All things that were set high
are now, it seems, to be lowered.
Caught between the horizon
and as far as one can touch,
all projects will be trussed and tarped,
left to shake their scaffolds
in the breeze. The word will
come shortly, by horseback or dove,
and those who look sharp
will be stamped with loyalty’s red pox.
The apprentices are bewildered,
and lacking the deceit of experience
their lamblike milling lightens
those around them, to loiter and laugh
at the Master, soaring in his makeshift
tower, charts weighed down by coins,
compasses, and dust-bleached sleeve.
To go forward into the past,
or stand still in the commanded future,
to whistle or pray, to hold one’s water
in decorous shuffle or urinate from
battlements into shadow.
The squat man in the open-air
nest looks only from his blueprints
to the curve of the watery world
and back again, listens to no one,
scorns all dither, is struck mute
by the fawn of diplomacy,
the bow-wow from below.
Pieter is a ///\\\ no sooner scrawled
then graffitied over in its turn,
such final snowfall drawn for reprimand
from local taxes, as if to pay for love.
Still no word, and the Master calls down
for sand and clay, a little wine
to ease his genius through vertigo
and heartburn. A greyhound
starts alive from the blue of its keeper’s cloak,
a cat vanishes into its mistress’s house,
the window latch chimes on beveled glass,
a passenger pigeon coasts upon a current
and drops exhausted from the
dusk-stained uneventful sky.