Blurring All Lines (a cento)
by Bill (William P.) Cushing

The night before you die, you wake at four
hearing the waves and the breathing shore,
the promise of the appalling air,
the compass needle dead on terror.

I stop at the border of dreams;
Norweigian Munch let out a silent scream.
An obstacle was often there,
but I guess I'm here. So I must take care.

There are lives in which nothing goes right:
a lonely impulse of delight,
the season of the lying equinox,
the heart that fed and the hand that mocked.

After the first astronauts reached heaven,
the voice was gravel, the gravel grain and then
promised the permanence.
Picture the resemblance.

NOTE: A cento is a new poem made of lines extracted from other poems. This cento is possible thanks to Louise Bogan, Jim Carroll, Constantine Cavafy, Sephen Dobyns, William Everson (aka Brother Antonius), Carolyn Forche, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, Robert Lowell, Heather McHugh, W. S. Merwin, Reynolds Price, Carl Sandburg, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Butler Yeats, and the help of my Eagle Rock 9 Bridges cohorts)

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