CHORDS OF THE DAY
by John (Jack) Clarke
“ … listen to the sounds of the day as though chords of eternity.” —Karl Kraus
“Even the jazzy present has this virtue, that low as it is, it is a prediction of a new order of knowing.” —W.C. Williams
At last the chaos that comes of exalted harmony
the antipodes rush in to subsume all gender,
and the reticule of the years advances equally
or else the transitional (excuse of the present)
disorder overwhelms us with its squandering of evil
bourgeois autonomy entering its own postponement
the Baconian goose seen to be the old statutes
as the unreal end, the heaven of itself and its
unreal despair come together to make the chords of
the day out of old flood mud of the eternal Nile
whose initial impulse is brand new, thus affording
invariant hieroglyphs always under exegesis until
love begets chaos once more (analogy of coming war)
and we, old Tartareans, are equal to this new order.
Sept 1st 1986