Adagios: Orestes' Lament

by Judith Fitzgerald

51 pages, Hardcover

First published December 23, 2004

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Destiny's emporetic fathers tragic laugh in the face
of fatal juxtaposition, vicissitudes, reversals,
and contingent universals. Give us this day our portion

of poetic grace citing the exemplar homo novus;
the mutinous winds; their traitorous disgrace.
Teach us to strike the stance of happenchance.

We, ecco-narcissism's collateral victims, falter.
No matter. Still, if these high-stepping fabulae fail,
slaughter this goddamned book on your glossological altar.

- pg. 9

* * *

I love the world and its green faces, its chartreuse arenas
ad linked mysteries cannily flashing absolute darkness,
its animals yoked to perpetual motion's harnesses,
readied for the climb into oblivion (or one Hell of confining spaced).

We live in a world bearing down on being, a whitened world
where, following full brightness, the moon falls apart in our hands,
falls victim to our obsessions with grave sights invisible
(till closing time settles the score of corrupted intentions).

- pg. 12

* * *

Transgrafting fatherly substitutes marks
and mimics the foundations of our self-
sustaining mythos, logos, ethos, all
in the name of brute imagoes' powerful casuistry.

At home in a vacant universe, we're agents predicting
the arrival of a despot in disguise. They're spies, these hands;
they live at their own speed. We station ourselves at the cross-roads,
our hearts locked beyond shrouded hills beneath a miscreant moon.

- pg. 22

* * *

Beauty stays a joyless master glaring from a high window,
leaves for points elsewhere to stain eternity radiant white.
I'd had visions; my nerves, sutured for tomorrow's spectacle,
snapped. The war's too far gone; these times too close.

I wander, hesitantly, at the edge of the ocean's roar;
an inviting phantom beckons, confident of my distress.
Any hint of ambition may be planted, now, without hope,
without deprivation. I know what lies beyond horizons.

- pg. 35

* * *

The breaking sea's endless wreckage incurs stilled calamities,
settles scores, silences voices raised against harsh enemies
teaching harsher lessons vis-à-vis our lists of things to doom.
Why must we - pitiless you and pitiful me - provoke gods?

Turning towards unknown targets with terror caught in my throat,
I know my guilt, I slue my heinous crimes; forever flawed
in the defiant face of unforgiving time (denying my small atonements)
I learn the hard lessons: This carnage eclipses all meaning.

- pg. 45