Aphelion
Jack Cooper
Half moon, cleaved like a melon (sight unseen);
breeze through these mean streets moves, cool to one side,
other — molten — mirage. Un nuit celluloid,
a movie still, hotter than blazes, this
clichéd July: Cinema Inferno.
Steadfast as sidewalks: ink, a wash on the page,
will not dry.
I cultivate rectitude
going about the city alone: species,
reconnoiter, of summer dress — sweet, cotton,
particular, clinging, a benevolent
transformation the Gorgons would have dreamed:
turning themselves into Liberty Belles
and I open a crack.
Geometry
in beauty, mountain in math rise above,
feeling no interference from the sky:
ideal the eyes may face, the sun show west,
the moon continue to climb.
Biology,
what difference — if influence, with the tides,
ride the world over and leave little changed?
— Commonality cease to accept its faith.
John Jack Jackie (Edward) Cooper is the creator of These Are Aphorithms (http://aphorithms.blogspot.com) and the author of Ten (Poets Wear Prada, 2012). His American English translation of Wax Women, with French texts of the original poems by Jean-Pierre Lemesle and photographs by Henry Jacobs (International Art Office: Paris, 1985), drew acclaim and dedicated full-window display from the Gotham Book Mart in New York — legendary fishing hole to the “wise” — released in the United States the following year. His work has appeared in Brownstone Poets 2013; The Venetian Hour, Dinner with the Muse, Part II; CLWR 49, CLWR 50, and online (exitstrata.com); forthcoming, in the Unbearables anthology “Somewhere to Nowhere.” His whereabouts have been numerous, like his names, but, unlike them, currently unknown. He is editor and co-publisher of Poets Wear Prada, a small literary press based in Hoboken, New Jersey ― birthplace of baseball and Frank Sinatra. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania.