Medieval Exercise

 

  by Donald Wellman

 

 

The temple,

a drum.

Lute, countertenor

film,

plenum.

 

Pen pricks on polished bone,

amulet.

 

Then, horns

magnum mysterium

golden morn.

 

Now goes the sun behind the tree

Me reweth marie thy son and thee

 

Pen pricks on velum

And when the king’s horse

came to the mosque

it bent its knee.

Ruthless

campeador.

 

See the sun gone red toward evening,

in its crimson dress.

Shelomo Ibn Gabriol

What can a boy of nineteen

really do?

From his grammar.

 

 

 

 

 

Donald Wellman’s Fields, a selected poems (1995), is available from Light and Dust.  His recent poetry includes Baroque Threads, an e-book from Mudlark.  Prolog Pages, a compilation drawn from ethnographic poetry and other observations made in Mexico and Spain, will be released in the winter of 2009 from Ahadada.  Some of those poems can be found in Eratio Postmodern Poetry, There, and Fascicle.  His essay, “Creeley’s Ear” appeared in Jacket Magazine 31.  “Aleatory displacement,” a review of Anne-Marie Albiach's Figured Image, tr. Keith Waldrop, appears in Jacket Magazine 32.  Recently published translations include poems by Antonio Gamoneda (Spanish) and by Yvan Goll (German).  For several years, he edited O.ARS, a series of anthologies devoted to questions of poetics and experimental practice.