Usurpers

I.

The mirrors on their wooden hinges had been placed

with insides out. A malediction spiraled down into a drain.

Clouds from slipshod artistry mummified illusions of appearance.

Blood came in whispers from her mouth

and her tongue was a lash for the penitent

while she intoned the sacred name of Legion.

II.

A knife pared the unholy black from metal corridors of human hearts.

Great grey birds with souls like doubt circled three slow times

before believing a burned tree stump to be a throne or shrine.

Her lips parted like a crimson sea and plumes of ash and terror

made pirouettes in the sun.

The Sons of Heaven could never have been ambitious for her hand.

The air is not of earthly kingdoms, nor will it consent to be chained.

Have all the others perished in the lightning blink of hatred?

Is it instead that we have fabricated a world so like the old

that its artifice shall not be discovered until the time of dying?

Surely neither can be true. Surely the graceless pestilence of jealousy

still lies feline behind each celestial glare upon a windowpane.

Once in the dark of December’s first day I killed Aeolus

and kept his power for my own.

She laughed and serrated her teeth against my shoulder.

III.

Anna, your hair the whip of flame, the light falling

from a rainbow onto the bone on the outside of your right wrist,

a tear in the seam of your shirt placing coy shadows for my eyes,

for you I have become loathsome in the sight of the living.

Steel

There had been a time when his madness had been tolerable,

as indeed it still would be in a man possessing less power,

but now it kindled and flared and on occasions

the vambrace of his right arm flattened the faces of servants

as hobnails grind a trembling spring daisy.

Such violence, of course, was normally the product of trivial slights.

The fire dancing on the bricks was hungry without starving

and onto walls black from flames and malcontent it sent small promises.

Above the hearth in a gilt frame there was a picture of a woman,

forbidding and terrible, wrists slim as swords,

her eyebrows the tails of Apollyon’s legions,

the artist’s skill sending her full lips out like a deathly kiss

as they seemed concrete as the exhausted breath

of a lover’s panted praise.

He pressed his tongue to his gums and spat away the blood.

He chuckled. In a far corner the headless body of a man hung on hooks,

twisting like a cloud or a sunset or a soul. What had the offense been?

Perhaps a plate was elbowed with a crash onto fitted stone.

Perhaps an unwise word was whispered too loudly.

More likely that the absent eyes had wandered to the portrait,

that in the shock of awe and beauty a sigh had escaped.

More likely that this insult coiled the madman into swift motions

that culminated with blood dripping into the fissures of flooring,

that a head had grotesquely rolled until the asymmetry of the nose

brought the desecration to a languorous halt.

Perhaps such a thing would have occurred if there had been no portrait,

no armor bound with animals’ tanned hides, no crushing blows,

no slashing whispers of steel nor the dull break of bone.

Perhaps such a thing would have occurred if there had been no room or walls,

no women, no madness, no oblivion at the bottom of a brandy bottle.

Perhaps it was sufficient that there were men.