Two Poems

Landscape of Pleasure

This flat land is learned with humanity,
its lights and silts panned out as though by a
first, victorious gravity, its dams,
polders and windmills become a proper
world of wounds and adaptations. The sea
pumped down, earth glassed over to cultivate
tomatoes' marketable quality. Acres
of artificial reflection, the sun's
cull, materialized. Delft's blue and white
unnatural clarity, a basic
rock rendered and dished as something to eat
off, as something to consume, smoothing the
flooded pits of war, North Sea's and armies'
fatal accommodation. Sciences
settle the end of Europe's estuary.
...