CONJUNCTIONS: A Web Exclusive

Three Poems Thomas Hummel

The Self and Its Others             A Borges Cento Here displayed also are my habits: That stars and men revolve in a cycle, Judgement. Day resounds on the trumpets Of battle, victory goes to the others— It is the unrepeatable cloud, the glory To others. The gods gave glory (that has no end) When they had at least their burning hour on horseback. Things, not words. This is my feeble translation, The dagger itself is after something else. Today I felt its nameless shadow tremble (Has made an archetype within me sing, He himself at the end, poor and alone) Through the dawning window. Night withdraws. Losing their brightness in the spread of dawn, Destiny towered over them like the arch, Toiled in the ghetto, matching rhyme to rhyme. I want one to be spared oblivion (Who never actually left his library) Amid the crowds, and lose himself in their Centuries-old habits of migration Where seven feet of ground wait for him here. Now, like an obsession, in the pubs, Now in the love of their own bridal beds. Vague elder brother, if you existed, Not swept aside in the continual, but rather In a poem written in a copy of Beowulf, And I was shade within a shade before you, And their mythologies live in your soul— Blissful, we think the world an everlasting Through the memory of the one who writes this down. A poor man's habitation, languidly. Of time that slowly moves away into, So say the mystics. I say I believe. Where is the wood of the Cross, the Tree of Adam Or the Placid Gardens? Now there will be no moon. At some point I will pass you in the street. You are invulnerable. Have I not granted you God who appears in every single thing, Whom I can call to mind without bitterness? And the doors that close behind you when you go— All that we were and will be, nothing less. Dreams in the dream of another mirror. Not love Where Saxon fought with Dane, mingling bloods, But I know it exists and will persist (Adding to the history of the planet). Over the plains of America Why should it be so sad, the early morning? The sea, the always sea. Existed, was. From need of lies, I know this very day And have forgotten the imprint of your feet. It was not I who begot you. It was the dead, The self, and its other. Columbarium Habitabile or, The Home for Old Little Houses and Their Inhabitants in a Large Modern City They're building a garden. Beyond the bressummer, in South Wing. Issuing plots at a rood, with allotment variation at an acreage-rate based on family counts in excess of the previously determined average, or, in those exceptional cases, prowess, which will be, by appointment, assessed (Chief Clerk W—), in horticulture. We could use a garden. The attics have never known such dearth of curious youth. With niched homes seventy by seventy, the slats and narrows of ulterior carpentry cease to allure. The little ones know nothing of sieves or of marshes, though agape they eye the apogee, the height of glass. Ballads, emblem books, Assyrian legend; The Bridge for Real Travelers once stalled them, kept them rapt; no longer. We remind them, ours are banister and shutter. They reply, "Low water." Only nests remain without, we tell them, girders and skeins of perpetual gray. They crave a sleek horse and purpose when neither remain. And so they scale the atrium. May pears grow quick enough to deter them. Seven Orders of the Plague Year Notice to be given of the sickness the house as house                               complaineth botch or any part falleth otherwise                                   sick without cause or disease shall thereof to health                                    within the said appear Nurse-keepers if keeper shall her self infected house twenty eight after the person dying infection the which the keeper doth her self until the twenty eight expired None to be removed out of infected house, but, &c item remov'd out falleth sick any other except it or unto owner of his own servants and parish whither that the said visited charged in without any such remove this remove be lawful houses to infected people so as not after sick the sendeth be secluded from infection at appearing No person to be conveyed out of any infected house if negligent looking be conveyed             place the been conveyed             their charge to be night             and punished at ward             and person to days Inmates house that house infected                                          no family of suffered to themselves without                                     examiners of default thereof he or be                          shut visitation Laystalls to be made far from the city that may be passages and empty a city Burial of the dead that visitation be before                                       sun-rising privity of otherwise and suffered to enter                                  the house shut dying of church in lecture and burial                                of burying-place to all the publick assemblies forborn                              during visitation