Mythologies

By Thomas Luhrmann

Extraneous but extraordinarily meaningful events
clog the drains of the summer house in Devonshire

while no atavistic memory of our desert origins
can alleviate the gloom or fill the night with strategies

or is it strawberries and the memory of some terrible defeat
stretching before us like a herd of wildebeest?

The sky is beautiful, the trees are beautiful, the buffalo
yet the people are uniformly and unmistakably hideous

The baby vomits up a miniature horse, a dog and a pig;
how rapidly they disappear into the wallpaper

while the dimly–perceived infrastructure tickles us
with its vague though never fully understood banalities

and the worm at the center of the apple–shaped cloud
imagines she’s the center of our world