PRISM (WHITE LIGHT)

Ice & the shadows of ice like the white scar

Of wind upon the world like the dust
Of polar flares strafing the St.Petersburg night

As the saint is laid again upon the grill of

Circumstance above the searing pearl ash until
Even the stars slowly drilling the sky rotate

In their boiling sockets & all hell breaks

Apart its howling white teeth its breath

Ruptured into the rapturous spectrum of
Pain by which we know the hues

Of our passage each one of us still assembling

The complicated palette (as in Make me
A pallet on your floor) where sleep splinters

& the rage of the new day again coaxes us alive

Praise for the Poetry of David St. John

“It is not just gorgeous, it is go-for-broke gorgeous. It is made out of sentences, sweeping through and across his meticulous verse stanzas, that could have been written, for their velvet and intricate suavity, by Henry James.”

-Robert Hass, The Los Angeles Times Book Review

PRISM, by David St. John.
with 16 color photographs by Lance Patigian
ISBN 0-9657015-7-3
144 pages, 6" x 9", perfect bound paperback.
Price: $22
Arctos Press