159. LUMINOUS DEBRIS

From the Archives
(October 2005)
”Luminous Debris was the title of Gustaf Sobin's collection of essays (UCal Press, 1999) on the landscape and history of Southern France, where the American expatriate has lived for more than forty years—but it might just as well describe his poems: like shards of some distant and immemorial linguistic eruption, they are full of middles and sometimes of ends, but their beginnings are lost in silence."—KultureFlash.net

LINGUA FRANCA
by Gustaf Sobin

frivolous with immensity, let your
fingertips slip over the
very contours
of
inception, grazing as they did its pleats, ripples, the
slick
contracted expanse of its muscles, laminated in
dark oils. loom and
dissolve; heave and succumb. for there, furtive, epi-
phenomenal, you'd only transit—vaporous—through all
those flexed
de-
terminants. does the mirror know what the
mirrored doesn't? wouldn't the

resonance enter, root
resplendent, there where the voice,
manifestly,
couldn't? thus drawn, solicited, even the air's
for

inclusion. so, too—you'd noted—each
dis-
tended member, its least
emitted murmur, but

only wrapped, enclosed in the whirring viscera of its own
un-
wording. for only then, in its very
ex-

tinguishing,
spoke.