Sunday, May 17, 2009

No Matches Found

In derailleur gearwork
No strategy is more dangerous
Than jumping a chasm in two leaps,
Yet this keeps cropping up in
Time machines.
I've never seen one
But know it sounds like
The second movement of
Beethoven's ninth: something
Between celestial clock and
Piston-driven sculpture.
You don't hear it so much
As feel the world churn
Around it.
Frame of fire dragged
By its sound was built burning.
I have hunted around,
No matches found.

2 comments:

  1. Hey Geo.~

    I love this poem, but I have to say that until someone in your family--it was my big sister in mine--urges guys (and, yes, because of the XY chromosome, it HAS to be guys) to send their spit sample to a good DNA site you will never know about genetic matches, They have become increasingly interesting to me as I have found out through them more about my roots further back than the five generations that our families kept track of....

    Will

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  2. Will,

    Hah! Very clever, young man, but this time I gotcha! One-leap chasm jump is paraphrase of a famous Disraeli quote. Late 60s, someone associated with the band, Cream, malapropriated Disraeli for derailleur gears when describing a new bicycle. Band thought it was funny and the rest is history. So much of history turns on such chance.

    You have found another route to matches, one more exact than happenstance, but don't rule out a mispronunciation or malapropism somewhere in that genetic chronicle.

    Geo.

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