stumbled on this online version of
Victor Coleman's 1969 Light Verse--though find the book if you can, its one of the loveliest Coach House productions, squeezing our coastal landscape into a little Cornell box...



"...Now I sit to write the story
of the images we saw there

and the poem holds forth fantasy
that cries to be reality

so much so that the tears it sheds
become clear pools of water

which we look in to discover that
Mnemosyne's our daughter and

a memory's as real as
the food that we ingest each day

unless we take consumption now
to be a way of living

as the ever perfect fiction
rears its head up into lies







So when loving starts to fail you
and your truth begins to wander

put your mind into a motion
big as ocean or an instant

let the wandering become you
so that fashion is an instinct

and the flesh that is behind your mind
's all glowing and resplendent


It's not your eyes that take you there
because they are small cameras

of past things lost to interest
and images whose records tell

so little that's of use to us
as we lie down to die here..."