Yes, you have said enough for the time being
(we can only talk in whispers in the hotel).
It is beyond spoken words what they are.
I’ve seen skies split with light at night
through opaque, glittering spectacles
in the gardens of the rainbow planted by anarchists.
I don’t want to go on being a root in the dark:
the centipedes are in my veins, swimming against the tide.
I want a magnifying glass & a knowledge of Coptic.
I have a great desire to move elsewhere:
I can carry your picture around in my brain,
solid blackness above & below.
Your window is a good looking-glass.
Shielding the truth & giving birth to it,
that man is but your reflection in the clouds of dust.
& now I must go to take my nap in the sunroom.
.
Dominic Rivron
The lines in this cento are taken from poems by David Gascoyne, Roland Penrose, Lee Harwood, Pablo Neruda (trans., Robert Bly), Tom Raworth, Gavin Ewart, Ted Berrigan, H.R. Hays, Frank O’Hara, Andrei Codrescu, John Perreault, Michael McClure, George Anthony, Norman McCaig, Toni Del Renzio & Weldon Kees.
I don’t know if you’ve come across centos – I say this as I hadn’t, until last year. If not, they’re poems constructed from lines of poems by other poets, who are usually credited at the end (hence the list at the end of this one). There are plenty of modern centos kicking around but, as a form, it originated in classical times.
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