1.
Day breaks on worldwellost.
Kingdom Come the unplayed trump of nervous darkness, crushed by massive sunrise riding crimson on the sea.
2.
From all those Roman deaths in York proceed:
the monument to the slain Horsa, the wall defensive to the humbled lowlands, manned by the stunning Picts, and westwards, pricked by the death of a civilization, a mystery in quick construction, the fat dikes fed.
3.
Blown beacons on the wind, the winter-weary stars.
Sea’s cries batter the iron heart: Latin helmets laid aside in exchange; mass graves the arctic marriage bed.
Token of dead days, deeds passed to emblem-forgers, bored beside the howling sea.
4.
Windhovers lose the wind-whet high over the goldbright fields, the archives of the unlettered, the tribes on the move, coastal guardians lost in the wheat sea.
Delight in one’s inland wife, river goddesses are in her eyes.
5.
Unmemorize the salt-bitter furrow, leave off the shivered wood, the shields
butt-knocked in the pounding surf, the horns’ ancient bellows wilding the ice-white
sky, and the noondark excess of Herodotus’ metaphor:
fatal laughter, to greet a single volley, loosed from every edge of empire, rising in a hush and dropping in a needle-tipped whirl that rivaled total eclipse.
6.
Mounds and earth ruptured.
Staggered, naked ancestors, erect oblations of bone.
Bewildered tangent to ring the rainwashed hill.
7.
Winds drove across the sun, the afternoon blackened, unbowelled earth un-covered the white ash.
No Sadducee saw nor seeing, drew what stark meaning from the coming storm, the frail daylit threads, nor from anything.
8.
Confused, network of minions, beetled in their military improves, all flash and sex, swept to the narrows where the scarlet victims growl.
Cannae, Lake Regillus, other squabbles without names.
Remorse abraids the maniple its faltering movement, a standard of hay to follow when one’s dead.
9.
An excursion of limestone.
Dome like a skullcap of wrinkled skin.
Melons and soft cheese, rotten plums and sulfur, three halves of sweet melon
before the taste is dissipated.
Moon’s curve without cist, as though congealed milk, veins on fire, youth dribbling away.
10.
Compiled, irreducible, famine’s records are dreary but exact.
A meal taken once in memory, a hunger rioting its minority.
Hungering for the very thing that kills, to inch past the dye of crumbled stone
and the palisade gate framing a perfect blue.
But now the walls are down, corpses litter the limestone base where the city is sunk,
squat like a beast above its stirring feces.
11.
Pure word to purge sated greenery:
‘and in sky a great phantom from
Mesembra to Arcturus
preannouncing’
HIC SUNT LEONES
driven scimitar of falling stars.
12.
(Neither Chinese nor Byzantine. A garden of rock and tile, cold-water piscine. Or precisely la grand sale de repos du basin de Khirbatal-mafdjar.)
13.
Berenice’s city triumphed over, serene nomads loitered in the shadow of the invisible Library.
Berenice’s night-garden, on the summer horizon Pan’s little boat.
14.
For salutation and care of horses and men, the Gate of the Sun and the oasis-dim haunts of the crocodile-headed god.
Alexandria double-harbored.
City of 4,000 palaces, 4,000 baths, and 40,000 Jews.
Coquette of exaggerated worth: Amr numb to the sheen of his taken rendezvous.
Courted to silence, Cleopatra’s city evaporates its unguent subtle lawns.
15.
In horse-loving Byzantium Justinian read the southern stars, found written an occult base for economy.
A camel’s image on a Mohammedan coin: the beaten head on the reverse –al-Mutawakkil.
In Samara’s palaces, who was tethered to paradox and desert or was the cradle dissolving to myth?
Dim the Bedouin, clear Caliph.
So 5 years earlier Justinian did not buckle but drove out the treve (Abd-el-Malik satanice stimulatus) would not handle (o eavesdropping Ezra) his monetary system like a whore.
16.
But the pure word raged, built up its castellated barrows –Kasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi by the Caliph Hishan founded, fortified.
(And like the deep tepidaria at Khirbatal or west of Kufa the Chateau Ukhaydir a splendor inexplicable in the fat green lands.)
17.
A decade past the Millenium Basil watched Bosphorus plummet to the southern horizons.
Constantinople the pole of his world.
In Egypt Christians died, and Sunnis, for bizarre simple words.
And the same year (1009) the Fatimide al-Hakim uncapped, turned stone from stone the church of the Holy Sepulcher.
In the mountains the Nizaris deified him, God of hashish-eaters, like Justinian obsessed with a rising shadow, to surpass not Solomon, but Sophia.
18.
Dim the minaret when twilight falls over eastern plains:
the words grow devious as Theodora.
19.
‘My gacela is unstrung, near or far, the body’s joy is theirs, the dreamlike ones, fatal loveliness beds me, heart having no escape
…
A goddess’ mouth of plate, amber on a page of heavy gold
…
My hand covers her breasts, her heart beats in my hand
…
The night is anxiety and grief and lament and lack of sleep, for in matters of love infidelity breeds devotion.’
20.
Sleek, lean, Arabia mothered simpler words, men bright as flame, the women clear as water.
And Amr, dying in the embryo of Cairo: ‘I feel as if the heaven lay close upon the earth and I between the two, breathing through the eye of a needle.’
21.
Green Nile moving beside green huts.
White sand at delta’s drain, slender redgold flowers under the blue fanlike shadows of a sleeping ray, the sun undulant on the sloping sands, from delta’s mouth to ocean’s floor.
22.
Where from?
roars poolbeg.
From the womb world to the diamond world.
The bird-song bitter, the wound through the thighs brings quickly down the realm.
The song recounts that la vertu fleurit. And under august willows bitterness bides the throne, the Queen loathes her slenderness, the bird sings by pool thrushed.
23.
From the ambon, in lambent occidental light the dualists are flailed. The Albigensian dawn springs up in the east.
The fire, the iron rod stalks Lyons.
Designated, the number of Masses said for the murdered envoy, bearer of heavenlies to Provence.
And Rome, diet of lice.
24.
Cantharus, the bird unstill.
The bright paradiso coheres, its wealth of living names, sardonyx and jacinth.
In the tunic chalcedony, the air pure crystal and trembling light.
25.
Eloquent Calypso remains.
From the sea-journey of firefly and moth, her island the entrance to the diamond world.
But by Circe’s route, the magnet troubadour (stark singer when out of love) dispatched by insular De Born, whose tactics left payment with the Jews, whose tactics Dante damned him for.
26.
-Let the Jews pay.
Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar spoke the words, Babieca pawing the wasted grass beyond the torchwhite tent.
The dispossessed Campeador sat mounted before Burgos, listening to a child’s tutored speech … los ojos
de las caras,
los ojos de nuestras
caras … Jimena
saw white runners
from her high window,
fluttering past
the hedged ditches,
marked the white and
silver centaur
to her daughters,
her lord
in the forefront
shadowed by a gold
crucifix behind.
27.
Cid’s vexillum, windsock’s tattered blanch remained, post-fire, post-blood.
Bertran’s fallen, forgotten in a girl’s wood, one of many scattered signum.
28.
A moth flits
through the fenestella
near his robe’s hem.
Gold pours through
high windows, the dust
swims between edges of light:
from the gloom
the celebrant’s chalice
surfaces, gold
in the thin light.
29.
In Lyons prayers for the soul of Innocent’s envoy, Pierre de Castelnau. Dispatched to gauge his master’s fears, to prove them, martyred.
A handful of grass eaten to signify Christ’s remembered Body, his dexter glove a proferance and given rite.
30.
Stone eyes turned inland, the long mid days gone: Innocent commands the tides,
old Urban’s bones through hoary depths.
In nymphaeum
a sudden sense of loss,
gold through high windows
catch hidden flame
and return
under the shadow
of Mars.
31.
A dynasty’s middle age and the fine muscle cramping. Lo sanh senhal turning inwards, the tendency towards Acre and Jerusalem once more out of saints’ hands.
(En Venise se cuideient trover plus grant plente de vaisiax que a nul autre port.) To juncture with Byzantium Venetian merchants chinked cold coin, in clear Venice forged a silver chain to bring down the high-class whore, collar her with crusader’s steel, lo sanh senhal inwards by degrees.
32.
Golden light
stirs the glass
and falls
through raised gloom.
A shadow
broaches
the altar’s prow,
dark relics move,
moth mingling
the flamelets.
33.
Souls eaten with fire. God damns in broken world to waste and pain, shod crusaders bloodying Carcasonne, the gutters unrinsed in Beziers, foul the cries
the Bishop makes, in Beziers, and in Carcasonne a generation of raped women.
34.
In confessio, at peace, the gnawed bones.
Raymond humiliated on his own ground, at Toulouse, and the plain at cold dawn.
Below Mt. Segur, ‘sacred to Helios’, with fire eat we our brothers.
35.
In pistikon’s gloom a slow sense of loss. Christ become an ornate corpse, forever in the upper room his eastern language.
The unicorn de froid couleur soils his horn in the disordered dungheap of jeweled lies. From the womb world to the diamond world. Circe’s directions, by remote collapse to sail.
And limbo-time, days redeemed or hope cast ever out?
36.
Spare the cauldron-view but assemble vexillum, signum, and tufa. Impale gloom
on a shaft of gold.
Escape the Harpies, go to Hell, go through the silent waves to bring limbs out naked from earth, in one’s palm mapamundi, not knowing those one meets, one’s eyes sheltering in no met memory.
37.
From aisle of light into surrounding gloom,
to these remaining
the final words in French
LA MESSE FU DITE
bent to stone
he trembles altarwise, a forest of misery rides him now as ever, wildly his robe’s hem wrung, deep-christened before the sign of the Lamb. His voice rises unchained, sheds the seamless garment of his cloistered walls and ribbed sunshadowing roof … rises, tri-syllabic naked utterance, sharp heartbroken loveliness his flown cry of love.
38.
And the voice that stretched through the wind was not strange, though wild with accurate pain that charged the living trees, the cowled treetops, the blackened empty day.