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The Legal Studies Forum
Volume 30, Number 1/2 (2006) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum Lawyers & Poets Far Travels ROBERT BOLIEK ________________________ Dogfish I propose that English poetry and biology should beExpecting the marriage of true minds, I find Instead this rough-skinned, finny fish, slate-gray On top and white below, dorsally-spined, And purportedly of the family Squalidae. I hold the knife but do not think of death: Rolling through waters light as air, with skies Of silver above, the ocean floor beneath, Serenely submarine my dogfish flies Through the mid-Atlantic suburbs of its youth. I pause before the image fades. The sleek Body conceals, but Percy knew the truth: To hope to find one first must choose to seek. So he used the knife without regret or grief - Dissecting the anatomy of unbelief. [425]
Scarabaeus sacer The beetle's iconography is old - and strange: Sacred scarabs rolled spheres of dung across the Egyptian plain, their praises sung by Pharaoh as the symbols of great souled Ra, god of the sun. Likewise, sun colored gold was held to mirror the immortal sun among those ancients, from which fashion sprung a hopeless fetish of gold's manifold beneficence: life, health, beauty, and wealth. Soon scarabs in gold were all the rage, in rings amulets and seals, as if a beetle so imbued by gold might triumph over filth. Now pyramids enclose the dust of kings where still the busy scarabs scurry to and fro. [426]
Robert Boliek practices law in Birmingham, Alabama, where he also serves as adjunct professor of insurance law and as an instructor in lawyering and legal reasoning at Samford University's Cumberland School of Law. His poetry has appeared in The Formalist, New Orleans Review, RE:AL, and The MacGuffin. He has a first collection of poems, "The Artist in His Museum," for which he is now seeking a publisher. "Dogfish" was first published in The Formalist. |
