I
In a reign of harsh boundaries the dubious honor,
and conscience in refuge.
A mind percolates with fear,
fear of the hoarded thought,
officialdom shod and hard-riding to the border its accent recognizes.
Hoarded, like contemplation of dire science:
faith written in an overflow of blood.
Sun strikes the withered glass in white collusion of stress and intellect;
the farmyard echoes with the music of igniting icons and
all is observed,
no longer merely lancets,
but staring quiet eyes.
II
Debonair foundations, rotten civitatis.
A regiment stalks,
shoulders arms against a landscape of proletarian dikes
perpetual against the frozen ground.
Horizon of drums and threatened snow
blackening the lacquer of the already black cortege,
cantering its mission of unknown morality.
From a high window it is not natural to look upwards,
but only down upon the upturned faces receiving their allotment
of poisonous intermittent rain.
A fault thrusts under this most ethereal city.
III
If the sheets are wet
blame the caught fever on the sun,
its bolts that cleanse with calumnies of sweat.
A sedan chair hovers on the street outside,
propelled through a dimension of summer mud,
ancient as weights and measures,
finite as man’s gross jurisdiction.
What is upheld is the debased and finite framework
of living words,
words that seethe with a sweat’s fine purity.
IV
Pent, the action is a freedom.
Where Ostend’s waters ripple over bright shoals
and blemished nets hang from the stern,
a passing reverie only, with remorse made perfect.
There was rain in Liege as well,
opposed only by the obdurate necessities
of a few vagrant women.
Gouging, and erect,
the pilings impale the sudden descent of an unmoored dinghy,
the line of black surf like
a strand of hair down a woman’s white back.
Bent instructively above a wash basin.
V
Drowned in a dessert’s emerald glaze
the sensualist disputes with learned celibates
and admires the rinsed scalp of the young prioress.
He would offend her but time is short
and the mild harbor is deeper than her chestnut eyes.
His servants nestle in the fraudulent aroma of the saddle,
asleep under gray starlight.
Departing, he unlatches the window and leans out,
watching the sky above the dark edge of the city.
The moon cusps behind the blown and fractured clouds,
cool and beckoning as the pubis of a goddess.