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)
