The energy we are birthed from and the energy
that devours us the same. It is fabled that we
might dupe the clock with a stone in the belly
might defy death with cunning and gold.
Still I hold the thread that sews me
into my concealment.
The lyre is sung
into the loom.
The circling wolves come down from Nysa
frenzied and ecstatic unable to recognize
themselves in their personæ and I
who came to praise love what can I do
but sing from the crater
of my loss.
Branches kept their silent birds
and earth kept foxes in fern-dark the meadow
kept its bowing deer.
Clever perhaps not to share but I
am overcome with art my desire
unravels itself into form.
Utterance crosses
into the underhall.
Where Pausanias sat on cypress lawn dear John
I linger among the dead minding O I turn
the columbarium key and open your spirit’s door
is it time the destroyer.
To live in our various attires and sing
a poem into agate light my voice full of sun.
Blooming out of material dark story remains
a clumsy instrument where once gods were held
from earth by rite on high but now.
It is easy to move from the quotidian world
into dayglo digitized sphere to find myself
lost in an afternoon without return.
To study time is to apprehend the body
prone to give way to ache and to ache for.
I think about paper
as if it had been the body’s largest organ
stretched illuminated and sewn together.
What a shame to print only yesterday’s news.
In a dream
in a wood that might be pulp.
Late the hour in this nether-realm where technê
haunts a brazen looping trance I can’t outwit.
In a mirror box of bright screens I see
myself repeat the story repeat the loss
repeat my art again again I hold account.
What pawn am I in yet another reader’s eye.
Who put men in the belly of beast but men
put air unearned to words they’d claim.
It’s just a cloud to cover thread the story’s
story said. I read it now in waiting rooms
awash in Muzak songs so dull the bludgeon
that ends a life also begets it.
Necessity is in everything an energy.
The stone in me disembodied hands my face
still turns into and above the sea.
What love I had returned
to grain and word and choice.