https://www.albany.edu/offcourse
 http://offcourse.org
 ISSN 1556-4975

OffCourse Literary Journal

 Published by Ricardo and Isabel Nirenberg since 1998


 

Poems by Louis Phillips

AGGIORNAMENTO

 

Swell. Now it's all right
For the sun,
Slipping sideways,
Revising day into night,
To speak Italian
To my foreign ears.

I bear the burden
Of the day,
But then who does not?
Time to revise my life,
Its nicks & dance
&  subtle sway

Of loss. My wishes
Are rubbed
This way & that
Like small shells
Clicking in the hands
Of children not my own.

           


 

TRANSPARENCIES

Sometimes a poem is so transparent
Readers see right thru it
Far past the linear ridge of the northern slope
Of Ovda Regio, past fear, past hope,
Into spiral arms, gas, & dying stars,
All the way to where galaxies start,
Only to realize much later
How opaque the human heart.

 


 

THE PAGE ANT

How dare he
Crawl across my opened Othello,

Creating,
Blindly, indifferently,

A zig-zag pageant
Of his own.

Now he's gone, feelingly,
Into a world

More foreign to me
Than Cyprus.

That earless jot 
Has no use 

For plotting or plodding,
Has left no stain

Upon various Acts
& scenes.

I stare at my book
& its tragic loadings,

Until I am beguiled
By "false gaze."



Louis Phillips website is http://louis-phillips.com/. His off-beat book on Shakespeare —THE PLEASURE OF HIS COMPANY -- was  published this July by World Audience Publishers.  On June 27th, a reading of his full-length play — ARBUCKLE'S RAPE— was given in ChicagoBio:



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