David Capps

Ithaka (Concept Island)

equanimity

as if here you could combine things in such an order
that the gleam of sudden violence ends
‌                                                                     (did the suitors need need to die?)

what humanity wrought gradually—its war and pestilence
dripping from the curve of the moon

blood-red
‌

or else to lessen it, to see it lessen, like some mirage
peeling from the road’s dusty lip

where loquat, figs, apricots, and sage undo their straggly strangling
climb to the fence (neither is the road very real)
‌

to be as starfish

they move in glass sheets of water the auburn of autumn leaves

David Capps is a philosophy professor and poet who lives in New Haven, CT. He is the author of four chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020), and Wheatfield with a Reaper (Akinoga Press, forthcoming). His latest work, On the Great Duration of Life, a riff on Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life, is available from Schism Neuronics.