Una Vida de Piedra y de PalabraUna Vida de Piedra y de Palabra number 23 in the 2River Chapbook Series
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poems by Charles D. Tarlton

Contents

I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.

In the Dialectic of Over and Under
Truth in the Larger Sense
“Lives in the Balance”
On Death, and Dying’s Threshold
“Give Me Men to Match my Mountains”
Going-to-the-Sun
“But Eternity Remains”
Convergence of Time and Distance
Tantum Ergo
Blood of My Blood
Only the Rational Is Real
Ecce Homo

Other Ways to Read

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Chap the Book

Tarlton Reads from the Chapbook

Other Matters

About the author
About the Artist

 

  VI:  Going-to-the-Sun

1

at a reluctant moment,
I clung in the cut,
to the worn footholds
chipped from the stone
rather than climbing up

— through thick vines
twisted roots, lianas
           
        all the way up;

blindly lost now
utterly dazed
before soaring
obdurate architecture.

Macchu Picchu,
enormity of rocks,
rising on itself, at last:

fugitive earth

        uncovered lairs
        terrains, abodes
        empurpled nests
        curled beneath
        their windings of sky
        coat of mountain mists 
        wet vectors

converging in you.

2

a matrix of placenta
and the thunderbolt,

praying men, who sway
deeply in caves,

hidden from the wind’s
searching talons,

mothering stones,
spots of condor spume

splashed dawn
on reefs of human bones

dug with flat shovels
buried in sand’s oblivion.

this was purple, here,
out of place; over there

broad kernels of maize
rising up. And they rose up

blowing
in virginal flurries,

misspent storms
of red snowflakes.


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