SurVision Magazine
Home Page | About Us | Submissions | Archive | Contributors | Books | Links
An
international online magazine that
publishes Surrealist poetry
in English.
Issue Three
G. C. WALDREP
Madrigal
beautiful
syzygy of the ruined city
the wedding you prepared
replete with the sun's cool dementia
replete with ampules of stars
let the horse of midnight
cover you, your rites, your vows
such a large, solemn surgery
that horse
broken beneath your stagnant face
the incense of its hooves
clinging
to the bright pinafores of children
Feast of St. Lucy
mute disk of the satellite's cult I lathe I pray your venous sodality I bear it by its
foam to the secret sky
plosive of childhood plosive of disfigured alms the sky's glaucous vestment
perforated as it were the basest trust
cast against every path into or out of the stricken capital oh affliction the port's
scaly fusillade lurches sideways
& you have always been certain the magnitude of the wedding sealing the cisterns
with its steep pain
I address you & your miniature sacrament of earth's grasp dextrous & in tandem
finite instance of wheel & reef
quartzed homeland bristling with the scat of nocturnal spirals the illiterate
seabirds scrawl in kohl upon the shoulders
of passive velvet tongues knapped baize defective reliquaries recycled in the
schools of the blind crush the glass heel of daybreak
it's chance that laps the milk of this irreducible horizon laps & lisps its blond fog
of insects
I would have saluted acre after acre the wheats pass through I would have painted
a rule on exile's crisp door
the sparrows know this slick little scars strung on the sun's surface bobbing
merciless as bone or cartilage
slipstream in the breath's strict chapel look now brother how the dim flood
sprawls
the wedding you prepared
replete with the sun's cool dementia
replete with ampules of stars
let the horse of midnight
cover you, your rites, your vows
such a large, solemn surgery
that horse
broken beneath your stagnant face
the incense of its hooves
clinging
to the bright pinafores of children
Feast of St. Lucy
mute disk of the satellite's cult I lathe I pray your venous sodality I bear it by its
foam to the secret sky
plosive of childhood plosive of disfigured alms the sky's glaucous vestment
perforated as it were the basest trust
cast against every path into or out of the stricken capital oh affliction the port's
scaly fusillade lurches sideways
& you have always been certain the magnitude of the wedding sealing the cisterns
with its steep pain
I address you & your miniature sacrament of earth's grasp dextrous & in tandem
finite instance of wheel & reef
quartzed homeland bristling with the scat of nocturnal spirals the illiterate
seabirds scrawl in kohl upon the shoulders
of passive velvet tongues knapped baize defective reliquaries recycled in the
schools of the blind crush the glass heel of daybreak
it's chance that laps the milk of this irreducible horizon laps & lisps its blond fog
of insects
I would have saluted acre after acre the wheats pass through I would have painted
a rule on exile's crisp door
the sparrows know this slick little scars strung on the sun's surface bobbing
merciless as bone or cartilage
slipstream in the breath's strict chapel look now brother how the dim flood
sprawls
G. C. Waldrep is the author most recently of feast gently (Tupelo, 2018) and the long poem Testament (BOA Editions, 2015). Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Yale Review, Colorado Review, New American Writing, Denver Quarterly, and other journals. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University and edits the journal West Branch. From 2007 to 2018 he served as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review.
