The French artist, Georges Seurat, painted with dots.
This was called pointillism.

A dot means a sentence is over;
three dots I do not understand

-- Adam Hammer, "I Have Thought About the Following Dots"

It opens right in front of us,
a white beast with a scar beginning
its belly. On its side, scared,
it pours the green of the forest.

We peek in at the blue patch of sky.
We sit down, excited, sucking air
through our pores because we
are dead? No, we're only sleeping
late in the summer, while the city

outside forgets about the universe,
we forget about the claw hammer
we used to pry apart the limbs
grown together, to pulverize rocks
in the forest and feel no better about it.
We're too literate,
more literate than you
can ever imagine. We are amused,

so we whistle.
We sharpen our brains on the black anvil


Failing to Become Anonymous

In any case, you don't achieve anonymity when you submit yourself to the law of accident.

-- Charles Simic

Incantations are very nice, but inappropriate.
There are too many of you angels already.
There are too many steps to Inferno.
I've just moved from Texas to escape
the Millennium, all to meet another man
from Texas. He had a face though.

A blast of gunpowder in snow.
Nothing for eyes but the grey rinds of mushroom.
He ended up on my sofa at 3 a.m., speaking
in tongues. Later they trucked him back
to the devil or the drugs or the women,
lucky son of a bitch and back to his car
and stained couches, the son of a bitch.
He'd drink motor oil or whatever else commanded
by God. He made me afraid again, that divine habit
of bending over and listening to the locked-up order
implicit in things --

Now I can only sit here and think about the gift
of tongues, and move my lips at that --
a brand new fearful symmetry.

The structural symmetry of the Canon is, of course,
entirely contrived, but still radiant, a red hub,
a dying victim feeding every radial spoke
with blood, seeding the seeds before they can fall
to earth --

--if that's inspired, I won't argue.
In your mouth, friend, a fragment of stained glass.
In your mouth a postage stamp depicting the Passion,
the fractal bones of torture and narcoleptic sympathy.

But we don't call it passion or torture.
We don't call it anything.
Maybe a divine failure of the divine, but too abstract
for words, face to face with the human face --

and just remember that you too
can go crazy too, and still
not have a thing to speak of . . .

Ronald Donn



Ronald Donn teaches at Louisiana Technical U. in Ruston, Louisiana. Previous publications include Jones Ave., Spillway, and Octavo.

Comments on "location" theme: Having lived most of my life in South Texas, and now in Northern Louisiana, I relate to a certain grotesque intimacy as one finds in the works of William Goyen. The cruel religious imagination of the Delta--the "referential mania" of the place, its separatist mindset, its finding a threat of homosexuality in the Teletubbies...this finds a dangerous breeding ground given telecommunicative and political opportunities.