First, brace yourself. The romantic is back,
feet propped, convalescing from the fiction
of an interventionist god. Tough journey.
Long. Oxymoronic lovechild of nature
and art, tell it slant on that red guitar:
that nightingale is not a bird. It's a folio
of Homer, a cashcow on fire. So notch up
your amulet of pain, living hand lanced,
then outstretched, clearance finally given
to the lover, who, outfitted with a conscience,
heretofore dead (how like a god), has just spoken
the world's first sentence, distinct as a hiccup,
in response to the tubercular prognosis: Hello.
O Hyperion, Fanny breathed, this is that new.
Beauty ungovernable, m'lord, because true.
By Virginia Konchan