Poetry by Daniel Thompson
Daniel Thompson is a poet born in the Black Forest of southern Germany who has lived in New Orleans since childhood. His work has appeared or will be appearing in Chiron Review, Sojourners Magazine, New Square, Metachrosis Literary Magazine, and the Catholic Poetry Room, among others.
Gulf Shores Genie from 2009 Revisited
An anachronism then,
An anachronism now:
The ambient mind
Over the Florabama.
The majestic-in fog-
bioluminescent
swamp gas-like
Me in my beach dugout fortified,
Blue zodiac towel, red cooler,
The arms of my previous years
Re-brought to a coastline routine.
Sand crusted feet like pecans
on paneed gulf fish.
The digging out of the magic lamp from
the pale dunes
coarse and sugared.
A genie to a snapper
is a kraken to a sphinx.
The steel guitar from the bar shack
Under a blue inflated shark,
Smiley with dagger mouth.
Savage to the plains past the shore.
Red brick Catholic body of the church
With finger spirals above the dunes
on the highway.
Condo buildings reaching in
glassy blasphemy.
Capitalist Phoenix watchtowers past
Babylonian wall guards.
Behold over my liminal and stoned
beach-merged wonder:
The fair unexplained magic,
or air-threaded enchantment
in an alien sheen.
The torn bridles of seahorses.
The red giants blown of sea stars.
And a mammalian shriek,
Watery encroachment in foam.
An anachronism now, on from 2009,
Painterly from Loxley, and Robertsdale,
and over the Foley outlet malls:
The genie exhales and breath
wraps like a chinook
Over the Amphitheater by the Wharf.
Like last my pilgrimage over the
decades into the wild countries,
Where the whines of immortality
flow through another country band,
And a purple seaweed bouquet
in an alien sheen.
2009 then, and now.
And again, in my raw hands,
two live wires:
The essence of the genie,
anachronism in all things,
re-blowing the fuses,
resetting the calibration.
And the fountain of fire
from Orange Beach on,
the messy explosion
of the stars.
Someone wished, I guess,
and we don't know anymore,
For this convergence
of awkward association.
Someone wished, I guess,
and we don't know what for.
And there's a fealty in drifting
in and out of time.