Aslan Cohen – Epithet https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/epithet The blog of the Committee on Creative Writing and the Program in Poetry and Poetics at the University of Chicago Wed, 30 Sep 2015 15:20:02 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.7.2 Aurum Foliatum [and other poems], by Aslan Cohen https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/epithet/aurum-foliatum-and-other-poems-by-aslan-cohen/ Wed, 30 Sep 2015 15:19:40 +0000 http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/epithet/?p=88 Aurum Foliatum
The blood of the leaf darkened and
clogged. It is now elegiac, subtle, brittle amber. Christ
stands cracked and blackened in the altarpiece.
The dry leaf is the theory
with which oil matures upon his body.
Time, quivering comet, travels
the resin. Wounds it in stelliform scars. Scorches it.
And the scorches have the smell of wood once smelled in the plum-tree.
When from those branches knees of bronze
unfastened and marked the ground
as battlefield

where still the wind comes and blows
like Resurrection’s afterthought.

Night

Inverted canoes stationed along the shore;
Unattended sarcophagi by the boiling foam.

God breathes

Ink-splashes of the Unsaid above the Arabic-scripted sea.

 

Aslan Cohen is a graduate student at the Divinity School.

 

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