Distance is money just out of reach, <br />a kindness like rain-laden clouds <br />that never drops its coins. Epochs <br />of fossilized trees crawl rusting hillside <br />strata: they smell like somewhere else <br />I've never been, an Anatolia <br />just outside the mind. Geometries <br />of travel and desire (from here to want <br />and back again), the myths of pleasure <br />reinvent another ancient world: oiled boys <br />racing naked around the circular walls <br />of Troy to find out who will wear <br />the plaited wreath, parade painted circuits <br />of unburnt parapets waving <br />to the crowds. See, even night <br />adores him, dresses him in its moon <br />and apparition. The sheen of intention <br />is on him, translates his motions <br />into marble, alabaster. (Cassandra <br />wakes and says There isn't going to be <br />a Trojan war. Centuries of fossil speech <br />fill up the space that comes after <br />currently, years spent talking <br />to paper.) Man and moment <br />become one, his reliquary skin <br />makes white occur (by now <br />the sweat has faded from his garish <br />details). The things his hands become <br />act out interruption, history <br />is his story, held at bay. He wears time <br />on his body (wears it out), chases gods <br />from mountaintops until the myth-smoke <br />clears. His old world's blurred <br />and hard to read, misunderstanding <br />becomes a place: galley <br />run aground on shallow skin <br />the color of no event.<br /><br />Reginald Shepherd<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/homeric-interim/
