Three Choruses

Three Choruses 1

We bore our standard across the plains.

At night we lay down beneath the camphor tree

and ate panada, a gruel of bread crumb

Our clothes were quilted, materialed with bast.

Nothing could surpass the formality of our lives.

We had humor, plane of a sort.

Our view of things was uniplanar:

the grass, the tree the stars,

and the miffy, snuffling the supreme goodnesss

2

We amazemented if the soul were probable,

belittling the bells in the campanile,

disturbers of birds. Then, apologetically,

we waited for sunrise upon a boulder,

as if god the father would provide an aside.

The dawn was primed with tetryl

weatherized. The disk harrow rusted.

That was cipher hour.

3

We labor up a direction downward

littered with calumets and farm machinery,

barely able to recall sea voyages, brocaded rivers,

or smooth the trip up the canal.

We are born in unvarnished pagodas

and cros the Styx upon Styrofoam.

We still exchange our ions, promiscuously,

though social life is countrified.

We sing our polyphonic canzonet

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Sep/Oct 1999

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