"My face..."

My face is succumbing to age, I am so much older,
It seems, but that I’m not –
I’ll tear down your empires.
Lay ruin
To their mercenary tillers.

Anatol Cordua © 2017

She was best on the catwalk

She was best on the catwalk, dragging her illness down her face
Like black rags fallen of the sky, fallen
Of her wishes, fallen.
Men played dead for her and it made her sick and ill.
Playthings floated.
Ashy mascara fell from her eyes
And rolled down her neck her breasts her stomach
Laced with inverted ubiquity: her cyclic moons
Were dragged as black teeth into seas of gases:
The black car drove by.


Anatol Cordua © 2017

Aye constituted as though a Bruegel

The light in the hung white laced embroidery
The good favors to me in the morning
The greetings animate and not, but still more so then
This brass and mahogany desk
A whole world is held up by these things
Aye constituted as though a Bruegel.


Anatol Cordua © 2017

He was lost to life, extreme rain on life

He was lost to life, extreme rain on life,
So that only death understood - he walked
Like a chicken, and threw his arms around
Like a chicken - the deep world soil
Of his being. locked up now. He had been
Such a good townsman.
He was buried with some of his famous
Wicker baskets, into a few of which
Were buried his Sunday bests: lost to life,
Lost, dead; rising in his ests, arms shaking,
White and red as the sickle moon hung from blood.
Anatol Cordua @ 2017

The Pope, the child, the chimney-sweeper, the lady

Nothing has been said.
We are a doomed race.
We are many things.
And nothing has been said.
But there is evidence of laughter
And things, said that made
The laughter come.
It is demonstrative, in high spirits
And sparkling eyes, creases
Into smiles.
So who knows what is?
Doomed, but, able to afford
Ourselves mirth?
I have confounded myself.
I know nothing
I know nothing
But the Dance of Death,
Hilarity in roses strewn from alabaster ceilings
Myrrh thrown on dancing skulls and bones
The Pope, the child, the chimney-sweeper, the lady.


Anatol Cordua © 2017

Generosity to the King

Generosity to the King… he’s allowed all;
The partisans have a new monarchy –
Spanning the abysses of Hell's canyons;
Cold isthmus,
Bodies huddled around stick fires burning holes in iced snow
Save these people in the snow.


Anatol Cordua © 2017

Lent the knell of time's arrow

Images lent the knell of time’s arrow
Into the riptide sleep of history's obsolescences.
Now says the god you’ve finished that.
That caper is never finished.
That knell is a book, a closed purse.
Curmudgeons pull it close.
Libertines tear it away.
Virgins pray that it will stay hidden.
I want it to be destroyed,
Time and time again,
Until there is nothing in world
To stop it.

Anatol Cordua © 2017

Out of Quarantine - Michaelangelo's Wrestling Forethought

I’m under quarantine. All freelancers under quarantine.  All great artists under quarantine. Patrons. O my patrons. O my patronage! The thanklessness to my lady, I mourn her, we were intimate. When the world made claims on me, they all stopped loving me, but her. That’s the price of greatness: my lady's thankless gift to me. I thankless to her. This is what is not understood in the world after Florence and the Medices.
   My carceral drag of my flayed face in my hand through the Sistine sky, I am free. I have finally escaped the Florentine incomprehension and seen Beethoven collecting coins outside his house, just for a greeting from him, and the merchant tribes of Veneto connecting up with him by a tachyon wracking up space-time Cauchy vectors and landing as Crystal ships on the fortified Festival metropolis of Asole.
   It is 2009 and Jethro Tull are at the festival, old Renaissance boot-shiners with a feral flute, and a layer of music to confound and delight the senses. Craggy voice, he gets it: what is pain to understanding? I have dropped onto a five lane highway in L.A. I am walking with a sure stride against the against the flow of automobiles on a five-lane highway and their incredible participation in the creation of the free democracy of Thomas Paine’s America. I am Michelangelo. I traded in my flayed face to a collector on the silica boardwalk over the Aurora sands of Long Beach, and paid a plastic surgeon to reconstruct what was lost.

Anatol Cordua © 2017

White Nights

White Nights

That the White Nights. That the comic summerly-drunk white moths spinning like naked dudes: sunny. That we. How we sort out into the future. How we don’t. What we. . . No.
   She, I said. He, she said. Two people talking about two people.
   The sedimentary plates and plateaued elevations of North Carolina seem the place for me to go. They have already reminded me of Maugham. And I have only flown over them – this 'flying state,’ as it is called and known.
   The Wright Brothers, two brothers communicating with the other brother in first sky-flights. White ink the sea-blue sky and men running with ropes and glances and hands at the textile and shy-wood frame and wings.
   These things, you know. It’s just these things.

Anatol Cordua © 2017

What Montaigne meant by "vice"

What Montaigne meant by "vice",
Is peculiar to us; not like,
Not of, but peculiar.
What sours our virtues
In time, is a false thing,
Unneeded.
We don't preference it.
We ally it as evil, or as a thing
Stinking enough to loosen it
To the depths.
We drink our coffee and tea
And dip our biscuits,
Or your own sweetest things
Much so much, more much instead.
Montaigne is harsh when he reveres,
But not "harsh", it's peculiar.

Anatol Cordua © 2017

Tempest Blossoms

Tempest Blossoms

The alien crafts of night the tempest blossoms,
Infinities of mittens on mauve hands,
Satiety he said satiety I’ve come to Venice,
The black railings in the alley canals.

Tempest blossoms make rivers run
Granite eons of water and velocity
Paramount alliances of chisel
Never sounds the pebbles and crayfish.

The shadow is the aroma in full lips
Anna is the tempest
Bashing images.


Anatol Cordua © 2017

I know the times are little and short

I know the times are little and short
But I want, to live, to an extent,
While I am here
The bells pealing just faded
Out. The sun reflected through
The sun room! in two flashes,
I looked up, and it was the neighbor
In the house above, opening his window,
Head out into the blue sun morning.
This man had contentment and settledness
And pleasant apathy on his swarthy face,
I admit that that was his full countenance
From my perspective, aspected on him,
To me, and I like his life. Envy
Isn't a vice in this case:
For I am so far away from indifference.
Rather I just don't care.

Anatol Cordua © 2017