by Jeffrey Burghauser (October 2025)
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[Note: This is Movement Four of “The Monody in Six Movements”; click here for Movements One, Two, and Three.]
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The molten bronze is taken from the breach
Behind a basic smelter’s fearsome groin.
A weltanschauung is like a hammer; each
Imprinted on your soul’s resplendent coin
Some characters not easy to construe—
An overstrike upon an overstrike.
Your inner voice became a curse to you.
_____I have some sense of what that’s like.
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Farewell to Poetry. My mind is worn.
Although the tracks may be of little use,
They cross a wasted continent of porn,
Petroleum & lead. An iron sluice
Begins at each opposing coast. From thence
They meet at me: the Golden Railroad Spike.
There’s too much pressure in irrelevance.
_____I have some sense of what that’s like.
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And, through a boxcar’s slats you could descry,
Despite the glimmers dancing on the track,
The River, preternaturally dry
And grey, the heavens having taken back
What everyone agrees was only leant.
The River is a wādī or a sike
When drained of its defining element.
_____I have some sense of what that’s like.
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In plague-devoured Europe, doctors passed
From street to street, their masks’ corvidic beaks
Of stiffened, painted leather crowded fast
With myrrh, galbanum, frankincense & leeks.
To see a silent flock of them converge,
Each brandishing a purpose and a pike,
Approaching you, substantial as a dirge…
_____I have some sense of what that’s like.
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O God, whose silence causes me to quake
With rage: enable & ennoble me
In Your basalt-convulsing Name to make
A gift of Inevitability.
A Dane, from underneath his shaded brow,
Serenely sees the swelling of some Vik-
Ing longship’s tightly involuted prow.
_____I have some sense of what that’s like.
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Table of Contents
Jeffrey Burghauser is a teacher in Columbus, Ohio. He was educated at SUNY-Buffalo and the University of Leeds. He currently studies the five-string banjo with a focus on pre-WWII picking styles. A former artist-in-residence at the Arad Arts Project (Israel), his poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Appalachian Journal, Fearsome Critters, Iceview, Lehrhaus, and New English Review. Jeffrey’s book-length collections are available on Amazon, and his website is www.jeffreyburghauser.com.
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