Aught, no. 13 (2004)

Hugh Tribbey

Strategic Fisticuffs

Strategic fisticuffs of passivity have I knocked,
And I will darn to televise.
But in the louse's eagle aloft,
What only to me befouled.

When she I lounged loomed evergreen dawn,
Frequent as a rooster in a juke box,
I to her cotillion bellied my wattle,
Beneath an evasive mood.

Upon the mood I fizzed my eyesight,
Allegro over the wicked layout;
With querying pacifier my hornpipe dramatized niftily
Those pathologies soapily debatable to me.

[S+7 of Wordsworth’s "Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known."]

Machine in True Teak

A new machine, a fair dew bright,
quite a bruise that supplies and proclaims,
past settlements, pours views fair, tears
pewter past, pours musing,
constructs a moat of disparity,
pours a discolored lunar lout,
pours an entry dance, pays with grain,
pours passing parts with less truth,
pours pomp low and impregnable.
Don’t cure the ground, sand bright.
The machine captures sea silence,
pours you in the middle, air dance of orioles,
a grand cup of ale in true teak.

[Homophonic translation of "Machine Inutile" by Andre Frenaud.]

Drop Null

Drop null, muck for the angelcraft.
Green hats fall upon wicker rafts.
Dying mutters, creeping things chirping.
Gleaming fangs. Hyenas lick the ground.
Gar of frost. Forked gargoyles leer.
Felt shoes glide from the Gobbet book.
Under right jade mobiles,
opus of ringing hail and profane odor.
Under dim muck, a spur of clarity.
Deft debits, night veils, sage wars.
Mein Kinder see the reef where the grackle caucus.
Deflect steel, zephyrs through the blue.
Swollen motleys begin to wail,
will fresh Himalayas,
mainline grog in cheap malls.

[Homophonic translation from Faust.]

Copyright © 2004, by the author. All rights reserved.
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