Charms in the Form of Typographic Characters
Estill Pollock
elegy
riffing Thomas Gray melancholy poets
an eighteenth-century staple, a graveyard shift of hexameters
edged in black
Wordsworth alone
breaking
the spell of fever cycles in airless rooms tropes of blood
on sour linen
death itself, shamed
by deer-horned crags spoof memento mori cowed by
English Lakes by hawks, high
above the moor
in this tuck
of hills, a cottage named Dove under
chalk clouds in this reality, molecular fates winnowing
preludes in their orbits
wintering
here on hedge berries, fieldfares
in from Europe their chak-chak-chak a chorus
challenging winding-key alarms
…
the hedgerows
riddled
with Mythos AI the church gate’s creak
a machine-learning overlay of pattern recognition
the stained glass
in the chantry, cloned baptismal fonts and the clouds
and the road
to town, protocols of server sacraments
fluctuating
pulses chirp across vacuum, wrangling
starlight, polarities and free electrons skittish
for atomic mass
no free
movement between borders frontiers
in name only facial recognition tech a tamper of DNA
and large-language models
announcing
an update of myself the algorithm a refugee of the well
of unfriended
ciphers, the trolled expanse
…
from Hyannis Port
to Mar-a-Lago, histories of entitlement and guile the hour glass
summoning the odds of democracy
and after
grain by grain, golden beaches syphoned
into fibre optic
etudes praise-God stump preachers rousing rednecks Nazis
texting blood plasma passcodes
sirens shredding the night air vast
estates sharpening
blades balaclava shadows moving as one one precedent one
reality one terror
rage-bait frenzy flypast drones
at near horizons dreamers, face down in the surf boats
the gangsters
sold them, holed at the waterline
…
patient biography
a drudgery of poems and centuries minor edits
stalking the dead whim and degradation
spotlit
the stanzas, intuitive never
numbered pieces on a sprue torn between instinct
and the wasteland of my socials, followers ghostly
or unborn
in my memoir
of the rain, the flood’s unceremonious judgment
the final chapter keys of images, their weight
suggesting nothing of salvation
the Rosetta Stone’s key
a mirror version
of the same one to the other and each to all everything
in the potter’s field, statistically nil
on his deathbed, Voltaire, urged
by priests to repentance of Satan, declined
both Cross and Fire, remarking too late now to make
new enemies
…
absent from William
two years, Dorothy Wordsworth, distraught her reunion
at risk a bout of worms she cleared with rue and Edmund Spenser
read aloud
these old Romantics, desiccated
bone and rotten leather. standing where you stand now lakes
a black depth mountains gathering to a misty
script
AI anointments
of the poet in this present tense the idea amusing, death
a mere nostalgia for footnotes
to an existential dread
in my shed, dibbing seeds
in pots for spring nothing published without a provenance
of genetic
calibration
every distant look
a currency dark moods, a bridge to other content, curated
for what never was and more byline memes
of Lamb and Coleridge
the last poem
written, a fingerprint on the air independent
of machine-head surveillance, feral
in the hybrid scrub
brave etcetera
of metres
recounting deeds of dust, salt waves and the compass
claims to four winds hear us, O Lord
code correction access
to archives of the stated sublime
declined alternative configurations pending end
programme runtime
Estill Pollock was born in Kentucky, but has lived in England for many years. The pamphlet Metaphysical Graffiti was published in England by Highcliff Press in the 1990s, followed by Constructing the Human from Poetry Salzburg in 2001. Between 2005-2011 the book cycle Relic Environments Trilogy was published by Cinnamon Press (Wales). A collaboration with Broadstone Books in Kentucky provided the impetus for his recent seven-book poetry series, Cartographic Projections of a Sphere. With Mudlark, he has published the e-chapbook editions, And Then, Working Title and One Hundred Views of the Mountain. Estill Pollock is online at estillpollockpoetry.blogspot.com.