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.

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

But I heard you singing when you were alone.

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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.