gone fishing to find it
to explain this absence,
let’s say i’ve been fishing
because what other phrase
will fit? that i have been feeling
the line to test the weight
of the line and what it will carry
when the noise wears my ears
stopped full of it now,
when eye breaks
from will to look
where do senses go?
and sense
when the organs will no
longer play to the unwilling
mind?
in flight
As the babies lost their cries,
keening women gathered them
to chests to gallop them over hills
past the shadowed valley,
snipers at the gates.
What else would a dragon keep
but these? Against theft
of treasures it could not
know the golden virgins:
the pose of the hour
was vigilance
against the useless piles,
and it curled at our ankles,
holding us to their warnings
against loss.
Eyes of every witness burned
and through tiny speakers
in our ears, the guards at the gate
said go home; the curators
of spectacle insisted, there’s nothing
and only the crazy and the sentenced
kept on and the angels at the floor
with the mops, and the dead.
Open casket equals open door
to enter the theater of mourning
then came hawks and the hawkers
went the blind mice Now run,
someone said, and we did then
the farmer’s wife.
Admission was free to the public,
see how they––
History was removed by the surgeons.
They held efficient needles to our lips,
we were the crimes against their progress
to be sentenced, but our eyes were burning
from the gas, and our faces wet
you fell three times
along the road
and we with you
even now
the guards feared.
*
From Flight Songs
In the pregnant pause.
If the edge
if the fall
if the downpour
or a sudden neglect
of the next breath
if in the heat to the land
of no light the blind prophet
will not come, if the wailing
starts again, if the Edens are
forever gone and the third day
brings no relief and the next call
no answer if the cold brings the
ships again––or won’t, please do
not lay this down while you are
here. Please, stay
for the carrying
until there is
none.
