literature for the future

      







           Outside Of A Bar



Two languages met in combative air.
Two temperaments on a parking lot,
 
hot and moist: two myths, thrown to the
ages. Poet against novelist: embittered
 
by form and the murkiness of reefs,
which hover behind cantankerous blows.

Booze, blues and its emptiness narrows
the gap between two stunning avenues

of thought. Two drives: ego to ego,
and only the moon can be critical,

as lunar urgings grow in lunacy
the template of an image, fixated

by stand-offs; by the air and anger,

by elite curses quieted by sunset.
It was a long way from the Canoe Room

or any patrician New England place,
to this backcountry, this seaside connection,

like muscular sentences, taut and hard.
Florida: figuring hotly into two lives;

basking within notions of each one,
each one a tall and solid volcano,

driven by ashfall of meaning, of feeling,
but never like this, errant impulses

from depths which collide: stanza and phrase.
So the fight buoyed the machine of thought.

Fists of the boxer, fists of the aesthete:
Wallace, Ernest  (Jake and Crispin too)  speaking

to us,  then perhaps, to themselves,
about myriad forms of wounds;  the wounds

of life, of sailing, of erstwhile wars,
now stand like men who are mere inventions,

yet stand anyway – an odd gigantism.
Where the rain gathers,  it’s a dirty

shiny home for a massive head,
and for a large red man who likes to read.

Two thinkers: drunken by scotch and snark, 
Dismissing, out of hand, protective jambeaux

for the active legs of one, sluggish legs of another,

have ended at the point it all began,
icons at podiums of each other’s eyes.


Lamont Palmer












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