from Pool V Journal
HERMES OF VILLA GIUSTINIANI / ITALIAN—I7TH CENTURY / TORSO—1ST
CENTURY ROMAN / GIFT OF MILWAUKEE ART CENTER GARDEN CLUB
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A drinking village with a fishing problem.
A mercury advisory for all lakes.
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HERMES IN PIECES
…The invention of the lyre and its seven strings is ascribed to him….Sometimes he is represented sitting upon a crayfish, holding in one hand a staff with two entwined snakes and two wings at the top, and in the other the claws of the fish. At other times he is like a young man without a beard, holding in one hand a purse. Sometimes his own appendix….Sometimes he rests his foot upon a tortoise….Offerings of milk and honey were made because he was the god of eloquence, whose powers were sweet and persuasive. The Greeks and Romans offered tongues to him by throwing them into the fire, as he was the patron of speaking of which the tongue is the organ. Sometimes his statues represent him as without arms, because, according to some, the power of speech can prevail over everything, even without the assistance of arms.
Mercury would flee winter in an instant. Like a thermometer, he needs to be sealed.
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Phragmites,
a halophyte
salt loving,
brackish,
bookish
as papyrus
)(
landscapes fold
and crumple
in succession.
Chuck Stebelton is author most recently of One Hundred Patterns & Three Heuristics (Green Gallery Press, 2023). His previous poetry collections include An Apostle Island (Oxeye Press, 2021), The Platformist (Cultural Society, 2012), and Circulation Flowers (Tougher Disguises, 2005). He serves as Special Projects Manager at Woodland Pattern, a nonprofit literary arts organization in Milwaukee, and has held residencies at Lynden Sculpture Garden in 2011, 2014, and from 2018 to 2025. He prints pamphlets, broadsides, collaborative print objects and such under the Ben Tinterstices Editions imprint. Ted Berrigan, “interstices // bent.”