The
Lightkeeper
The hologram-token
I hold in my hands
now brightens the
carved stone-
tower and its
arcades, now reveals
the
stone-tower’s interior – the iron-
wrought handrail,
the keepers’ quarters,
the turned-on
radio, the Zephyr’s veering
force on the
cloud-bound Atlantic. Further up,
the keeper
adjusts the crystal-clean rotator
diffusing a
diffracted light on the rippling
coves and the
scattered rocks below.
Upon a steep
slope, I had, once, been
subtly
forewarned of the lightkeeper’s
Tenebrae and
the abyssal trenches below.
And of a sailor
floating upon a coffin-plank.
Hubris
Like a
sea-sentinel, she refused
to abandon her
self-assigned field.
From their
love-dinghy they dumped
their pride and
its deceitful tributaries
to the Aegean.
On the receding gate
he said pride
was all they possessed.
Her passive pride
kept her confined
but still
attached to him and to the distance
of her loved
ones. They travelled through
the undertow
and on highways lit at dawn
and moved
countries and were bound
to be severed
through water, land,
and vennel
enigmas – that cryptic
entanglement of
river-rhizomes.
Synchronicity
Like a magnet,
I set out to tame
the Atlantic
with a goal. On the cruise
I let myself go
to the ocean’s
wide
undulations, synchronous
with the moon’s
wan attraction.
On the
dolphin-watch, the guide
started
throwing out chunks
of chicken
breasts to hook-beaked
petrels and
frigates out of a tin box
with his arm
spanning the open sky.
The hysteria of
the poultry-fling hid
all the
dolphins from our sight.
After the swim,
the sirocco tainted
our eyeglasses
with red dust.
The served
picnic remained untouched.
The Body-Dam
One
blood
flows
into our body
all along
rivulet-veins
the body-dam limns
the
psyche-waters
of the flesh
corrals
our inner moods
avoids the floods
in the heart’s
interlocked
chambers
for
our departure
Two
in the cool of the night
we polished
our
marble floors
streaming
down
the sacrificial
waters
of
our imminent
departure
Three
in
the scorched heat
of two summers we cleaned
the gaps
between
the stunned bricks
of our books
and departed
Challenger
The engine
dives yet deeper
Into Orpheus’
dark subterranean
Trenches along volcanic
vents
That spurt out obsidian
gas-fumes
Where bacteria
swarms thrive like
Colonies of
bees within a wild prairie.
In these
ice-waters, all sea-creatures
Are liquified but,
on a layer above,
Lantern-fish
gleam to prey, mate,
And maintain
the primaeval breath
Of silence
buried in tenebrous
Shadows before
matter began
To aggregate
and darkness
Was gradually
abraded by light.
Emily
Bilman, PhD is London’s Poetry Society Stanza representative in
Geneva, CH. Her thesis, The
Psychodynamics of Poetry: Poetic Virtuality and Oedipal Sublimation in the
Poetry of T.S. Eliot and Paul Valéry, was published by Lambert Academic in 2010 and Modern Ekphrasis in
2013 by Peter Lang. Her poetry books, A Woman By A Well (2015), Resilience
(2015), The Threshold of Broken Waters (2018),
and Apperception (2020) were published
by Matador, UK. Poems were published in The London Magazine, San
Antonio Review, Wisconsin Review, Expanded Field, Poetics Research, The Blue Nib, Tipton Poetry Journal, North of Oxford Journal, Otherwise Engaged
Magazine, Literary Heist, The High Window, and Wild Court, Remington Review,
Book of Matches, etc. http://www.emiliebilman.wix.com/emily-bilman
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