Eric Ekstrand
LAODICEA
(Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested,
Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)
—“The Wound Dresser”; omitted from the inscription
above the Dupont Metro Station
That I can’t have You, rival
to personal choice, completely
without dying as the president’s
helicopters in trinity
for confusion fly low
over the river, conspiracy
black as You are
conspiracy black in low, stern
minerals, is one unconscious
consternation I have kept, Land.
Gripped-down plants
sprung in middle-states
are slightly more
like us to You and slightly
more like You to us. People
can only think of the plants as objects
of beauty or use. In Washington,
all of the plants are protestant,
mid-Atlantic, small and old
like oldest mountains are smallest.
Like Larkin-darkened post-war
Britain, the old mountains
Are concise and Lenten;
Or like Auden (if I were sarcastic
Because they are wrinkled
And in America). But with
Auden, I’m not sarcastic.
He is a great small mountain.
These have been my two simple elegies.
Smallest tear-drop leaves
in republican hunter-green,
green chair-leather
tightened with brass, so that a bush
looks like something a campaign
analyst might strategize upon.
The golden dog pauses
valueless among the muscle
of the word rhododendron.
A little triangular garden
below an equestrian north
of Dupont, west of Adams Morgan
is a leniency city architects
permit You to mark the small
difference between fashionable
young, the rich homosexuals
and a famous Russian restaurant.
The horse strides nobly
towards the edge of an iron block
in preemptive slapstick;
except, if You’ve actually seen
a horse fall, (You must’ve),
You know it isn’t funny.
Constant anonymous grass
and a decorative black iron gate
are all unhurried. A bit of
The Wound Dresser above
the metro entrance is a chilling
way to go underground.
This has been my third simple elegy.
Before the Duke Ellington Bridge
going West on the right
is a plaster finial above the door post
of a row house on which
are cast two ladies gathered
in Elysian roaches repainted:
one as a Greek woman and one
as a black woman of post-social-reform
anachronism, meringued
in olive branches—a refashion
intent, unlike the Elysian Fields, Land,
or the baby panda that rolls-over,
virtual in the DC public zoo
reproduced on the metro cards
because its image is innocuous
and without a sense of symbol.