You said it was late. Your word
brought the enormity forward, collapsed 
in your night-blue hand. 
      It was the labyrinth folded
            and solved by an idiot.

You said it’s too late by way 
of elaboration—revealed the maze
      in the streets and animals:
the city’s old calumnies
      against erased Eden.

Untouchable fire spun in her porchlights,
      now sing enough anger to sound
this side of our window in tones
of restless vacuity — justice
            is only remembering.

Just sing sleep and sing melancholy—
            we must remember to rest,
      but recall: I am the thrown animal
who came by way of the sea to the street, 
      who lows in a road with no memory.

I know the woman the Levites employed
to trim iris at midday
in the Gentile courtyard—

      when the veil was torn 
the priesthood receded 
like morning primrose, 
but the woman remained
in her jasmine and linens—

      she knew that somewhere 
behind the new door,
old tablets balanced 
against one another, two sides 
of a seed, its coil unopened—

      she was forbidden 
to speak of such things,
but when sleep of the lotus 
descended would sing:

      in the outworking bloom 
of their most secret dream,
a garden arose 
to the cheek of the moon.

At Ur the great stair 
led to Nannu
and Nannu 
looked his blue face down, 
to all inured
(the way the old gods
were)—a moth

died on the bars 
of my window,
which to me are 
miniscule,
a thin darkness 
on the world,
and for the moth 

a great evil
between the old sky
and the new, which never 
in her lifetime drew 
close enough for her to say 
that she could it
disprove or prove.

One year ago today 
I heard a man describe 
the black city they reported 
in the clouds above Jiangxi,

and though we have no mountain 
here, four rivers descend 
to split the Nature we can see — 
this is how we speak of it — 
a still small voice advises me: 
apologize for your sincerity,
and either give phenomena 
the side-eye, or tangle up their sense 
in necromantic rhymes...

            I saw the damnable town 
force its bruise through the pollution,
and I count the rivers properly 
when I travel, making note
of their invisible origin, 
the strength that comes 
from nowhere. Is that enough? 

I asked the man from Jiangxi
to what point points the peaks 
in total night, and where 
their rivers go? Do I or we describe 
some classic sense wherein great gods 
abound invisibly outside 
the rough-hewn stone in early morning 
pinks, waiting just beyond high houses 
we have made — for whom? For them? 

Give me back their names 
cousin, and I will order all four rivers 
with their abandoned weights,
build this city that eternally suggests itself
and yet refuses to alight.

Tall white walls of rich earth 
left out too long,
an abandoned brick of stucco
in a Sumerian ditch
after the irrigation gave out — 

a souvenir, a curio; 
Georgian porticoes
enclosed in iron palisades;

rusty black leaves sharp as Cirsium arvense 
thistle twist over the unwashed of the sidewalk, 
and where they impress pendulous Heaven, 
go green — recover something 
of what must have been
the old Mesopotamian lushness.

High windows flush sidewise to pillars, 
so clean the rich 
must possess a secret yen for visibility. 

I spy the stitching of a banker’s father’s 
favourite piece of lux upholstery:
cream hide on a chaise lounge,
imperial studs like frayed tumors.

A brown Abyssinian watches me 
from its dry spot beneath 
an empty flowerpot, 
young god of the Laurentians,
licking thin dreams from its paw.

Rows of portraits,
tenebris in the drawing room,
distend into the bulk
of the great house; a baroque
of pale faces and black wool,
held together by circles of gold,
bedecking the rainsoaked fields 
of that other history.

They’re all I see
Black helicopters
Fall on me
Black helicopter
-Matthew Good

Not even these occultists
that you hear so much about—
with their diagrams and mutilations,
island temples, houses in the Hamptons—
can square the bloody circles
of the Earth, and though they try,
I keep my squinty eye upon them.

I circle my square wagons,
softly, with an iron rod, just like
my father taught me. All, he knew,
was motion. All is motion!
There’s no changing that,
and this is everything: the hems
of my clothing, darkened from the dust.

I am forever falling over,
and wish I could afford a horse–
a white one like the mare 
my brother and I rode in circles, 
then the forest, then the road. 

I remember thinking it was us 
against the cars, against slow herds
of Mennonites in dark, Old Order wagons;
against the tractors and the world,

its four cardinal directions;
against the unlikely theory 
of its all-surpassing roundness.
Surely no force in heaven,
nor in the engines of the Earth,
could move so much so subtly
as to fold it back into itself?

In night's old hour 
each room is an altar-table
serving spurned Mnemosyne.
      In the black harbour the stars
sail to opposite shores
and leave the shining huntsman

      poised upon denuded wilderness.
Her communion descends
like an Assumption rescinded;
moony static in an open mouth;
and the weak ones—
her adepts—weep, 

      and weeping Recall;
and remembering laugh,
assured that memory
is a way to watch the beloved,
her face masked in bare reality,
and no decorated blindness.

We are assured of wild persistence
      beyond the beading cloud.
In blushing, gravid morning 
laughter answers laughter;
nine new voices make light 
of their parents’ lamentation. 

We go out to search again
across the long retreat of white drifts,
for that which negligence
left standing bravely on the earth.

Buried masses kindled by the eye,
awash in recognition before formal 
confession of their origin arrives—
unwanted guest, in awkward dress 
of name and provenance—
that the ground’s receding gore is real;

that this wedge of wild flowerbed,
of time and all it intersects,
is more than just the March cloud
undoing imperceptibly,
casting doubt as shadows 
caught on verdure in the plain.

I find Anaximander there,
among the trilliums. He stands
somehow inside ...according to
the arrangements of time...
—the flower patch,
planted half like one of them,

though the trillium does not abide,
wild or tame, in Anatolia. I see
an ugly track of tears contrive 
a silty river down his cheek,
the same as mine.

We both have known retreat
upon retreat; the picking-over,
dark shapes hunched in foliage.
He wonders how many hours
the sea will take 
to carry his ghost to western cities, 
to sleep;

how long the ocean needs 
to chant the nostos of her prodigals—
the streams abounding at Miletus;
saline Maeander and his young—
back to itself in their entirety.

No change sorry Man.
A wind comes between my hat
and I. My skull is cooler now
than it was upon calculation. 
There is always the word. 
The tongue wags a bell in the air.
Whose tongue? For my part,
I take me down to the stone, 
beneath the willow by the river.
Good breeze. If I had for lack
of change or anything else
to live outside, it could always
be worse than the willow raking
the river's dark shoulder; stone 
warming and cooling slowly again
to the word—that escape from nothing.

...so that when you sleep
aired in cold light,
your mind no longer buoyant 
in the sun’s boiled breath,
your head may become porous 
as a fossil on the beach,

buried half in blue dunes
after they tumbled a thousand years
and sunned, waiting;
half in the rushes of twilight,
uprooted, twined in a crown
over the brow of the earth—

then, the pool 
of your mind eddies
somewhere else to hide, 
a new shell, and finds nothing: 
only the mountain dead, perfect wounds 
tracked through its chest;

towns that seam the hills
to the mountain's ruin,
and occupants who whisper in sleep
that days were once arrayed
by a shining weight
carved from the icy peak...

On the night of death in the tower
we shrived leavings from bone crockery;
washed sacrificial humors from eburnean plates.
In early February, the pale lady spilled her bowl
of milk into the waiting cloud above the oaks
that stood unshaven from the cold north hedge.

Each of death’s cold nights the moon spilled, 
diffused—a plucked, unpetalled trumpet flower—
into the medium of oak-speared cloud,
freed to use its subtle body to press into the tower
like some light-seeking child. We would stare into each other—
grime-dark we and white cloud—from across
the weeping windows over parking lots,
sick from staring through the silt of comrades’ eyes,
looking to rest them in the cool, black sky,
and noticed how the cloud cried too—

how it was a weeping without weeping;
how it retained the muscle of its vapour
to return to the void that crowns the north oaks;
instead grew lambent with a flex of light;
and then eventually to disappear 
before the cars of morning came,
in the expectation that the cloud of night— 
with all its mourning, its lunar sympathies—
might hold unseen above the trees another day.

...only to say that man’s dreams are the coastal vantage
before the moon-eyed sea that mothered all these colonies,
that cold first port of wise cedars, bowed
into vessels wise enough to navigate the wounded descent, 
the froth of blood issued from the old world.
I track a faint ligature and claim the empty traderoute 
born of the bony caves that crest windily 
from the continent: the thin skull of an intellectual
bobs in beaches of white sediment
like an over-sunned jellyfish, his beached migliori
who worked only with their hands, long hours
to come and take vacation here in the particles
of their great works.

This is all that he remembered and was willing to part with,
we familiars of the human average, homonculi, 
mingled lazy as anemones in the fanning tide—
on a steamer in a photo of a famous east-coast harbour—
could be St. John's Newfoundland 
or New York of the Gentiles—green idyllic statues wave us out. 

I don't know this copper tongue you hide, Lady,
behind your featureless, unmoving mouth—
Celtic shade up from my blood, gesturing with fire, 
or ghoulish Vandal poseur—either way, 
in this dream I heave beneath your tutelary waves, 
having taught myself to fish though everyone is starved 
to their bones back here; only you remain
to spin your mute oriflamme into the pink flush 
of four horizons; clouds afternoon-drinking what's left 
in the porcelain of Empire, shooing us off in the right direction.

They wouldn't want to reopen it all, in fairness.  
Close fast today, wounds and restaurants.
Freedom isn’t cheap. The horizon insists things are nearer to the sky 
where I’m going—closer to the point,
yet the lane of the current arches empty through the bowel of the void.. 
Gulls argue over and above its sudden, steady mystery...

If there was Becoming,
      it would not have arrived,
so I sail the great wave of Parmenides,
and contemplate its lineament, Eternity;
      seek to know how it has borne me
like those whales who range and shepherd
            the occulted ocean’s bulk,
between the dreams of fishermen and hobby painters,
      who swear illiterate oaths to the Sea.

When in days ahead the blood comes
chugging like a Gothic horde
over islands of windburned skin,
and something grey in our windy heads
flounders back into protective violence,
our restive arms will flail brazenly
to no avail, as brazenness scales
infinitely, down to the whisper 
and the meekness of children.

Forgotten instantly by Tyrants,
we'll inherit, without interregnum, the world.
Do I find a way to murder fear? 
Do I strangle wisdom in its womb, where it pulses 
with me beneath the dreaded meekness 
of the constellations? Wisdom's ill-starred bassinet, 
a city changing colour in a fat, distant hand—
so large and flat we see a faintly rippling
heaven in it as it brushes, like a coward,
the elemental portion of the sky.

The offensive distance that economy keeps
between us affords our freely written license 
to parade beyond the scope of our procession's interest. 
We are helped down in sweet degeneration,
allowed to spring uninterrupted from the dirt.

...I have stepped with strict particularity
Where stars let down the knifed hems
Of their dresses onto the surface of the Earth,
Float their fronds for me in still pools on the asphalt.

I lift my empty house up from the century, afloat
In its own glassed silt, its neon swamp-light,
To deposit its whistling walls in their pillar
Of sight. I step out as instructed, into the first pose 
Passed out of nothing's cold hand. 

A parade flows from our first hill,
Down by the shortest route into the unknown
Sediment of shadow in the valley.
The rhythmic breaking of bone by that way; the shiver 
Of old men who linger in the grooves of golden arcades
At the crown—as long as we parade,
They sing dry centuries of ecstasy over the young dead.

They sing and the valley receives its name.

Uniforms flood red with gore, then black with death, 
Then dun with the ground that receives them
And recalls the true names of their occupants.
Red returns in unclean ochre; handprints
Small and uneven (the children have not eaten)
On unadorned walls of concrete redoubts,
Which, unknown, unnamed, signal the procession
To proceed once more from its violent landing...

...sorrow even here
On the plateaus so richly
Draped in seas. We hear
Of sorrow, of catastrophic 
Love affairs between the endless 
Body of the mountain 
And our memory. The lunar moth’s 
Faint kiss ignites the avalanche
But who remembers?
Moth kissed the mountain once
The one place it could pose,
In the piled dust of its switchback.
The trees do not recall,
In the new-made whisper
That moves them, anything. Basalt
Forgets, contemplating 
Its own darkness, full
Of contemplation... ripe with it.
Clay remembers all—
Red wife shut in rooms of land—
Clay the heart where gestures
Are taken and laid down 
As they came. Clay is the body
Of the moth’s betrayal—
The mountain falls in half,
Crying all the while. In the valley,
A house full of love turns red,
Disappears, is buried...

Low in the bell of time, octaves down from first light,
in the worried far-off moan of Everything,
a young brutalist designed and built a pumphouse
for the city's utility, a ruined song
that one can walk inside of. Mars traversed
the lunar halo overhead, end of winter; war
came through its adolescent madness 
and will now be more effective. Under these conditions,
the double-eagle's gates swung closed as per tradition.
The pumphouse was converted to a cafe
where I made to read Omeros in the common room.

A baby wailed and awaited reason under lights;
immigrant students stared down their screens
like those convinced that fear is wisdom's start
and end. A self-mutilated man prepared my coffee,
a man whose friends describe him as a woman
to his face, a boy behind his back, and I
know him for a priest of Janus, a man watched
only by himself, though he like me knows fear...
I sat to read Omeros under banks of Anglo-Saxon glass,
windy eyes through which our land seems so unlike
a colony — more a tall ship stuck like cataracts in ice
far from southern ports and the home ecologies.

I think about if Illium knew terza rima, that is,
if Helen or her adopted court had sense to hear 
the end and the beginning, in a war, conspire
to build the middle of the new... Helen,
if you had heard Omeros as a disembodied voice
reads it to me now, the walls of Troy might stand today,
but Janus casts his lunacy in two directions —
one across the frozen coast, the other on the frozen sea —
and has missed the Martian reconquista of his innocence.
Only wolves in hooded charity, and Rome with all her mutilants,
will come to lick our brutal hands when “spring comes round again.”

Reality nowhere found in real matters,
seen last at a crossing of two unlikely fingers,
grasping for each other behind a blind man’s back, 
behind the stone of country parish,
a rood of bone in fleshy prelest, shame —
a filling of the hand with blood.

The blood pounds, deafening in the hand,
the vein around the eye constricts,
what seems to be the matter is the real.
The pulse is set to eerie music, strange
in regularity of deep, red thrum vitality.

Lie to me and say nothing big sky, big sir,
oh great beyond. Shuffle, cloud — I’ll duck
behind those gravestones there. Won’t be
a moment. 

the star has wandered somehow
out of the great dark,
three old rods of silver, dead trees
hung with new lights,
affixed to its light fixity and dragging
three wayward minds
down the old valleys of sand and graves,
through fig courtyards
they will pass again by a more distant
way, these three men
gone out from under a spirit of flame
by the augur of this star,
what great thing in such bright emptiness,
what perfect night
wandered from and made mother's blanket 
(three Sisters jilted in another sky...)
by restless cry of All held thereunder...

Conservation efforts have been laudatory
and ineffectual in the case of your piano
and in the case of the Piano Conservatory
that languishes, scaffolded on the avenue.
Today all men strut la danse des parvenus
beneath both its splinted wings, eyes down
to mine the road’s embarrassment for clues
as to whether or not the masque has slipped.
I always appreciated your piano in the room;
it was as if it knew itself beyond conservatism,
and well and truly into more precarious territory,
more fertile, where even broken instruments
like you and I and your piano might make due,
not merely with ourselves but in some swollen
movement also with each other, into something
that is written and expected—something new.