To be forever sad, playing to the gallery
of an emperor’s benevolent, distracted patronage.
Frederick shivers, eyes on the east.
The chill wind of the okhrana,
in a fugue of snow the vanished horsemen.
A girl’s fingers creep down the white harpsichord,
to raise an emperor’s nape-hairs
with a surgeon’s ladylike tune.
Unlike the warrior-watercolorist
as unlike the builder of grotesque chateaux,
Frederick’s shadow haunts a still pool
between the burgher’s heart, the neurasthenic’s brain.
Here, in his simple crypt of mirrors
and harpsichords, the blond mice sing,
dreaming an inauthentic and holy wood.
(The Emperor’s Central Intelligence;
Achilles with a gasoline bomb;
Xerxes in culottes and puffed sleeves.)
With his eyes on the east Frederick lingers
on an image (more sound than shape)
of heaven without music.
He turns from the keys with a pricked
and final note, fading beyond recall.