from Plague Nights
Night 547
Silence pastures
great wounds here.
Aquinas
is one of them.
At the celestial
threshold
of movement
a dignity, pretense.
Pretend
to spirit. To the
memorial noon, o
half-
impoverishment.
Silence
parts the ruin,
for you it seems.
You step
into the wound,
its consenting
choir.
Its elegant organs
with almost
visible
chords, remark
them.
Its metric idleness
so shapely
it could never
be an animal.
Night 604
Brush of alders against
my shoulder on the trail
inland. I once read
Leibniz in just this way,
by which I mean
aware of the touching
with my back to the sea
at the hour
of burlesque dragonflies.
My shoulders bleed
into my chest
thus making their angle
with pride, & with
the god of pride, by
which I mean my body.
Not the alders
which part in a nimbus
of tongues, whispering
equations of ash.
The alders, swords
molting into swords
& not the least
bit cruciform. I say
they brush me
as if it were their mind
behind the act
that gathers
them. This is the act
but not the mind.
This is not the banquet.
Night 646
I sought the flag
inside my eye,
I sought the will
inside the flag.
Eclipses passed.
I chipped
the frost away,
braided an exile
from
the amnesias
of crows. All
but form
rocks me in my
dirty sleep.
I am sorry
I came this way,
nothing is almost
the site
on which
the coronation
rested lightly.
My feasthood
propped
against the motel
marquee,
fine-grained
like a hot fire.
Improvident
like a fire.
The eye, the flag
inside the eye
smolder-
hums
the color of
migrating geese.
It’s simple—
matter descends.
Oil vapors
welcome us,
why not
paint
their portraits,
they pay so well.
Only the ghosts
age out
from this world,
once they’ve
smoothed
the origami
folds
from their eye-
shaped eyes.
I will have you
know
this weir of ash
encircling
the dun manes,
that just
brush the tops
of the porches
as they pass.
You may
have heard them.
