By the cloud-spur she paused,
waited on visibility to gate her doubts,
a passing vista of green
to be the background to farewell.
Sorrow and its fellows stood patiently by,
loyal as any paladin,
to dissipate in sun should she so desire.
A lifetime’s faithful service brought to its end,
here in the open air.
The clear water was deceptive in its depth,
offering the shimmering dead-end of beauty.
Strains of a music pitched to thoughtless ease
rose and hung and died away,
quivering on the sharp decay of altitude.
A Saxon harp, a frail wind, a knifepoint
drawn across a sheet of Saracen glass.
Music to a life she might have chosen,
drained of counterpoint and bass,
descriptive of a damage no tears would soothe.
Syrup on a spider’s web,
Sorrow and lieutenants patient
as the creep of shadows.
She would wait a while longer,
see what shroud-torn dream might join her.
Gallantly, the sun froze,
to cast all shadows backwards to a winter’s day,
to box a frame of snowfall
for her to wander in,
ice uncarved by its relentless eye,
but richly burdened with its dagger-loads of silver.
Her mind held Aachen’s glamour:
a list of names, each soul astride its sins,
each rooting chancre bright as rubies housed in opal,
a crown of worms to halo every wounded head.
Take heart, the sparrow sang,
you taught us not to be afraid,
although our world beats with fear in every color.
The gate itself is fear. And terror, understood.
You know this for you told us and we listened
in our sad nests, tapping this twig fear
and this twig love, no longer
knowing the difference.
Knowing only the sky you showed us,
the simple gate you stand beside.
Take courage, sweet Queen,
sang the palisades of Aachen.
Take some of what you gave us,
a drop from every stream.
Why else have we stood, erect and shining,
if not for you?
One vault one winter’s night,
and we were taken,
but none have dared the leap since then,
the bar was set upon your virtue,
while darkest scarlet weighs the strongest down.
To earth, to moss, to mattock-powdered dust.
What did the lute dream, when it lay
unstrummed? Whose dreamed hand
filled the falconer’s glove when it flexed
at midnight? Did the rope twitch in its coil,
remembering those lynched poachers,
gentling the edge of the royal wood?
The pagan herdsmen overthrown,
their flocks resumed the language of unfallen Eden.
The sparrows in the garden,
the wolves in the woods,
these knew and know the names of every one
who loved and loves her, numbered on
claw, paw, wing, and whisper.
A whisper ran through the weeds,
circled the Great Hall, leeched silence
from timber and stone.
An urge of counterfeit anger,
metal molding under a sanctioned hammer.
Players mocked the ecstasy of devils,
rocking toy thrones and, goatlike,
turning fingers into horns, drooling cross-
eyed to feign the fall of Babylon, of Nineveh,
of Rome itself.
Smoke-stains from braziers now cold.
A child born blue, the high-pitched prayer
to send its soul across the hills to Purgatory.
Three concubines at a single loom,
weaving which saintly debacle,
its lessons not so much an afterthought as
floral on the borders.
Drunkenness brought dreams,
and permission to read them,
to gather a scattering of bones in a full-length shroud.
Love was the color of honey,
days of happiness and peace
crowding like attendant bees.
She read the distant flutter of banners,
knew no dream would come to help her
while away the final hours.
As many kin as her heart had room,
hulled for voyage, dragonship.
Pine and evergreen and oak,
and a palm leaf, gold as straw,
carried in a casket from what was not yet Outremer.
A nightingale’s worried song, strange as Cathay,
strange still in familiar gardens.
Where she was able than willingly she did,
and where prevented she mutely bore the cost,
the willful sins of others. Silence was ever order,
and silence drew down chaos with a look,
to wither violence and shame the untamed tongue,
a woman’s thumb to right the balance of the bright scales.
For every Gorgon barrowed in snow,
a naked slave stood purified,
the cults which felt the shudder of a changing world,
stumbled over their rites of coming in and going out,
withdrew as bears hemmed round with torches.
All this she knew, hoarding the scars
of spells cast against her,
which pricked and punctured
but feebled down their poison
to a wasp or gulling toad.
I am that I am had been the hideous motto,
coming as whisper and thunder, tangled together.
Spirits of wood and water clowned briefly and fled.
What were seasons then, mere moments now.
First, a lash of faraway rain,
then an instant of blood-red sun,
islands settling under creamwhite clouds,
the beckon of twilight’s lidless blue.
Another blue to silhouette her girlhood.
Panels of silk, edged at intervals with white and copper,
weighted at the bottom with tinkling grapes.
A marriage pavilion in a hewn-down copse,
bridal path an ankle-deep litter of blossoms.
A grown man and his scarred companions,
to shield and guide her from a child’s singular garden
to a queen’s lonelier court.
The Bishop, tall as heaven.
Her husband, strange as an eclipse of the sun.
And all the thresh of shining warriors.
And ladies, solemn in their smile of tears.
Latin rules and Latin answers,
memorized with a girlish pipsqueak stutter
which stood and straightened and flamed
from lips to sky, errorless and pure.
Her gloved fingers smoothed the cloisonné broach
for comfort, cool and negligible in the blushing light.
And later, when dogs and stallions,
jugglers and singers, gifts from every compass-
point were borne away, she was
lain down for wounding on a bed the size of France,
consummation ringed with a castrated choir.
The hurt was called love and she quivered its arrow
among the other loves she knew.
Whippet-love, sister-love,
the love of Christ, the love of laughter.
Time passed through her hands,
time took from her hands all that she had,
all that she had ever had.
The false division of the charmed,
the wretchedness of winter in a land of plenty.
One war ending and a new unfolding,
an hour of peace rare as a bolt from cloudless heaven.
There was no prophecy but had its armor-denting makers.
Peace was forever one battlefield away,
but still she watched, slim gleam
among a shadow of watching women,
hope a horizon bubbling with pennants,
a horn trilling the hoarse mob,
sweetening the roar of love’s return.
And love returned, though masked at times
with jealousy’s madness, fury’s pride.
Her body was another’s property,
her mind stood still at Heaven’s lowest step,
her prayers in fox-flight rising.
She woke to summer stars still blazing,
the consequence of distant midnights
shown with rook and pawn upon a map of skin
which overflowed the table, a golden bowl
upended to a Moorish mosque, wax figurines
in a line from the Pyrenees to Pavia.
A friendly priest displayed for her
the workings of the flattened world,
spoke her language with a care she found endearing,
and gestured towards unseen marvels
swimming along the dark floor,
Dane-devouring monsters of the deep.
She asked him then, a lady’s whisper
ill-suited to a room so recently echo-chamber
of recounted slaughter, to tell her something
of the fabulous enemy.
She guessed some mystery behind the details left out,
the ivory carvings he offered in selection.
Of minarets, of treeless empires of sand,
the number five, and slaveries not so dissimilar
in use and purpose.
The enemy, like double-jointed acrobats,
outran her husband’s heavy horses,
to hiss behind white mountains,
to simper in their perfumes from behind
the rose-washed borrowed Spanish walls.
A surge of red-flecked foam;
long blades wiped clean on the riverbank;
dream-images her sweet mind censored,
remembering Pontius Pilate’s wife
and the dangerous ways of men.
Truants of each campaign were left to tell it,
scribes conferring as they set each broken bone
with a twist of the stylus,
basketed the innards of strip-mined torsos,
gathering the butterflies with a stitch of ink.
To cook or magnify the evidence,
till Tolosa ran swiftly red for days,
and severed heads bobbed a bridge to Africa.
But she could count upwards to one hundred,
could see which horses cantered riderless home,
which former Apollo limped along with half a face,
squinted from a single squid’s eye
with a look of now eternal surprise.
Three autumn afternoons running
she sat long on conversation’s edge,
listened in as veterans,
young men when she was a child,
subtly gilded the carnage.
She sat too long and felt the sudden stir of unexpected love.
Taking solace beside a rock pool,
she sought forgiveness for pleasures
which outshone mercy, the secluded pool
a mechanism to spark (were she so graced)
a prayer free of questions.
Returning, she heard a slave singing softly
of a vanished harbor near his vanished home
and she wept, for herself and every burning fleet.
Blood ran down the walls, milk soured in the breast
and empire sang its tuneless song of joyous self-regard.
Some day another voice would sing IT IS FINISHED,
or choke on despair.
Her husband built cities, made widows,
built bridges, made orphans.
Oxlike monasteries lowed the cut fields,
the very bricks hummed in the fattening year.
She leaned upon a light-bathed ledge,
watched the wind careen the treetops,
strained to hear the creaking of a solitary tree.
The motion of her mind held her body still,
propped against the cool stone,
head cradled in her arms to watch
her familiar world grow strange.
Duty tired in its necessary sleep
and pleasure’s limits narrowed to dream,
no confessor the wiser when she sailed free above the muezzin,
a river’s blue line below, like the curve
of a girl’s body, eager, languid,
through the scorching gold.
Above her, hawks and angels
leaped from cloud-crag to cloud-peak,
in effortless easy spirals of giddy soar,
and skirlfall, and deadweight drop.
She watched, unnoticed, gently mocked
by skill so natural.
Life sang from the shadows and purred
in the sun, the rock pool as quiet as before, and unvisited.
The wide world went away and came back
on every exhalation, each intake of breath.
Underneath her clothes she was naked.
From her thighs, burning with spring’s kisses,
to the wintry shiver down her arms, and white flowers,
dropping from tapestries onto her bare feet.
Death was a golden ship, pulled along by love’s tides.
Rest now, restless Queen,
sang the hidden wolves of Aachen.
Unbidden stones have come upon us,
ridding your woods of our smells and shadows.
We do not understand these changes in our woods.
We are driven across the treeless, friendless fields,
we are ridden down in silence,
snarling at ghosts whose spears drink blood.
A sun is riding on our river, a sun that calls your name.
Death’s golden ship blots the wide river,
its mast rises three towers above her own.
Its music of harp and knifepoint
calls her down to board and sleep,
and none but she can hear its call, nor see its gold,
outshining sun.