#47

In the glorious city of Babylon,
by the glorious gate of Sabot

passed Tabitha, blazing white over red, having lost in the evening her charge to the night. That tempered, such trickery, where the hands of five hundred sailors tore and taut at starbreak. While the clock struck, and the barn brooked to the sounds of morning.

The after-sales and spirit-booths, thro' the hubbub of the market. All the tinctures bent for barter with who comes, and the fires spelt in licks and tithes: the shacks of ready wares. A frith of sin for song, where shades pass and cease and move about, with a gray wall of rain behind 'em. A gathering of tasters, poet-s, at the square for feeding. A play of masculine muscle through smirchsetting trousers and waistbands. Fickle tastes, and furnish'd, food on the slop of sidewalk stones.

Beneath the table there! A sonnet half-complete. Oh, they'll look around for poetry and ask what words are worth. The sorry scenesters in the pride of principled sight. The market-price determined. Loud as boys, his absence, our predictable error. His vulgarity erect, a mask sewn for the needs of fiction. Where he clad in light by darken'd gates. Where she lost him, time in the gaps of the serial.

#46

I dreamed I was a lighthouse. Always the grace of God. And my ardour in a convex mirror, displayed and thus displaying. While he was where: the sidewalks steamed, the cannibals opened lips to drink the sun. Each word like an opened window, curtains of so much gestural fabric.

One prays, as if one's praying. Like a hole hidden behind a mirror or a frame. Limbs akimbo, and goodnight. The speech balloon that pops, so full of silence. Or the green, green garden, where he said I love you, a silver trinket, half-discarded.

I will write the future this way. Not the possible or the probable. A librarian's humble discharge. It's his cross to bear. Aposiopesis, that's tomorrow. The maid who has made the bed. Laundered clothes for temporal functions. Plant it, like a treasure chest for blooming.

And tell me a poem is not a memory. Let my hands that open, stutter, be all I need to relinquish.

#45

I was there, at the table, in the shrill blue of God, and I said: "For nothing worth proven can be proven" or "That tender chain of flowers with a serpent's grasp." Oh, I love the place that I have loved before: A land where all things always seemed of quiet portion. One could strum one's fingers in the gray afternoon. Teleport the heart to prisons less stolid. As it poured, and paused, and poured.

Names for future poems: The Ingrate, Rachel, Superman. Like a pack of cards left idle. Too many, the August streets of metropols. And that fountain, where everything subsides.

Each calendar
Each afterwards

If the green earth blossoms, we will vault the paths of men. Be as Williams with his doctor's gear, mending the rinds and the porticos. Every virgin word asleep in cedarshade. Horrible, horrible Demeter, sunscreen'd and magnitude. A traitor to the pomegranate. The wren will call. The dogwood flower. The river will part into volumes. And I wood, and I still, and I hearing.

It was a siren's answer.
It spoke of drains, and smelts, and burgundy.

#44

#43

And the hands came down, flat upon the desk. This was your dismissal. Leave the lyric, they told me, there, and bother no one with the morning. Chorea sancti viti. A terrible disease. Propped up in a younger style, say, "the salad days of borrowed plates." All the forgetting that food entails. I mean, the empirical, and the pretend! Characters sent scattered through doors. While in the line of paper trails, you think again of breakfast.

Aluminum frond, like an image on water. One glance is as bad as another. Actaeon posted a sign of warning. "All things / are not told / to all." A mirrored box, a shield askew: drawings of the real in shadow. Or: brilliant in the light of capture. Many birds overhead. Many symbols, moving prodigal shit-deployers. The skies in my eyes like clothespins, like flies, that pivot instead of remember.

(An image: an image). Let's describe him calling them forward.