Ethan A. Paquin: Two Poems
Caladium in Waning Sestina | Anatomy of Seduction

Caladium in Waning Sestina

When some epoch melts,
fraught with declension,

I'll spy the smoky extensus of days
wound taut around potted repens,

drizzling a sleepful aquarium glint;
I'll bate the seconds of your falling hair

uncounted by the listless voyeur;
I'll seek the parting of sanguine from skin

disrobed in the fire of ochre piano-rooms.


Now to wonder. The day
______ was called forth to plant

sadness below the mountains, in the glint
caressing her wisteria gardens beyond their

quiet slopes: "Grow ever, o tall voyeurs . . ."
Pinyon? birch? the hawthorn's kin?

Who belabored that whisper in the wide room?


Hues of viridian and mango share
hesitation in this dwindling arc, voyeurs

one and all to the fall, to the skin
of trunk and sprig, scattered about Pomona's room.

Anatomy of Seduction

I.

Some come from ectopic sunrise,
some from the shadows of clatterboard cabins
near chalky lee summits.

In rumination,
some recall the dry friction of grain,
the furnace, the calendar, the birth cry.

Most are pinions of irrelevance:
Even sunrise is a stain,
wiped and washed.


II.

Eleven drones in with its tones of raisin and habana,
the breadth of something terribly luscious
drizzled with midnight horns, breezy furlongs,
                                                                      the pitter of halyards,
as you crush them all in your palm.


III.

You:
       gray spectre, satellitic orb, exiled by shame—
                                                                           those tendrils,
flitting muscles [devils] dancing with bleakness.

O, the canopy:
you'll find there a new tangent in Eden:
                                                            the strange gravity of flux.

Poet's Biography:

Ethan A. Paquin edits the online journal slope. His poetry and reviews are forthcoming in Quarterly West, Verse, Overland, Plastic (a Czech journal) and Lagniappe. He teaches in the writing program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he is pursuing his MFA. About Ethan's poetry: "My goal is to explore the lacunae between object and observer. I like to explore these gaps, and the requisite tension and static residing within. I tend to appropriate music and language to capture the fugitive sense of a particular situation."