Two Poems:

Acrolith

I had been hoping for a change of scene,
surfing the centuries for something new,
like a new head for an ancient body

or a new body for an ancient head
dredged from the sea or a sarcophagus,
or like a new tooth for a tired smile,

iconic or else maybe ironic,
in gold or silver, in plaster or stone,
some metallurgy or mimicry,

a simulacrum or a simile,
like deadheading a favorite rose
or else starting again from the sourcebook.

Sorcerer! will you give me back my source,
give me a head or let me get ahead;
maybe only a shift of mood or heart,

a goblet of wine and a gulp of air,
a milestone on the road to Nirvana.
Wasn't Nirvana the goal of the nerves

or a hill town on the outskirts of Rome,
a headstone on the highway to heaven?
All this searching for a surge of surprise,

when all I found was as old as the hills.
Surgeon! A splurge, a surfeit or an urge
to bring me to my senses or stun them,

some salvage from the ruin of myself,
some saving grace, a means of saving face —
the face-lift of a Roman fantasy.

Pantheon

If I had known the pleasure principle,
how different all those years would have been,
all those years I spent plaintive and pleading,

but that was plain pain, that was the pure stuff;
could I sing it as a psalm or a hymn,
a sigh to god or to some other one

to look this way, not that way, and soothe me.
Forsooth and so forth, it did not occur.
I was forsaken, and not for my sake —

for whose sake I'll never know, believe me.
Force of habit, or force of not having,
or perforce it had to be, and it was.

Or peremptory, on the part of who?
Meaning who was it who picked out my part
instead of giving it to someone else,

or phase, passage, it could never be known.
Though pass me a pill, or give me your hand,
hand me a pillow or else a haven,

or read my palm and tell me what you see:
I see a palm at the end of my mind,
swaying like an arm, waving like a hand,

the print of a palm or else a blueprint,
a pantheon or a panopticon,
or the prison or prism of myself,

meaning the one view or all of the views,
or else the one god or all of the gods,
and none of them explained what had happened.

Sarah Arvio
Sono: Cantos
Alfred A. Knopf

Copyright © 2006 by Sarah Arvio.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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