Politics Poem by Tim Lilburn

Momentum's needle pulls the ear in its elm bark casket

under four and a half feet of ice,

past alder leaf hide windows, where it sweats shaking, boney rooms

of West European night which hydraulic over seventy-two hours

a rack from themselves that is the corpus of the lake

in armspread thinking, then the rooms, their singlebed ears, breast up points of

sparking sentence skeletons of tamarack, of cougar-wound rock, one bird in a canyon

stuffing miles into mass.

This is Tristia, here serviam's darling pubic mound. Set the table.

Roman-candling around the henosised ear, towering nose,

pheromones of the aquatic cat; a squirrel plays dead in the green

cloud, bottom-dipping smell.

A birch's scooping claw is caught in ice.

The tusked fish cuts and cuts over the sludge.

The ear dragged by moaning chains, gang-followed, in its quiet.