HORNPIPE EPITHALAMIUM
For World Oceans Day 2016
Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem, "Hornpipe Epithalamion"
The sea blows high and the wind blows cold,
The Hornet sails out to sting.
We bellbottom boys are bully and bold,
Young at the moment but growing old,
And it's no damn good that I bought Jean a ring,
I bought pretty Jean a ring.
The Gunner's Apprentice is cute as a pin,
The Yeoman can really swing.
Those almond-eyed girls all know how to sin
To make your eyes swivel and your head spin —
But I had to go buy Jeannie a ring,
A yellowish diamond ring.
Davy Jones flirts with the mermaids below.
Down there where Neptune is king
The seacows come swimming along in a row
With nothing more on than a green weed bow
While the drowned sailors gather around in a ring
And dance till the fathoms ring,
For each wooed a maiden of iron and steel,
Then took her out for a fling.
She had a pert hull and a lovely keel,
But one day she just wouldn't answer her wheel —
I wonder if Jeannie's still wearing her ring,
That beautiful bargain ring.
The wind blows cold, the sea blows high;
I stand here trying to sing,
But the salt spray rises to spit in my eye
Till I'm ready to kill and fit to die
While Jeannie sits home and stares at her ring,
For I gave sweet Jean my ring.
"Hornpipe Epithalamium" was originally published in Curses and Laments (by "Wesli Court," pseud.), Stevens Point: Song, 1978, and gathered in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004, 460 pp., ISBN 1-932842-00-4, jacketed cloth; ISBN 1-932842-01-2, trade paperback, copyright ©, all rights reserved by Lewis Turco, may not be reproduced in any form anywhere without the written consent of the author. Also available from Amazon.com in a Kindle edition.
The Pilot
THE PILOT
by Lewis Turco
Calais, France, May 18, 1968 (AP) — Low tide yesterday uncovered a plane, presumably of World War II, with the remains of the pilot still at the controls. Its origin could not be determined immediately.
It has been
a long flight. Like flak,
the seagrass exploded
beneath me as I fell
out of light into
an older and a heavier air.
My planing
continued in the tide.
When the scavengers had
done with my flesh, I found
that still the stick would
answer, though more slowly than before.
So I flew,
and am flying still, back
to the beginning. In
my marrow direction
lay. Now the sea has
released me, and I have been constant.
But I was
wrong. You see me at death's
controls, in the primal
mud where our flight began,
but it has not been
a fleeing, as we have long supposed.
I see that
now, with these sockets where
fish have swum. You, rising
from the shore, have shown me
what the snail tried to
tell: the journey is the other way.
Turn me around. I am with you still.
"The Pilot" was originally published in The Saturday Review, lii:23, Jun. 7, 1969, and collected in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, copyright © 2007, ISBN 978-1-932842-19-7, cloth; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, paper. Also available in a Kindle edition. All rights reserved: may not be reproduced anywhere for any reason without the written permission of the author, Lewis Turco.
June 05, 2016 in American History, Americana, Commentary, History, Literature, Memorials, Monologues, Poems, Poetry, Quantitative syllabic verse | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: submerged World War II aircraft