Sample Poems by John Talbot

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"Is this now mine own countree,"

where the sea stops shaking its fists,
where clouds lounge, sated tabbies, in the window-seat
listening to the late sun
whisper its lists and lists
of euphemisms for hissing fat and indigent heat,
and the rapids refuse to run?

Where the sulking diadem waits for the queenly brow
and the crown jewels turn to shells in the beachcomber’s bag,
and the palace chaplain
dozes in his pew,
untouched by the sunbeams that lark in the rafters and brag
of the tricks they will play on his vision?

Where the brass bell’s clapper, carpeted in moss,
summons the summer brides from those nunneries
whose pink swaying coral
prays and ponders and prays
for submarine gales to flash through the arteries
of this pranked and slumbering girl?

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Circuit Court

Surely something beyond just pleasure
Drives them round it, goads his flesh, her
Rippling trunk. Even I help measure

The circuit: three hundred sixty-five paces.
I know I witness in their writhing faces
A mirror of my own; I know this race is

Endless; yet each lap kindles my resolve.
Feet of mine, pampered with insoles and salve
Nevertheless keep suing for relief,

Burn like expired archives of autumn leaves.
By just such tokens, some runners swear they arrive
At a longed-for threshold, which, they believe,

Hurdles the track like a coffered marble vault.
I believe in it, too: portal less seen than felt,
Ushering flesh and pleasure into court.

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El-Ephant

“I represent the elephant,” mouths his trunk,
Which has lassoed out to greet you, and before
You can manage a word, that rubbery hose has filched
Your bag of peanuts.  “I’ll see to it, of course,
That he gets these,” and coils back into the maw.
No help from that pair of housewives on the roof,
Beating the dust out of the broad throw-rugs
Of elephant ears; nor from below, where four stumpy
Umbrella-stands divot the mud.  Those flickering
Sequins that stud the creased and serrated prairie
Of elephant’s flank, the scavenging parasite flies,
Broadcast high-pitched contempt for the indifference
Of the management towards its oppressed dependents.
Behemoth expanse later narrows, all at once
To a shoelace, a rip-cord, a heartstring-thick whip,
Cracking with mock-heroic petulance
At horseflies, stoutly ignorant of the bulk
To which it appends.  
         Where, then, among all these parts,
Where to look for El-Ephant, that wizened elder,
That dour four-footed buddah, that Ancient of Days,
Who stands with the patience and fixity of an oak,
Flesh scored with rivulets from the rain and wind,
Bearing up under the weight of his unforgetting eyes?