i brightness

This summer birds fly out from the top branches of a tree

            outside the window, dancers running out from the wings,

& a tree that was dying for years of an unknown disease

            proffers its fruit again – small, hard, green & bitter;

the birds fly upward, folded into the brightness of the air,

            distant but clear: air separate as an ocean to one on shore,

clear as they are not, so near we feel the rush of their wings

 

 

ii with the help of good fortune

This was the longest day, we sat under a tree talking

            about notes & accidentals, a word & its inflections

& our part in ordering them, making a world revolve

            around us & obey, while high winds plow the ocean

& a network of radar signals fails; in dreams you often

            see his body washed up on the shore, pale & slack,

& fortune is a tide lifting and playing with the fingers

 

 

iii to gain [the harbor?]

Between voice and word, sea wind & sail, no certainty     

            but the rough map of an expedition, from the ruins home,

to the neon light of a harbor, a drunk watchman running

girls on the dock, back to piercing silence, a death-mask;                           

or the other story: a course through dark seas of longing,

            alien cities, a hand moving across skin, across a wound

& the return years put off for a series of false identities

 

  

iv black [earth?]

Your eyes are two pails of terror carried into the future:

            what will you find – fertile black earth measured by feet      

or a yard choked with anonymous limbs, screams lying

            like withered leaves in an index; the fullness of a bird call,

the sound of running water, or (you say) roads & bridges

            mined, lines ripped out, the waste sunk in stagnant pools,

the melody outlawed that stitched words to durable air?

 

 

v the sailors [are unwilling?]

And it’s true, many didn’t leave but stayed behind,

invisible at the farther reaches of a city, shunted around

in closed cars from dirty bed to dirty shop, children

sent to keep a place in the queue; always, somewhere 

at the farther reaches of the mind, you know, stopping

            for a paper, watching the news soundless in an airport,

that it must be temporary, this difference between us

 

 

vi great gusts

The story travelled slowly from that corner of the world;

            by the time they were heard of poor souls, they perished

some fleeing the catastrophe & some who stayed behind;

            a wind now carries scraps of papers, spreading the news,

sketching their customs & the major tenets of their faith

            in bird’s flight, but not the diminutives of a boy’s name,

you say, or the song you sung at school during a blackout

 

 

vii and on land

The words are ghost limbs, cracks on a tongue’s surface;

dessicated rivers curling at the edges, falling backwards

to gag the throat & shiver on the skin like flaking paint

            when a house is hit by a stray missile, a garden wrecked

and a pond where fish float pale under the sick skin;

            but in the morning blossoms fall, after the city is wasted

a tree scatters petals, forming a beauty entirely unwilled

 

 

viii sail

And when your eyes are void, emptied out by waiting

            there is a sound that stirs in the sharp shell of the ear,

a midnight voice, for those whose seas are not sunlit

            or Hellenic, whose native harbors are dirty and cold,

singing they sent us far away, far away from the city

and they gave us peas to eat, just like chicken feed

I’ll put out a marker buoy, and slip away on the sly*

 

 

ix the cargo

Of the human cargo, just a few survived the expedition:

            on arrival they were fed & slept in a high school gym,

while laws were made in town to rationalize & use them;

            the permit was made out to be ‘permanently temporary’.

Maybe it’s true the dead don’t die but live on, blind cats

            ghosting in city streets and squares, or implacable dogs

sleeping in littered doorways & outside subway stations

 

 

x since

 Since then no flight is innocent, since then you’re here,

            so near no one sees you till you perform your strangeness,

as challenge or custom, wound or skill, rage or song.

            You said to plant nasturtiums around the condemned tree

& the disease fled centrifugally, moved to the outskirts;

            & the tree applied wasted limbs to the synthesis of light;

this summer, birds sow seed-pits in furrows of bright air

 

 

xi flowing

Time quickens in flight, asylum crawls like syrup

            in an airless waiting room until the number comes up

& panic sticks in flecks of dust on the asker’s lips;                

            a native satyr wed you in the recklessness of his heart,

sharing an identity for which he had no sentiment,

            his friends threw ironic confetti & laughed like hyenas;

in the end, after the legal years, he released you

 

 

xii many

If we get rid of them, they said, or kill enough of them,

disease will die with them & they will fertilize our soil;

they said before they did it: it’s the best use for you,

            roots will snag your bones & worms nest in your eyes--

for the grandeur of the task made them wax lyrical,

            sacrificial, full of mournful lust for the stranger’s body

they destroyed too expertly for spade or god to find

 

  

xiii [receive?]

It’s now more than a year since you had word of them.

            They grow skeletal as trees in winter, a theory of color

stripped of proof by each blank day & metaphors fail,

            exhaust themselves running faster & farther & fuller,       

leaving the mind without play, the eye without a sign.

            Only then do the dead come, white on white, setting sail

from the eyes’ harbor to the Sargasso Sea of memory

 

 

xiv tasks

They enter the bloodstream cell by cell, running like water

            underground, rebuilding the city in the cave of another self,

their bed around another tree’s root; we won’t eat the fruit

            this summer, it may be the next, or even the one after that,

meanwhile the work is all waiting & taking infinite pains,

            making tea of the weeds & burning the dry underbrush,

keeping the plot clear, as it revolves around us and obeys

 

 

xv dry land

Ithaka & Mycenae are the same city, that was the scrap 

            thrown from a ship, swallowed by a fish, carried by a gull;

a day & night ground them to sand, the innocent & not,

            violently they all went into the foundation pit of the earth,

sent by betrayal or revenge, fell under a wave’s blade,

            & this silence is the interval before the next act--when

props lie plotless, you rest your voice & wait in the wings

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* From a Greek political exile’s song, Mas Pigan Exoria Serviko