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Geoff North Poetry.

These are completely original works written by Geoff North.

A Redolent Oracle

With gnarled brow and mouth agape
He lowers the flag and surrenders to the sylvan cool of the evening.
Now, shrouded with gnostic dread he cowers as a pine tree eyes him quizically.
"Reap what you sow."
The oft-repeated words of his father clattered with loqacious spleen.
He could not help but recall the rust and filth of the highway truck stops and the Janus-faced calm of the sea.
It all seemed palindromic now.
For now, each morning he awoke with his tongue knotted from the sharp taste of motor oil and dandelions.
The crescent moon illuminates the inscription on the ancient gravestone.
The gravestone, by day, a gnomon delineating his youth of wine and prurience
Is now eclipsed by the sooty chimneys of progress.
Witch hazel bloomed here last winter
But tonight the demons' dance stamps out the bacchanalian conference of the birds.
"Kyrie eleison!" drips from the corner of his mouth.
And with ashen eye and thorny foot he walks to the edge of the forest.
The new Babylon awaits.

Untitled

Amid a pasture of broken glass and under the gossamer of water-stained newspapers,
He grazes on the fruit of the dumpsters like a gamin.
Soon he would be washing his face with whiskey and bleach.
Hebe once visited him every year to run her fingers through his greasy hair and drop a coin or two in his pocket.
Now when he returns to his room in the $12 a night motel,
Bleary-eyed and ears ringing,
He spits out the briny filth that collects in his cheeks and
Climbs into bed to pull the oily, damp sheets over his eyes.
The mildew and exhaust which once made his nose bleed now sedate him.
Lulled to sleep by the chilling threnody of the bed in the
next room clanging against the wall,
He would awake each morning and decipher the churlish cuneiform left in the plaster by the prostitutes' work next door.
But now sleep would not come, as the image of
the armless and legless beggar propped up in a plastic lawn chair in the lobby flickered drowsily in his mind.
"Godspeed to you" the beggar moaned with a bronchial cough everytime he passed.
For ten years the old man had sat there, reading a telephone book and belching from the canned kidney beans the manager fed him.
He smirked every time he remembered the withered beggar's arrogance,
And recalled his own baptism by the rancid water that rushed under him as he lay in the gutter.

Anna of the Grotto

I found her, this muse of cookery and ambrosia
Amidst the saltiest of scent and throng of sweaty brow.
Grilled cheese, like nementhe, offered with a transient coyness
That recalled her nights as coquette.
But now the vainglorious Richard speaks
Of the spill of her heated blood and the pulse of lips
And the unuttered words that burnt dark circles of terror
Below her sunken, sooty eyes.
He, the foul drifter, with machine-like intensity,
Spotted the naif waiting humbly, head down-turned,
To return to nurse her fair whelps.
On this sunless day, he called to her.
And with a grin that revealed her calloused teeth,
She, still wet behind the ears, joined him.
It was then that her girth, of garlic and sweat first rumbled under him.
Now standing in her nervy regalia, she should pray to Hecate if she could
To deliver her from her burden.
Not from steely slave shackles, but from the starchy prison of manacotti,
The grainy hell of synthetic turkey and from the Braggadocio, Richard.
But of heaven and hell this blasphemer does not know
And she will amble heavily, 'til the knell that signals the setting of the sun.
Yet, each dewy morning, she is surprised to stir to the first shards of daylight.

If you have the original poem about Anna written by none other than Tufts' own Bryce Dastaous, send it along and I'll be sure to post it.