
sable and
out. Or that

man at the
edge of the
tapestry
holding his
inches of
niggardly
ground and his
trumpery
order of
red and his
equipage
angled and
dated. He.


II Verso

Wasting no
energy,
Time, the old
registrar,
evenly
adds to his
scrolls, rolling
up in them
rampage and
echo and
hush—in each
influx of
surf, in each

tumble of
raincloud at
evening,
action of
seaswell and
undertow
rounding an
introvert
edge to the
surge until,
manhandled
over, all
surfaces,

tapestries,
entities
veer from the
eye like those
rings of lost
yesteryears
pooled in the
oak of your
memory.
Item: one
Normandy
Exercise.
Muscle it

over, an
underside
rises: a
raggedy
elegant
mess of an
abstract: a
rip-out of
kidstuff and
switchboards, where
amputee
radio
elements,

unattached
nervefibre
conduits,
openmouthed
ureters,
tag ends of
hamstring and
outrigging
ripped from their
unions and
nexuses
jumble with
undeterred

speakingtubes
twittering
orders as
random and
angry as
ddt'd
hornets. Step
over a
moment: peer
in through this
nutshell of
eyeball and
man your gun.