A Modern Lament

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.