Time's Covenant: Selected Poems

by Eric Ormsby

Bringing together Eric Ormsby's entire poetic oeuvre thus far, including a healthy selection of previously unpublished poems, Time's Covenant is timeless, by one of America's best poets. Essential reading.

Genres: Poetry

288 pages, Paperback

First published October 16, 2006

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection includes poems from Bavarian Shrine and other poems, Coastlines, For A Modest God, Araby, and Daybreak at the Straits; along with new and uncollected poems...

From Bavarian Shrine and other poems (1990)...

Between the stones, by the sea's edge,
And in sheltered hollows of the rock,
Flat lichens cling. Their surfaces are grey,
Dry and crinkly. Some are cracked and sharp
Or flake away like weathered paint in strips.
They survive the cold light and the spray
Torn from the North Atlantic. The way they clasp
And cover the rocks seem to signify
Inconspicuous courage and tenacity. But
At evening they gleam bleakly in exact
Configuration and their order is exact
Configurations and their order is fiercer
Than the sea's: their drab arabesques
Look splotchy, rust-wept or scaly as dead bark;
Far-off they're starlike, spiky as galaxies.
Like us they clutch and grip their chilly homes
And the wind defines their possibilities.

- Lichens, pg. 37

From Coastlines (1992)...

In November the grasses discover
Fountains in themselves
That cluster upward toward the long stalks'
Tips and flourish cloudy flowers
That are the oblique colour of the sun.

They look festive, ceremonial, like
Ostrich feathers in a vestibule;
And yet, they seem so public, plumed
For display, and wag from side to side
In the cold breeze that nudges them
Prancingly like horsetails in a stately parade
Or shaggy pompoms brandished
To the booming of a drum.

- Grasses in November, pg. 88

From For A Modest God (1997)...

I wanted to go down to where the roots begin,
To find words nested in their almond skin,
The seed-curls of their birth, their sprigs of origin.

At night the dead set words upon my tongue,
Drew back their coverings, laid bare the long
Sheaths of their roots where the earth still clung.

I wanted to draw their words from the mouths of the dead,
I wanted to strip the coins from their heavy eyes,
I wanted the rosy breath to gladden their skins.

All night the dead remembered their origins,
All night they nested in the curve of my eyes,
And I tasted the savor of their seed-bed.

- Origins, pg. 119

From Araby (2001)...

When Jaham fell in love his skin became
Xylophonic. Each fingertip would ping,
Each dimple vocalize till all his body chimed.
His toenails clicked their little castanets,
His ankles and patella cadence-clacked,
His nipples pizzicattoed with a taut
Epidermal anthem of delight,
His piccolo of penis piped its glee,
And even his shy balls in their goathair sack
Blipped like muffled bugles when he walked.

His tongue alone was throned with silences.
His mouth was deader than a soldered flute,
His teeth chatterless as a sprained harmonium.
Even his garrulous eyeballs had turned dumb.

But when love came to him, that leopard-whelp
With dark lope and both wild eyes
Like pristine puddles where blue cyclones loom,
His very gooseflesh crooned to the dunes

In phosphor aureoles of synaptic song.

- Love Among the Dunes, pg. 159

From Daybreak at the Straits (2004)...

To live in the body like a nervous guest;
To be confined in fingers and in feet;
To swing on the pendulum of what to eat;
To be subject to south and east and west...

Behind my skullbone lives another thing
That fidgets anxiously as I barge by,
That swivels skyward its chameleon eye
For the interests in the twitches of a wing.

My inmost dweller is predacious root;
Ransacks reality for steadfastness;
Adores the constancy of all dark stars;
Refuses thirst and thrives upon the brute
Benedictions of the wolf and lioness;
Loves the futility of fountains; preens scars.

- Another Thing, pg. 196

From Uncollected Poems (1958-2006)...

Thicket-whisperer, you
Cherish austerity,
Your small claws blue
Beneath the raggedy

Habits of subzero
Song. And you will
Tutor me, flit-hero,
Accentual icicle,

Prophet-minor of cold-
Crunched twigs and nettle-
Skeletons; your bold
Coal-chip pupil settle

On me, where I follow
You, farther into hiddenness,
Aswarm in the swallow
Villas now left summerless.

Remembrance of the sun
Glitters your retices;
Icy octaves bangle your dun
Beak that curettes crevices.

Cauterized, chipper, astute,
You concentrate the frigid waste
In fierce fluff, my modest flute
That whistles to the holocaust.

- To a Bird in Winter, pg. 252

[Nigel Beale]

Listen to my Biblio File podcast conversation with Eric here

http://thebibliofile.ca/eric-ormsby-o...