OUR LADY OF THE BURNING FLESH Animation: Corinne Heath

Animation by Corinne Heath
You Tube Channel Here: http://www.youtube.com/user/corheath
Corinne Heath Website Here:
http://www.corinneheath.com/

Poetry by Eric Prendergast, Bio Here: http://drawingofghosts.com/page10.html
from the chapbook of poetry, INFRASTRUCTURE.

INFRASTRUCTURE is the first published chapbook of poetry by Eric Prendergast. The collection examines in intimate
narrative the skeletal abstracts--social, psychological, and
symbolic--that support the flesh of our reality. Together, the
poems argue that the ideas that underlie our world are as
solid and essential as the industries that give it function.

The imagery, the ideas, the experiences, and the quoted dialogue of this poem were taken from the journals of Christopher Columbus. "Jug, Jug. Dirty ears" is an allusion to the story of Philomel as imagined by T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land.

Voice: Steve Braunginn


OUR LADY OF THE BURNING FLESH
POEM BY ERIC PRENDERGAST

Santa Maria is on fire.
She burns at the horizon like a sun that never sets
or a soul seared stiff with guilt.

Her captain charts a level course across the smoldering map
as his veins curl and knot in the heat.
He aims to sail up pear shaped curves,
supple and inviting as a freefall from the rigging.
Against the will of gravity he aims to sail
to the rain soaked green-gold garden at the edge of the world.
He aims to penetrate her mystery.

He will come
and come.

Four hundred years before he's done.

He sighs and takes note in the log.
The paper crackles and the ink evaporates from under the quill's molten tip.
"Nothing is missing except the song of the nightingale."

Jug. Jug. Dirty ears.

Santa Maria is moving inland.
She reveals herself around the riverbend,
and in her wake, burning,
in the way that memories, stories,
bits of cloth, wood, possessions of the dead
burn in the wake of a scarlet fever.

The water.
Even the water
is on fire.

Santa Maria is coming.
Pray for us sinners.

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