Three Poems by Oliver Rice.

AND PEASANT SOCIALISM

Monday, Thursday,
spring, summer

the humanistic annals await,
     voices from a thousand and one nights,
     imperial Easter eggs of Faberge,
by happenstance importune

along the uptown side of Watkins,
in the newsstand by the subway exit,

     a kebab cooking in an Arabian stall,
     de Sade dying in an asylum,
awaiting the enlightenable,
persons with the third eye

for the Birth of Venus,
oriental rats bringing the Black Death,

randomly along the jogging path,
from the crosstown bus,
Cicero’s letters, a Zen garden,
the nine Muses, a fist hatchet.

 

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CHRONICLES

Rooms,
rooms
the selves and alterselves inhabit,

decors of uncertain identity,
of ostentation, of indolence,
auras of the old inclinatons,

rooms,
rooms,
nuances of domesticity.

 

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THAT LOOM, THAT GLISTEN, THAT FALL SHORT

 

Various qualities of darkness
have fallen on the vicinity
of these, asleep or awake,
who take their consolations where they find them,
who deplore the drift of things,
of those who have made the same mistake before,
who no longer fear their fathers,

of one who exults in his fragment of night,
and one for whom night is a looming ambivalence,

of one who reveres the space his psyche ocupies
and one whose psyche falls short of itself,

of one under whose sun the world glistens
and one the streets of whose world do not confirm.