Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 106
- Language: English
- Date Published: March. 2019
- ISBN: 978-1-948017-23-7
Excerpt
~ Third Reverie of Magellan ~
Men who bring no tools with which to serve.
Men whose desperate oath is: ‘We will serve’.
Dried and salted. Blistered until brittle.
Boiled in lye and weevil. Casked. Preserved.
Bastard son of a slave of a nameless ship’s cook!
‘Your beard stinks of the smoke of those who serve!’
The psalms of the orphaned, who turn the half-hourglass:
‘Water. Sand. God of our Time, we serve.’
Praise barber’s pelican, red wine and oakum,
turpentine, quince jelly, pitch. All serve.
Castilian, Basque, Sicilian, Português,
‘Al cuarto! Al cuarto!’ ‘On deck! On deck!’—to serve.
Ass-back to the railing, bowel’s exposed
to all—. Leviathan, your dinner’s served!
We teach the rats to dance on dead calm nights.
Which man believes he gets what he deserves?
At last you’ve won your reeking ship, Magellan,
this tub of vinegar your rage would serve.
Author
R. Nemo Hill was born on Long Island, and has lived in New York City, San Francisco, Portugal, and now resides in an enormous old stone farmhouse in Halcott, NY, in the Catskill Mountains. He has travelled extensively, principally in Southeast Asia. He did not graduate from college and so does not earn his living ‘academically’. Rather, he has been a baker, a raunchy greeting card salesman, and for two decades an importer of folk-art and fabric from Indonesia. At present he runs an indigo-dyeing operation with his husband, Julio Perea.
He is the author, in collaboration with painter Jeanne Hedstrom, of an illustrated novel, organized around the processes of Medieval alchemy, Pilgrim’s Feather (Quantuck Lane Press, 2002); a narrative poem based upon a short story by H.P. Lovecraft, The Strange Music of Erich Zann (Hippocampus Press, 2004); a chapbook in heroic couplets, Prolegomena To An Essay On Satire (Modern Metrics/Exot Books, 2006); and two collections of poems, When Men Bow Down (Dos Madres Press, 2012) and In No Man’s Ear (Dos Madres Press, 2016). He is also editor & publisher of EXOT BOOKS.