rel="nofollow" href="#u165ae414-55f9-548d-8294-e19a6e058be1">Letters From The Front, 1906 – 2006
Calendar
Now it is one era; now,
another. The sky
burns purple, unpronounceable;
the hours are a bristling
looped into your nerves.
And so, the rock-doves plunge and swoop;
sight strains to parse
their scattering into
verbs inflected for the future;
a hand like amber smoke casts
yarrow sticks, bundles them
promisingly; so many silvery cities
trilling in the solar winds.
Soon the oceanic clatter
of a talus slide;
soon the fluent stutter of guns.
The Abyss of the Birds
The hours flashed, flicked
their crests; I broke
through the scenery
to the eternal half-
smile of hooks:
I was a man
like a tree, walking.
Sparrows came in gusts,
cranes came, and hawks.
I held their cries; there was
a sound of leaves; I held them,
gave them back as smoke.
To the Counterglow
To the counterglow, to
the lesser darkness
barely shading
out from the greater,
follow the famine-
script limping across
the complicit plane
again and again. Against
a noctuary’s
petering out in ashes
set one human carpal
sailing backwards
with a few willow baskets,
a few amphorae
for the next trial,
your’s or another’s.
The Translator’s Dream
There are poppyseed cakes
cooling on the window sills,
there are horses swimming
in the rich grass beyond.
Towards evening, the sky
grows more primrose,
the mammulus clouds
yellow as a girl’s hair:
indoors, the new light bleaches
all his spread-out papers blank.
And a rain that begins
as dashes turns into periods:
“Es heißt ‘virga’ “, a stork
clacks from the loft.
Soon he can hear the roof
whine under the grainy weight,
see the land as far as the eye
can see take on a black gleam.
The postman knocks twice,
slides under the door a postcard
of Goethe’s spreading oak:
“I waited and waited.
Why did you not come?”
in a hand he doesn’t know,
and no return address.
Finisterre
Only the doggerel
of forgetting, bitten-off palatals
of Gaulish spat
out of baffled faces, crab-
crackle of carpals: it is
late; a whirring psalm salts itself
in between the embroiderd edges
of every scar combed across
the tableaux of unicorns and roses
massed on the endless
leveled lands behind. The sea
widens its blind eye. All
I want to know is
who sees this,
what has been hoped
asunder by wave after wave
of men in invisible ships?
Blood Orbits
(To Simone Weil)
Prayermower, periodic
comet.
Of the perennial verbs
nothing left
but the stalks. You keep one
step ahead, out-
traveling the snowline,
the