Sueno
I. Ruins
Ruins, a special love.
Turbulence of stone surrenders no sound
save the discreet scatter of rats beneath
the terraced, eternal city.
There is no lesson affordable to a world
which buries its dead, loosing them into
the fathoms of a Baikal, fearful lest they be
churned back into view by the moving waters.
These dead familiars press and push and nag.
They are implicit in the naked streets
the living walk down. They will not leave,
however much we celebrate their absence.
And in their absence stones connive.
Limestone sweats to a finger’s pressure,
leaks its gagged blood,
beads jagged where the shadow falls.
Through an envelope of heat
the river bleeds with too much light.
The pain is borne, endured,
like fever under a nurse’s touch.
II. Exit Via Necropole
Why would, eyes wide, one go?
Past sensed if unseen slime, prefigured
by the pale slabs of stony moonlight
or no moonlight at all.
Only reflected light, fading rabid fast.
However reasonably asked, passionately begged,
why marple through the leavings of the damned?
So as to return, sated and florid.
Silling’s pale chronicle clutched
in delicate bloodstained fingers.
Climbing back up, having gone down,
do you avoid the drippings of festive sap?
Or whisper at the vague repeats of yourself
powdering the windshield as you
wind through the city?
Morbidity garlicked and staked with a sob’s unbroken joy?
To breathe the anthrax-ridden pollen
and picnic beside the butcher block
that squats upon the summer plain.
Perhaps it was simply the wrong address after all?
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Extinction Of The Species
Are you mad? The period piece exasperates.
To civilize and plan the future out of pure
weather? To indicate where the jungle ends
and where the door begins?
Is then the doorway made sufficiently clear?
Brambles shunted for a view of this sea,
and of the terraces beside it, of which she
faintly hears the calling of, the sighing of.
In her seaside room, plagued by the wingbeats
of tiresome frolicsome gulls, is this the doorway
and if so, is it made clear?
Yes. At least the boundaries say so, although rain
coming on spells out the futile dream’s design.
Can we afford to stop staring at the sky, or must we
get soaked when the wide Nubian breast goes crack?
Look to the west: there is a spasm in the violent eye.
Genius, Dogsbody, Scatterer. A harrowing dream,
striding across the blank plain to truncheon and
deform, baroque refusal in flint and moist epic.
There is such certainty in young men’s ghosts.
Time, that fat despoiler, demotes those deaths to
the mere destruction of precious stones. Under
the flung spray of a vardarac the furs of the
humid north are dissolved: beneath the amber
of a sheer bodice bruises gleam, as between the folds
of the gold unbearable robes.
Look to the east: compassion’s herald vanished in a
dark flood, for what is gone is gone, in a shadowed
turn of oak and thorn, an animal’s mouth (so like
a brother’s broken mouth) pinched and fretted
with the crawl of death.
In flight from Byzantium the sails catch the sun’s
long twilight, deferred to a colder destination.
A stony land, whose people humanize her plains
with monuments of mud and straw, whose people
laugh, from time to time.
Drowning in the silence of one alone with one’s
thoughts. The despair of souls for whom no word
remains unvoiced, no library unscoured, no matter how
jerusalemic in age, nor high as a sky-burial on the roof
of the world, the tassels of the Bardo muffling the tongue’s
black wood, cloth ribboning to pieces in the wind.
Smoke rises and settles to a level pigeon-wise the red
roofs, torches templing cholera’s wasteflame.
Like the needles of some gigantic surgeon, corridors
penetrate the city’s guts, the manholes’ preplanned
puncture wounds like mouths blistered with a venus of sores.
The gutters rinse away both life and poison, enamel ribbons
on a silent run to the outskirts, away from the broken anchor
of the city’s spine.
All that remains of remembered beauty, unseen
through ruby tears. She was the friend of many
and memory withholds the inviolate name.
Fresh air is as precious as water, where there is none.
Stairs lead to meadows outside the city, poison ambling
in a ghostly drift at a distance wind might still carry.
Steps falter in the waist-high grass, then stop altogether,
under the shocked freeze of a trillion stars.
You fear the closed rooms, don’t you? Observed from
lightless city walls. You fear this, don’t you? Small?
Made not human? Limbs plucked off? Fragile legs pinned
with febrile fire? Fear these, yes? Fear also the open meadows,
for they are not empty.
Look to you left and then to your right. It smells your fear
and comes flying along the stalks of the meadow’s spine
crying:
you are my sister!
my daughter!
I heard you call my name.
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Nara
Palace above water.
Still as canvas, the jeweled reeds.
Mist,
ravished
in its slow drift
across the stone surface of the lake.
A slow bell
deadens
a bending note,
warps under a
humid sky
or seems to hang
like wood-smoke
in a haze.
Through the
water roof
of dawn the cliffs
wash white
and green.
Gorged lovers
retire from each
other’s embrace,
partnered now
by sleep and sleep’s twin.
Over them
the shadow
of a gull
ghosting down the current
that will bear it
shrilling
to the delta’s
red courtyard.
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Nusquam
Stone dogs yawn. Fresh snow lightens the screens of Nusquam,
gray morning in dispersal before the weak sun.
The storm has raked the villa’s stones to bed in the nearest canal, priests removing themselves to a place of less safety so as to fuse together the remnant of a once-
compassionate
now desolate people.
And is the council in session?
Will wide heads wag or baffle at sheer number?
Will the fleet sleek vessels be hoarded, gruesome and splintered,
on the shoals sounding suddenly underkeel the fog’s knit cloak?
And will the kelp grope its seachange through the stripteased
bones of entire crews,
violet manacles of bloated flesh,
raised by a storm, gentled to the seafloor’s fractured strata?
Who will empty the laboratories and museums of those tools
by which might be measured the proportions of a headless snake,
some kilometers in the unwinding of its length
along the hills trebled with purple, with shadow?
Will the mourning corteges read the lucid affliction correctly, and find a journey’s end of disrepair less awesome for being the prevalent phenomenon this season?
Will the vanguard of surviving horsemen
be routed through the perilous machine
to be uprooted,
mount and rider,
into a colored violence, garish explosion
of tangled, broken limbs?
A ban on stargazing is decreed
and the empyrean smokes
with the hatcheted remains
of offenders.
What most offends is a vision of snow
falling lightly,
to cover the festering stumps
of the once-promiscuous
now-desolate
park.
Nusquam is herself.
(And the chain of illumination
in calling that place a kingdom!)
Half-hidden, screened, words gossip, words whisper …
It is elsewhere than here that the look will travel, fall, go unrewarded lest the light change and blindness be revealed as world-altering in the strangeness and durability of its gift.
To snow,
cushioned,
and
moist jade leaves,
long-eared as rabbits,
brittle in their encasements
of unrippled ice.
And winter is for Nusquam identical to spring.
That is paradise. That is, stasis.
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Horus, Mute Beside The Waters
By dead reckoning and by the drawing off of light, the land’s dusk is a long book, a scroll to follow in and back out, the delta’s tides showing the reader the way.
An aura of cursory statuary,
defined as though there had been
no guilds.
Royal lips dictated commissions,
plagiarizing rare departures,
notions, to a stylized
MONUMENTAL
bid for eternity.
Cursory, and even a lifetime
is cursory, reversed by
unequal moments of perception.
Shrunken kingdom of monkey grass, the war music of a hopper’s forelegs, bowing the strum from whirr to whine, the throaty death-challenge beneath beating wings, turquoise and narcotic green where the lessening sunlight flashes through.
Not the methodical accumulation
of facts but recognition of
inherent luminous frailties,
like a sheen over the weight and
bulk, the inherent humanity
of the cities of the dead.
Radiance builds at the delta, but still adrift in the narrows,
men saw a different light, pervasive, made a supreme crown,
to which others were assumed blind.
Frogs call doom across the stagnant pool,
a snail lifts its horns,
armor washed clean in a water-spider’s byspray,
a three-minute downpour.
Innumerable the genealogies of slaves and plants, booty like
nectar to random dynasties. Through cycles of benevolence,
moderate governance out of righteous cities, to the rapid
friction of a decade of anarchy and suicide. Withering to
stone, the men become no more than outlandish glyphs, the
union of the provinces a cosmopolitan dirge laid over the
dissonant poetry of local chiefs, their eyes sightless, their
foreheads bashed in.
On marrow that the years warp, etched hieroglyph of flame.
Genocide an impulse older than alliance,
older than the slave societies.
Outlandish tastes quelled in a child’s pouting face,
more beautiful now
than the disproportionate pubic mound
of an ideal but living queen.
And where does the reign end?
Groping from its niche,
progressive towards the unknown,
a priest sets frees the cloud of
surplus incense, steps nearer
the platforms supporting
the appropriate sacrificial flocks.
Stocked forever after, forever now,
in the long run termed eternity
or name of Egypt.