Eggnog, you are a good candidate for governor
of my mouth: You require so little of me
and give so little in return. I am excited
about the phlegm you produce in my throat;
it’s as if senility has set in, finally. Come here,
let me show you what pi means. It is like a woman,
going on and on about nothing. Pi never ends,
the way your flavor does not end. You agitate
my palate and make an informal home
of my gastrointestinal tract. The same quandary
always separates us, like this elegant expanse
of IKEA laminate. Tired of your liquidity,I want you to harden into bone. You, tired
of my nullification, want to know why I never
pour you into the glass of your choosing.
This poem is a transliteration / homophonic translation of Catullus.
Dana Guthrie Martin and her partner live in the Seattle area. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals. Her chapbooks include The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press, 2009) and In the Space Where I Was, forthcoming from Slack Buddha Press. She writes at My Gorgeous Somewhere (http://mygorgeoussomewhere.org). For 30 days, she will be carrying her trash around with her in a clear backpack and reporting on the experience at Post/Think (http://postthink.org).
Much better than daily cheap chocolate. And I love eggnog, hate eggs, and suffer the difference by clearing the plumbing.
ReplyDeleteBetween you and Nathan ("your" Nathan, not "my" Nathan), I'm left feeling that Catallus should be far more celebrated than Nostradamus. Even his sounds become the present.
(On a very yummy slice of pi: http://crd.lbl.gov/~dhbailey/pi/ . I've TA'ed for him. Wow. And of course I'll zoom into the one super-analytical phrase in the piece. sigh. I can't break it, nor can I break out of introspection. I suppose I shouldn't mention the use of IKEA laminate stools as cheap computer racks...)
Jason, your pi link opens a whole new world to me. Who knew pi was so written about, that it was surrounded in such mystery? You knew, obviously, with your fancy mathematics Ph.D.
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