Two Poems by Duane Locke

TERRESTRIAL ILLUMINATION, NO 271

The diary
               Was a
                         Stumbling block, the familiar was lost
And his thinking about his seeing of Signorelli bodies in Orvietto
Turned his mind into brown ovals and brown contours.

He meant to record the event but it was scratched out by white wine.
His mind begin to leak, like the leaking roof at his home he now avoided.
His mind fell out of his head and dropped in drips to chill his bare feet.
His shoes
Was placed on bare broad floor
Adjacent to wad of paper once a love letter
The shoes was to serve as a model for his next painting, hoping they
Would be immortalized in the philosophy of some future Martin Heidegger.

Recalled the charm of her when they watched a skylark arise from grass
Over the Stonehenge to disappear in an upper distance.

He ran over, picked up his shoes, and put on his feet
To warm the cold caused by the drops that dripped from his mind
Leaking out of his gray haired head.



TERRESTRIAL ILLUMIATION, NO 272

My mind was a fallen farm house
                                                             And red
Morning-sunlit comb of a white rooster as we, whoever she was, sat
On a light grey circular cushion looking at an early Mondrian
In which the swerving pencil marks caused recall of a lost forest
In the building that housed the Guggenheim collection before
Frank Lloyd Wright built a circle and called it an art gallery.

Life was yet to be unrolled in a long blank scroll. There would be
A few dots on pages where a pen point touched and meant to scribble,
But became awkward and paralyzed and would leave revised, blurred memories.

I watched unseen a yellow-stripped black butterfly flutters in an
invisible atmosphere.
I was trying to translate the unheard sounds of the imagined bassoon
whose sounds were French.



Duane Locke lives in Tampa, Florida near anhinga,
gallinules, raccoons, alligators, etc.
He has published 6,680 poems, includes 29 books of poems. His latest
book publication, April 2012,
Is DUANE LOCKE, THE FIRST DECADE, 1968-1978, BITTER OLEANDER PRESS.
This book is a republication
Of his first eleven books, contains 333 pages. Order from
http://www.bitteroleander.com/releases.html,
Or Amazon.