Incinerated weight of the ploughshares.
Wheel of the solar Cyclops.
The humming of ravens and roots.
Darker, a sovereign domain.
Swords, their hasps aglimmer.
Rowel spurs pinned to the hands.
Lambs with their throats slit. Slivers.
Sulfur and scree char the plane.
Without scrap metal, rebar, or rings,
who will know you, my body?
And when naked skin seethes
with this breath, and these bindings
of dark silk grade nightward,
will these arms, these eyes
cede the embers, the ash
of forgotten fires in hand baskets
stoked and scattered by the wind?
We travel, arrayed as harlequins,
over the smoldering sands.
Bronze, neglected bells.
Body bound by foot and hand,
wounded and hanged, do you beg
to salvage the light from before,
the doublet of vainglorious silks,
the chambers and instants,
the falcon’s wings haughty
over faraway shipwrecks?
Pit graves of sea spray and gold.
And the stars, now decamping
immobile and sepulchral
through the expiatory dome
that annuls ancient crimes
of elegiac armies, green serpent of day
that snuffs out dark beacons,
the stars cast their light on the madness
of a sunset of kettledrums.
Black cohort, affliction of light,
light glowing black on the outcrops.
The soaring of an eagle,
distaff of a sky perplexed,
can it shatter the darkness,
procurer, black panther, ebony,
of a bed of pleasure, a hollow,
man’s succor, derisory
spindle, a body, dreary
dowry, usufruct of shadows
in the abandoned manor?
The moon binds body to body.
The white blaze of hawthorn,
the prone scimitar of night,
the beeches the March light
joins scorching in a sheaf,
the whole of midday disbanded
is a frock torn to tatters:
tunics, a swooning, dear
to the eyes, posthumous, dead
unease. Dark metal, greedy clouds
For foxes and ferrets
and the scorpion’s claw
have made of the sky
on this bright day their pasture.
Everything is conjury.
I gaze at my frozen hand.
In my heart, countless shadows
come to rest. The horses, the oxen
smell death. Vain fire
consuming an offering impure!
The light vanishes. The tiger’s eye,
the panting of the dog, endure.