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Benision before your Venison, my Dear
Gordon McDermott

Quello infinito e ineffabil bene
What continues from that leastless
yeasty body, that sunny-
science in the bleb of the ‘that’,
no,        —the that
which is directed, like light, to a loved body
inductivly, indelably, and reductivly
rendered to be that

                which had once meant who
                as in ‘Our Father which
                art in Heaven’
—which body was bread

Urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg

all the more a remove.

That there is where it lies
that which is removed
that which which once meant who
that is a body of something
a corpus, a body, a which
which was a whom. Which,
or another (that is another which) another
body that is a filling
for that abstract moral breadth
extending into the tongue, chest and loins,
in no particular order, after the caesura.

Benediction before the meats.
Our Loin which art
before an English bible

                only ever always

was a cut of meat.                         com'a lucido corpo raggio vene

That body which is induced from
                —induced, inducted, inductive
the thousand some odd years of teutonic
fear & trembling on what we haven’t acted on,

               the desire that is pilled love on the tongue
               which is neither remedy or symptom,

not that the two are ever always in opposition.

But that, my dear, is the means of time
of ‘was’ and ‘will be’ or the ‘always’
and ‘ever was’ that will always
stand aside its referent which,
that is who, is shapeless but is,
when called to, continually a body
an image that is meaning without form
a word
a word
a word
and not the cut of tender meat before you.

Gordon McDermott's poetry has previously appeared in Fence. He is co-founder of the Wilkmanshire Project in Seattle, Washington.

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