Not for there to be fire, consuming
everything entirely; we leave that for
the sky, who always has the right
to a wisp interrupting a plain expanse, or to
partial darknesses. We leave it to
the tectonics to arrange the vistas,
knowing full well not to trouble if at no height
can we turn in a completed circle. We already know
there are no perfect circles in nature,
nor in art. And there is no conflagration,
either, only the searing trail
of a flame glimpsed behind a closing door.
and bonnet, sitting in her only chair
in her attic room in her
allotted repose, embroidering a system
into a sheet, unravelling, going over
again the riddled cloth. I found your
sheaves and sheaves of notes,
your illness, your ontology, your art.
I am everyone coming after, running my fingers
over your spidery lines, forgetting
the rustle made by your dress
as you sat down in your chair.
I guess it's a knight alone in the forest
with a dragon, and no one to see the arc of his lance.
After so many tales of one or two
strands, pressed on like a purple
bruise, can he take pride in the
bundled grass before him, braided by the wind?
Pride in what had had to have strength
to go to his line, but what now seems
indubitably feeble, and anyways only
to discourse on here and there, day to day, next
to the constancy of the leather cuirass
tied onto his barrel chest.
A handhold, a bluebird, fit to the palm,
the footprint of a dog in the road. He sits
in the dusty courtyard, poking at
cicada husks, sucking on caramels. The whole tome
will never be writ, save for a frontispiece
that trails off mid-sentence,
when something like a nascent cloud
puts the knife back in the courtyard,
or what everyone else accomplished
while he was prodding at
dragonfly wings. And that is all
that is ever written, and it is a sort
of battle, or journey, that can end in
judgment, and a great book, and a woman,
at the rock-point, in a blue ring of cloud,
wearing a sash.
