What really lies inside the poem? Before it, after it.
Even inside of it there is something which is not the poem.
It is living inside the poem but yet it is alien to it. Entire
worlds and universes dwell there. The poem lies there,
above the surface. We can not see the colossus underneath
it, very like the hidden part of an iceberg and just as cold.
So in these prose prefaces to these poems I seek to explore
that, maybe even by accident elucidating something,
some small something to cling to.

M. Bones



Henry’s Elegy For Percy Bysshe Shelley

When they pulled Shelley’s body ashore
they found “Hyperion” open in his pocket,
sea water draining bitterly into the sand,

the fishes just off shore drew circles,
their fins swirling, surrounded by Italian air
and a sea turtle swimming away.

Shelley’s hair was tangled in seaweed,
his face as pale as an unwritten poem,
words just out of reach.

Here in the sand two hundred years later
you still see the outline where they dragged his body.
The guilty waves avoid this lonely stretch of beach.