I, Minimus, Throw Pound For Pound To Pound & 'is Old Son - Paeons, Peons & Pissing 'pon The Century Xxth (Selections Poem by Warren Falcon

First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee - Ezra Pound

The kingfishers! who cares for their feathers now? - Charles Olson


*

First Breath - Prolegomena


...I take my Pound with lumps...

Old cantor no longer
cantering but for us
both now I swagger

not to stake a grand
claim in turning the
race the species other

than to what it always
was/ever will be
grandiose verbose

polyglottal babblers/
murderers/plague bringers
of 'the new world'
'merikuh 1492 n later
Pilgrimista crews
think theyre

rebutting halitose Death
how big the universe
how we are all so small
sings it well (tho wrung
out 2000 years now
n more, the verdict's
in though denied)

'The ant's a centaur in his own dragon world'


1

I, Minimus, tongue in cheek creak oar row out too
into Homeric sea choleric not old Greek singer long
of breath but as Winslow local seer his paints straw
hat consigned to mistook heroics pure accident not
to check radio maritime ask captain if row boat worthy
of even an American sea - projected too - can go
a-row-row-rowing claw oar into wave tips whitecaps
safe perimeters, smell of earth nasal-yet to keep
oriented to dirt.

Have instead reaped I redundant whirlwind

play America-the-Fool leapt again naively trusting
my and country's destiny are one always good in spite
of Melville's long eloquent 'discantus supra librum' -
'above the book' - more truing than any to spoil it
the projected 'pluribus unum' thing for Mayflower
folks tripping lily lightly between the hawthorns
their imported gardens and God, irritant tomahawks
'can only turn out swell' thought they like inflated
waves self-gathering in sea full of selves them/they
individually Destined they/then and do think,

to break just for,

O America, thee.

And now come poets each century heavier than
before, heavier than the other few, this new one
too only bards, a real few, to bar, board up the big

gaps,

O great light gaping torn off, oft thee sung,
slung over shoulder, hauled, the burden,

o the load
it is now become.


4

To live in presumptions of other life
that will eventually live or be living
aware that I live presently as if this
being-lived-life now is provisional,
that I shall one day be traveling or
well-traveled, living in some other
land/culture, having planted Odysseus's
presumptuous but resonant oar
there, fluent in tongue/lovers of
said land or if now said then perhaps
I may sing/say bring new ships
into the leaner bay loaded with exotica
to otherwise o land-locked Reason,

'to begin with a swelled head and end with swelled feet'


7

That one day the book shall be written,
Odysseus come smiling through the door.
That I shall live forevermore free of provisions,
be delivered presently into good, rich life
and unto the richer world, my Lover, so long
turning turning turning in distance away from,
yet to manage a caress, a smooch which
neither dismisses nor fully embraces and
it is I that is and shall be erased into this Love
which shall then in time be erased as well
in the greater Sun and that Shining too shall
be erased. Then we shall all be scattered,
or I shall be only, embrace by embrace,
toward erasure no longer effortful.

I soft sift draft by draft rough toward world
now slowing in spite of parentheses these
provisional postulations of 'the good life'
to come. Eventually. There is only this that
I am living now. And my hands feel, even
perhaps are, strapped to this wheel that
turns me as turns Beloved Earth, the Sun
too each dreaming near to but apart from each.

My reach is
here on my tongue,
in my fingers here
grasping words from mind.
I am ever behind in this chase,
now am further from
Love/Space than ever
though my heart
is swollen from
wanting It.

Still, world, accept my blessing.

I send this message aloft on kingfisher wings.