Selections from Edward Dorn's Gunslinger I & II (Fulcrum, 1970)

A rich and strange book. I'll be returning it to The Poetry Library this week should someone else wish to experience it.

from Book 1 (easier to excerpt as the narrative is just beginning)--

He would show you his map.

There is your domain.

Is it the domicile it looks to be

or simply a retinal block

of seats in,

he will flip the phrase

the theater of impatience.

*

my mare lathers with tedium

her hooves are dry

Look they are covered with the alkali

of the enormous space

between here and formerly.

*

STRUM

strum

And by that sound

we had come there, false fronts

my Gunslinger said make

the people mortal

and give their business

an inward cast. They cause culture.

*

Stranger you got a pliable lip

you might get yourself described

if you keep on.

*

and as the disputational 44

occurred in his hand and spun there

in that warp of relativity one sees

in the backward turning spokes

of a buckboard, then came suddenly

to rest, the barrel utterly justified

with a line pointing

to the neighborhood of infinity.

The room froze harder.

*

Your vulgarity is flawless

but you are the slave

of appearances--

*

You make the air dark

with the beauty of your speed,

Gunslinger, the air

separates and reunites as if lightning

had cut past

leaving behind a simple experience.

*

to her swelled black mound

her startled faun

which has the earthy smell

of slightly gone

wild violets

from Book 2--

I didn't know you had a drawl, Slinger

I dont, I slow up at noon

from the inertia of National Lunch

and from the scatteredness

of the apexed sun which attempts

at that point to enter a paradox--

namely, The West which is The East.

Edward Dorn

Gunslinger 1 & 2 (London: Fulcrum, 1970)

The entire Gunslinger is available from The Book Depository.