I tremble at the edges of
feeling, in grey cotton,
as the morning trains pass
beyond,
shaking the factory smoke
into bleak portraits
of your faces: the modern
woman, the modern man.
Modernity, dissolving into
air, swallowed up by soldiers
in white collars, catching
the buses at 20 to 2:00.
“She always could blend
time,”
they say as they settle by
the hearth,
my witchcraft always the
subject
of after dinner drinks.
They enjoy putting out
their cigarettes in the
palms
of shabby mystics.
Yes, they know now I waste
myself
building tomorrow out of
ashes,
that I spent my summers
tracing lifelines
of sailors lying cold
beneath the waves.
“Always could summon the old
souls,”
they whisper to one another,
casting away their tea
leaves
with January eyes.
Oh, how I wish to tell them,
that from the basement I am
blind
to the dawn of their vogue
discipleship,
because Time swept me up
into his brittle arms,
and broke at the hands when
he carried me
up the hillsides; my
immensity was
too much in the fog, my
burden of atoms
could not be borne by the
tide of land.
They fear the truth of
rumors
that I was born in a casket,
and buried in a crimson
womb.
I walk backwards, flame in
hand,
down the corridors of the
plantation,
the walls dripping in the
wax and wane of a century’s moon;
whispering cacophonies of a
sore wisdom.
This is where my mother died
in childbirth, on the eve of
the winter solstice.
At the window now,
I look upon the field
where my father hung
in his adamantine chains,
marked by that gaping range
of earth
where the corn forgets to
grow.
Those ivory pillars in the
distance linger,
fashioned from the remnants
of my closest kin,
accompanied by flowers
of a gruesome morning.
Lupus where the dogs bled;
Poppies where the children
fell.
Friends, have you
disremembered our relations?
You sit too comfortably by
the electric fire,
while on the horizon loom
the clouds of Rome, harboring
the blood of bodies we went
hiding
beneath our brains.
And we are left with deft
hands to put pistols
to the ears of our horses,
to swathe the spoils of
victory in the forests.
We lay upon the bones,
desperate to rest our heads
upon something we ourselves
have ended.
You gape collective at the
advent
of our uncivil wars,
while I make the business of
Orpheus,
dragging corpses up from
Hades,
just beneath the parlor
floor.
I must lead them, with no
lyre in hand,
but instead by the dire
music
of a battle drum,
beating,
in the cellars of
your understanding,
a modern lament
of a modern age.
