Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SEINE SPLIT, by CLARENCE MAJOR



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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

SEINE SPLIT, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Remember / at that moment of waking


Remember,
at that moment of waking,
your swimming body
divided into irritated halves,
one
floated up,
the other,
nude and undernurtured,
scattered as it fell down
insane and guilty,
pretending to be the lower twin
with the welded-in eyes of Gemini.

Paris had a way: it came
together as content
in one of you --
which one, I don't know --
and as the merged, reflected image
of Castor and Pollux.

If color were sound you'd hear
the bleak screaming of green.

When you tried to silence the conflict,
to yellow-and-blue it in dream,
it burned an orange hole
in your corpus collosum.
The brackets beneath your vermis
broke. Remember how silence itself
reached its maximum
in your central nervous system?

The Seine flowing through Paris
was the liquid that held
your two floating bodies --
bloated and bobbing --
in its stormy vomit.


Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA
98368-0271, www.cc.press.org




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