"seep into luminous prowl of sea"

R.I.P. Syd Barrett

I'm in North Carolina for a few days. At a used book store in Chapel Hill, I found a copy of Stephen Spender's 1938 play Trial of a Judge (Faber & Faber, 1948). Across the street, Internationalist Books has a small but outstanding poetry section. I bought Ron Silliman's Tjanting (Salt Publishing, 2002), which I'll start reading on the plane back to Boston, and Stacy Szymaszek's Emptied of All Ships (Litmus Press, 2005).

Szymaszek's poems are just as entrancing for me on the page as when she read them in Cambridge a few months ago. Below is a beautiful section from "Some Mariners":

"grappling iron your legs

moor me in full tide

whet against protean shoulders

breath is fuel open your mouth

seep into luminous prowl of sea

night is shell eloquent

transient lid"