by Jeffrey Burghauser (November 2025)
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[Note: This is Movement Six of “The Monody in Six Movements”; click here for Movements One, Two, Three, and Four. The entire cycle is available here.]
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The least reflective man (at times) can sense
The Truth in spasms of intelligence,
____As when a train uncoils into some
____Capacious curve, allowing someone (from
The isolation of his seat) to see
The train in its august entirety.
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Though Josef was just barely middle-aged
(The comrades of his youth by now engaged
____In managing the rightly-treasured fruit
____Awarded for a serious pursuit),
He was apprenticed to a glibly stern,
Impending bullet—Spitzgeschoß mit Kern.
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The scavengers were circling above
When Josef saw himself demanding of
____The burnished bullet as it blasted through
____The yellow air: “In imitating you,
What lesson shall I learn?” The bullet said:
“The art of being ponderously dead.”
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You stand alone, a Solitary Jew,
Imagining if Night could manage to
____Exhaust her nightness in a single night,
____Excluding dark—without producing light.
There must exist for every inner hell
A publicly substantial parallel:
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The Belgian whips of twisted hippo hide,
The leonine Crusader’s easy stride,
____The flame aspiring to kiss the book,
____The dark infirmary at Ravensbrück,
The waning moon’s reflection in a knife,
The groundless scorn of an unfaithful wife…
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But what can parallel the gentle heart
Destroyed (in turn) by Recklessness & Art?—
____Not even scores of corpses in July,
____The blackened, flake-exuviating sky,
The MG-42s & murder pits
Of something like a worldwide Auschwitz.
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Converso Carmelite Juan de la Cruz
Positioned his attentions to peruse
____The stark topography around the hole
____He classified the “Dark Night of the Soul.”
My darknesses are more profusely strewn:
The Soul’s Dark Daybreak, Morn, and Afternoon.
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You stand alone, a Solitary Jew,
Imagining (and therefore willing to
____Invite Cognition’s elemental sting)
____If Nature ever boasted anything
Within the waxy compass of her rind
As prone to ruination as a mind.
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I’m ruthless, restless, obdurately used,
Exasperated, skeptical, confused,
____Impatient, bitter, shaken, anxious, bored,
____Ashamed, withdrawn, insulted, ill, ignored,
Heartbroken, overwhelmed, obese (and thus
Depleted), cynical, and furious;
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I am (though posh) inelegantly poor.
I am (though badly undersexed) a whore.
____I am (though nauseated by the goal
____Of hunger) ravenous. My gilded soul
Is like unto a collapsed rococo dome.
I’m lonely. Love me. Love me. Take me home.
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The least reflective man (at times) can sense
The Truth in spasms of intelligence,
____As when a train uncoils into some
____Capacious curve, allowing someone (from
His isolation by the bars) to see
The cattle-car in its entirety.
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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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