Ophelia's Nun

I put this up in January, originally. Now "Troy" is out I thought I'd put it up again.

Hissarlik

Puzzled rubble stipples out the plain:
mute, brute jaw grey. Moss tassles overgrown:
insignia of Schliemann's lust in vain
for Priam's city. Signature in stone:
The recklessness of wonder. Disinterred
By one man's smash through Hissarlik: the fangs
of broken sherds and bones bite through the sword
of Progress. Never could we prove the songs
of Homer now. West Speculator Bold
has carved his nothingness into a mound,
the riches of which shadowed "Priam's Gold".
No trace of Agamemnon. Dream at end.
Schliemann's folly should serve now to warn:
Troy's lost. Today, we squander Babylon.

Originally posted by ISN
permit me to say that's obviously very good.....

Is anything obvious? Poetry taps at the towering epistemological wall of truth-in-prose, inside the great hall of forced realities. It listens at this squarefaced wall of ideology, not for the echo of rhetoric resounding about vague space as "truth", but rather for sounds within the wall itself, for the electric fluid buzzes of the wall's deeper being, merging, constantly inconstant, in strange dialogue with multiplicitous beyonds of space and time and dimensions we don't yet know about except with our crazy hearts. When poetry begins to listen to the fizz of conflict in the solidity of structure, it copies the sounds of indeterminacy, of vital flow, and challenges all that is presumed obvious and immovable. Poetry moves, then, - yes it does - toward evoking in everchanging sound, an inexhausible, wall-lessly open universe of being and experience.

Flattery will get you somewhere. Where, I haven't a clue.

One flatters with a spadeful of praise too. Look at the etymology:

DEFINITION: To spread. Also plet- (oldest form *plet2-). Extension of pel-2.
Derivatives include flatter1, plant, plateau, platitude, and plaza.
1. Variant form *plad-. a. flat1, from Old Norse flatr, flat; b. flatter1, from Old French flater, to flatter. Both a and b from Germanic *flataz, flat. 2. Suffixed variant form *plad-yo-. flat2, from Old English flet(t), floor, dwelling, from Germanic *flatjam. 3. Basic form *plat-. flan, from Late Latin flad, flat cake, pancake, from Germanic *flath(n), flat cake. 4. flounder2, from Anglo-Norman floundre, flounder, from a Scandinavian source probably akin to Old Swedish flundra, flatfish, flounder, from Germanic suffixed nasalized form *flu-n-th-r-j-. 5. Nasalized form *pla-n-t-. clan, plan, plant, plantain1, plantar; plantigrade, supplant, transplant, from Latin planta, sole of the foot, and denominative plantre, to drive in with the sole of the foot, plant, whence planta, a plant. 6. Suffixed zero-grade form *pt()-u-. piazza, place, plaice, plane4, plane tree, plate, plateau, Plateresque, platina, platinum, platitude, platy2, platy-, plaza, from Greek platus, flat, broad. (Pokorny plt- 833.)

http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE413.html