3 Poems

Blazon Star

edgy in your edginess
and on a spotted vale
empty in the outer sky
and washed in seaweed shale
heavenly and hard to eat
and ever ready green
going toward a catomine
a horse that runs praline
plunked down on the
mountaintops
from high up in the rue
reddened by an autumn
patch of mustard seeds
that brood
broadly based in
earthen muck
and modeled on a vale
ever going happy home
to sing a golden scale.

Geography Sonnet

When the news from Africa
is that we're in London
and are moving to Madrid
O Madrid, you're not New York
and I have never been to Syria
which is near the border of Iraq
how happy I am, Great Wall of China
and bank vaults of Fort Knox
there's no place like home, in Kansas
or a city like San Francisco
just down-sea from Japan,
I grew up outside Buffalo
and my people are from France,
Charlegmagnic, dark as Mars.

Zero Onset

an eagle added attaboy ongoing outboard oak
of after agile april airs in inner age awoke
apparent oaten apple arcs, amazing amish ax
and undulating ache of air in Aeschylus attacks
o agitation angrily, o okra ocracoke
and after orange onset ilk updated on an arch
all-knowing error out of earth, o undulate aardvark
applicable of often oars, o oar ashore ashore
antagonistic afterburn, appalling anvil adze
adversity, ambivalence, androgynous aloe
astrology all edible, of aging update om
and opening and opening, unpacked allowed aroam
authentic arching anarchist, allowance all awry
an afternoon, Albanian, unurgent and espied.

Lisa Jarnot is the author of three full-length collections of poetry including Black Dog Songs (Flood Editions. Chicago). She is currently completing a biography of the San Francisco poet, Robert Duncan, which will be published by University of California Press in 2006. She lives in New York City and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Brooklyn College.