From an Abandoned Adaptation of the Old English Wanderer

 

1

Off alone again. No complaints.
Red hands combing the hairy sea
again, there's age's luck. Again,
again careworn in dawn's version
of the wavescape. Been brain, gone breasts
recoil on contact back to where
progressive scleroderma carves
from skin the turtle-self, again.

 

2

Between slow floating ghosts' greetings
the clamped mind moulds again limb-buds
into fists, the arm suppressed. All
hope's contained in the panned brain of
a thane. Didactic double he
-lices unwind in this world, while
motion elsewhere is geodes
-ically determined. Halls fall.

 

3

Comfort's sunk. Up close this stone wall's
still worth seeing, though from a dis
-tance the intricacy of its
decorative interlace be
-comes more clear. Giants made it. Some
are still here. Scree from the stone's face,
pounded and fired in the living
furnace, coins the new brick. So build.

---

First published in Parataxis: modernism and modern writing, issue 8/9, 1996.

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