Malgre Lui

"While Wendlandt's verses are facile and readable, they are not memorable as poetry."

"Desolation meets desolation, a feeling of awe succeeds to wonder."

The wonderful particulars lie under

The general, soft-sloping piles of dust
Like mountains too old to have any outcrops,
All the edges worn. The faces of old coins
Are buried not too terribly far below,
But good luck to you guessing which emperor,
Already a god-king when they were minted,
Already dead while they still circulated,
Had some cut-out likeness of his greatness stamped
On these slugs of burrowing metal. Mottoes
Sometimes last a little longer, often not.

These compacted compost piles, these grassed-over,
Over-grazed but moderately bucolic
Hills that out-gassed culture and authority
As the slag-heaps that fed them then gassed out fumes
Poisonous to anything that got started
On hunger before the globe saturated
Itself with death and dying, with oxygen
That burns even copper and iron to tints,
Once held the palaces of the darkest dreams,
By which we mean, yes, dreams, same as yours, the same.
Alchemists were close. But gold ages downward.