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A year past, I carved you from dark tree trunks

And a goddess warned me you could come alive.

This tension between love’s reality

And words that are trembling in soft whispers-

It creeps through windows, lays upon us like the dawn.

The shades split bright rays before they reach you,

I know the light will grind your dreams like grain.

In vain I attempt to anticipate

The moment that arrives as you awake-

If you will stretch your arms behind your head,

Or if a waltzing sentence will emerge

(A request for songs, perhaps cold water).

It matters not what is done when exile ends.

My tears flood the Nile’s banks. I will hold you again.

Carmen 31

If I started to write you something sweet

I fear that I would poison the sugar,

So mostly I begin with war’s drumbeats

And hope by the end there is less blood.

Plants thirst for water, they are not maligned.

So too, they fill their mouths with the sun’s rays,

And still their blossoms are such lovely things.

As I prepare to play thief to your light

I notice our bodies- husks on the ground.

Do I drink so eagerly of the flames

That I shame those that can live without you?

When parasites are carried long enough

We call them children, or give them pet names.

Carmen 30

When people declare that nothing is free,

They are often confused by my laughter-

Knowing not that they have conjured Troy’s gift

Or the seeds inside young Persephone.

It is something in the first dying leaves

Or buying drinks for dulcet girls in heels

That I identify with Jormungand-

He wraps around the vast earth we crawl on,

But to him it is the only normal size.

At Ragnarok he finds us pitiful

And yet he learns that monsters can be slain.

Rapine artifices in camouflage,

Eternal return hammered with lightning;

The ancients teach no wisdom, save that none

Can know the endings of their own short lives.

Even mistletoe has bloody vengeance.

Which triviality will I ignore?

Regina

There was a vagueness about her that provided a more permanent impression than the color of her skin, like a halo shaped of pure radium, or the flicker in the eye of a bear (dancing with a pale rose balanced delicately upon its nose) when clapping hands evoke the rushing of a river and the tempting scent of berries and fish is almost as real as the lash.

Unexplainable echoes follow in her path, reproductions of things lost:

-A South American agent of torture who tilts his head to the left and burns into a soul and seems sorry, whispering through a scream, “You will die well, the innocent all do” but then the pain again, and more.

-Warehouses filled to rafters while on a far road a boy’s family abandons him while yet alive because he cannot stand after fainting. His mother mourns him with two younger children on her back (all bellies and curled ribs like the bands that hold together empty barrels) who weep because they hunger but also from the dust. Her sobs diminish. The gunmen will be on the road when the sun sets.

-The sound of two syllables, separated by five seconds in time, taken from one extinct play of an Athenian tragedian, building on each other like coins dropped into wells that had been dry long before man first built altars to those gods who most adore the rhinoceros clash of bronze.

Certain tales that shrug their own shoulders are told of wolves, specifically of those half-familiar and half-lupine. They are loyal but often confused by sheep and their eyes are blue like freezing rain and some live all their days with their masters, but time may lay any man abed and ailing, his companion his comfort. Then suddenly, bared teeth that menaced steppes for millennia are in a snarl, and the language they had always heard but never understood commands them: “Kill. Devour.” In a blink, a shredded throat that silences any final words; they become as kings with new crowns in that moment, the weight of gold less than the shiver of forbidden accomplishment. Would the first minute seem as years after a life without freedom?.. and then it occurs. The usurper looks about the room and like thunder sees that no window is in view and, crimson-mouthed in glory, she realizes that she cannot open doors. Oh! But the taste of it! The warmth of blood on a tongue! Starve, Regina, but savor your triumph!

Carmen 29

My dear, you love to have your secrets told.

You would not evade me for that reason

Lest something in the telling tears at veins.

My song, delving through the devil’s mind,

Brings alive a tepid vat of leeches

Who survive on the blood of their siblings.

Shall I raise them higher, from grotesque forms

To trees that have learned to bend with seasons,

Or mobs cheering for conflicts that are also hells?

Is it so opposite, from a newborn

Who fails to breathe and dies without a name,

To cross the Rubicon leading battalions?

The destruction of memory is crime.

All are victims of ancient infamies,

But more a theft than the Temple of Artemis

Shall come when you disappear at my death.

Carmen 28

When we met I made no compromises:

This hour- I would give the Sudetenland

Or offer the roots of the World Tree to decay

To hasten your return by just one day.

Fragments 9

If viewers are surprised at my skeleton

It is only because they have not read Kafka.

__________________________________________

Oh darling, you're not homesick, you don't have a home,

But I heard you singing when you were alone.

_________________________________________________

There is a moment of anger, like the butcher noticing

a bruised carcass. Priestess, I wish I was a better sacrifice

for what you wish to burn towards, but this is all I am.

__________________________________________

I am always thinking of incursions to Africa,

perfect prose pieces placed like stories on a barge,

the way a moon is when it is carved from your smile

and not just its own memory, when it is the infection

that burdens arms before the machetes fall upon the blight-

and I know that Conrad got it right.

___________________________________________________

Everyone has just one heart, beat,

I think of grinding It beneath my heel

Agora

Sacred memory, a philosopher

Expounded on the nature of creation:

Through him it was taught that heaven exists,

Populated by objects with such power

That to cut a sliver from a flawless stone there

Will cleave abysses deeper than all hopes.

Some time later there was a gathering,

(Protested tradition like a wave rolling in).

Thick words like mortar bleeding through the streets,

The sky a furnace (to hold in the prayers).

On that grey and cloudless day they spoke of Gold.

“Immutable,” said one. “Pure as diamonds are!”

In a moment like the tide, the salt scent heavy,

A trembling man stood and uttered heresies.

He said:

“If by this I offend the universe,

I will bear the punishment of the stars,

But yesterday I saw the soul of gold

And it was dancing in a woman’s hair.

"One color? One essence? No, it was infinite,

A number that was real until the counting,

A vial of sand that told of more than time-

I grasped at her tresses (Oh, blasphemy,

To menace all the statues of the gods,

To sunder to naught the bonds of wedlock…)

"But what I touched? A mere breeze! The aether!

I saw her no longer. Did laurel emerge?

No! Then my touch would caress sharpened bark,

I would have the splinters to prove her spell,

Not linger here alone, like Icarus in flight…”

Did he have more to say? It is truly unknown.

Those noble men of the forum, righteous

In their anger, they flayed him there

With stone knives from their belts.

Orthodoxy.

Tender

We sometimes color money as precious metal,

Although the names we use are fraudulent-

Two silver coins to buy a newspaper,

Gold coils that cannot buy a loaf of bread.

I am still sure that blood is deeply red,

That a woman's gasp is of all the shades,

That food will be worth more than all paper;

But I have no flocks to tend, no earth to sow,

And still? A life of slavery to these portraits.

Was it better to call them Emperor,

Did holiness take away degradation?

Carmen 27

For some reason, it is the word "lamination"

That springs into my mind without request.

There must be something of that lovely book,

The Lamentation of Jeremiah

(The third dynasty of the city Ur?)

That explains the way that thoughts seem mirrors-

The way protective gloss may seem a wail

(Like seeing your lover among the damned

While the boatman will not turn his ship aside

In spite of violent protestation),

But the pain of the past is a shadow

That the future crafts into an aria.

Carmen 26

Carmen twenty-six is considered spurious.