His gait is like he's got a cricket in his shoe; he's lost his morning-coat. The odd one is Mandelstam himself laundered with a queer name in his tale. It's the spineless and heroic victim of @3The Double@1, Dostoevsky's own equivalent for Gogol's civil servant. They claim us in their common round like song from a Victrola against the beefy railroad prose which shuttles generations like Jews from one zone to the next. We strut Commercial St. to see @3La Cage aux Folles@1, male lovers triumph over a cultural official; nonetheless, his daughter marries their son. We're alone in time. It's our human gait. On the beach a father taught his boy not to catch the lines flyfishing. Sand forms and unsettles like soldiers. Movements may not thrust opposites together, but a man with a strange ear might rest his sunken face perpendicular to an era. The sunny war lyric of Theodorakis you honor in you new art, synthesizer. It's a simple enough act, to bow a cymbal, if it occurs to you as music. We empower the odd number we couple in, three, cacophonous and far from the possible which was limited and contradictory. Men complete themselves or live on animals. The orderly and familiar sea drives the new gravel to lyric. Full moon over a fast ship. Sometimes it's as close as a string of sleep in the eye no one else can remove, and as silent -- tradition, nothing in itself but the dream that produced it. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE RIVULET by WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT THE HEART OF THE TREE by HENRY CUYLER BUNNER THE SURF by JURGIS BALTRUSHAITIS THE SECOND BROTHER; AN UNFINISHED DRAMA by THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES HOW DO I KNOW? by LOUISA SARAH BEVINGTON |