(L'introduction à mon premier roman...)

                The wind buffets loudly as I sit and think back on years, experience, literature, dreams, memory; it's a flood of infinite magnitude.  It's a thing that comes and goes, becoming nothing,

                  But ivy sprawled in light tendrils over cracked concrete that didn't feel the moods of poetry.

AN ODYSSEAN MICROCOSM:

For eight hours he hung,

                By his hands from the fig tree,

Waiting for the Kharybdis maelstrom to spew back his boat/

and timbers,

Shifting weight,

                From shoulder to forearm,

                From right to left,

Fearing to relax,

                Using clenched muscle

                To keep bones,

                Shoulders,

                From shifting out of joint.

For eight hours he clung,

                Like an art model in some brilliant academy that allowed/

                                                                                                no breaks,

                Shifting tension

                From the tired chest

                To the rested underarm,

                From the tired underarm

                To the semi-rested chest,

As all things burned and became exhausted.

For eight hours he hung,

                Forearms around the fig tree,

                As the sun,

                Always slow,

                Moved one thousand times more slowly,

Shifting from

                The burning elbow,

                To the numbing shoulder,

Exploding with dull pain.

The right the left,

                The shoulder to the chest,

Ten thousand false shadows of twilight

                Before the real twilight came,

Ten thousand false maelstrom heaves,

                Mirages and exhaustion and the dread dread sea,

Ten thousand thudding pains,

                And feelings of mortality.

Shoulders loosening out of joint,

                Muscle strands popping,

                All thinking almost gone,

As Kharybdis maelstrom spewed back his boat and timbers.

He dropped,

                Senseless,

                Into the foaming water,

He,

                The master of invention,

                Madly rowing past Skylla,

                Six-headed eater of crewmen,

Through the dread straight,

                Into the open sea.

INVOCATION OF THE MUSE:

Muse, tell me the reasons;

The Bard composes,

                Lounging in purple satin,

                Beaten,

                Vice-ridden,

                Weak,

                Pained (but still blind to horrors that will be),

                Taut,

                Lithe,

                     An exile,

                While the world carries on

                In Love and War.

                                                               - John Russell Herbert

(Tous droits reserve par l'auteur en 2007)