attempts at a kind of postmodern overwriting of Virgil’s eclogues

 

by Roger Sedarat

 

 

 

 

word lamb’s anonymous self-crossing

 

 

x branded, branded x

eternally chiastic/antimetabolic

self-crossed like dickinson

dying—pronominally—

because i could not stop for death

he kindly stopped for me

dreamless post-vision

x his eyes a dead cartoon fish

pulled from the trash

permanent shame

nobody cares it doesn’t matter

poètes maudits

sans the glorious path

anonymous spot

marking a nobody

are you nobody too missing

your calling

run of the mill every lamb?

 

 

 

 

lake isle of the blinded word lamb

 

 

word lamb pulls wool words

over so many lyrical i’s

the blind misleading the blind

 

his mothball mother embeds

all sense of selves

under thick blankets of shame

 

poor shepherdless herd lamb

devoid of authentic pasture

mangy sour milk frame so skeletal

 

hungry [tab] starving through poetry

virgil’s eclogues symbolic desire

all theory no praxis shepherd manual 

 

arise and go then to dante’s inferno

verse-turn 9 bean row sprouts there

virgil toils no soil couldn’t care less

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roger Sedarat is the author of two poetry collections: Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic, which won Ohio UP’s 2007 Hollis Summers’ Prize, and Ghazal Games (Ohio UP, 2011).  He teaches poetry and literary translation in the MFA Program at Queens College, City University of New York. 

 

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