Psalm of The Flower
The flower grown to to its full height wears a mountain like a lethal skirt
The flower enters dark doorways trembling and spilling beaks of moonlight
The flower drifts through enormous abandoned houses pursued by little girls
The flower hides within rings of mirrors until reflected sunlight turns it into a dragon
The flower seldom walks without a system to follow as it pollinates the maps
What savage agent enables the flower to roll like a wheel through the forest?
Traffic: A Sonnet
Cloud ocean surrounding a slow swirl of cities
Sunlight reaches below the clouds to brush my eyelids
Staircases rise and fall, pistons in a house machine
Tiny wooden shutters open and close inside the heart
Green bees argue surrounding the brain of lavender
About the rococo flowering of the fingers in air
And the machinery of dragonflies and clover
A shell-river of yellow taxis advances to fill all space
Women in red face to face press their palms together
As hollow windows echo each other in the sunset
Whatever am I doing here at the Swan Exchange?
Doors slam open into more doors faster and faster
Marching across the shiny mosaic moonrise
Silence is its own train pulling into the terminus
Cloud ocean surrounding a slow swirl of cities
Sunlight reaches below the clouds to brush my eyelids
Staircases rise and fall, pistons in a house machine
Tiny wooden shutters open and close inside the heart
Green bees argue surrounding the brain of lavender
About the rococo flowering of the fingers in air
And the machinery of dragonflies and clover
A shell-river of yellow taxis advances to fill all space
Women in red face to face press their palms together
As hollow windows echo each other in the sunset
Whatever am I doing here at the Swan Exchange?
Doors slam open into more doors faster and faster
Marching across the shiny mosaic moonrise
Silence is its own train pulling into the terminus
Adam Cornford, born in England, was Chair of the Poetics Program at New College of California in San Francisco 1987-2008. He has published 4 full-length poetry collections, most recently LALIA (Chax Press 2021) as well as a book-length collaboration with the printer and book artist Peter Koch, LIBER IGNIS (2014) and numerous chapbooks. Often described as a neosurrealist and known as a poet of science and science fiction, he is currently at work on METROPOLYTA, a long narrative poem (or novel in verse) built out of Fritz Lang's 1927 silent science-fiction masterpiece METROPOLIS. The poem's protagonist is the MaschinenMensch or gynoid robot who plays a central role in the film.
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