Wind
When the last drops of humidity were shaken from the wind
we moved northward out of the magnolia groves, skirting
the boreal pine forest already tanned with autumn’s onset,
hearing therein the coppersmith’s sledge ringing out beneath
the sheer flank of sky, shifting blue like an angel’s thigh
or a word freshly hatched from the humming loam of thought,
private though it was, and we abiding such gestation in silence,
hesitant to unsettle the future, which drew us in its wake
like a merganser on which we could not gaze for too long.
For too long had I kept the ticket for my passage
upon the Black Sea vessel in the pocket of my green vest,
for too long had the mercenaries been deprived a glimpse
of the rugged waters as they climbed the hills of Trebizond,
for too long had our sled languished beneath the pecan tree,
the rain’s rusty teeth gnawing its welded seams summerlong,
while we cheered the sailors idling on the café terraces,
the underside of the bridge spanning the Crabapple River
flickering orange in our campfire light. The king’s brother’s
speech to the mutineers from the corsair woke us at dawn.
Three men with skin hissing like static stood by father’s
ivory coffin, his pain now flown to other fleshly harbors.
Vigor was a highland sap our hearts drank, was a slap
to the inside of our faces, which swelled ripe with purpose.
Come out, we called, not knowing who to expect, out
of your dank stables, from the web of roots through which
a turquoise river pours, out of your huts on the salt flats,
from the black glass towers thrusting skyward like an impulse,
from the convocation of the fraternal order of elks,
from barges moored on canals where the water is so still
the child mistakes it for black glass, come out, you sisters
dripping prayers in the chapel nave, you candle scientists,
you pilots scarred by love, it’s gone, we say to you, those joys
receded across the marsh, you greet your children in markets
like strangers and carry home in your throats the hot pear
of sadness, gone are they, we say, the lake and mother
and the piano sonata, the sunlit mushroom and the train
that split the woods, the train at which we hurled rocks
in our exuberance, gone, sold and dead, its whistle
fading in the empty high school football stadium where
under the bleachers once a green desire awoke. And
they do come, these scriveners, gripping sandalwood canes,
these criminals, these animal surgeons, contortionists,
lugging their crates of astrolabes and oboes, the jade icon
of the rhinoceros, the coven who summoned malice
from the night’s fringes, leading their horses Crescendo
and Margarita, the officers, their backs latticed with scars,
the vendors of conifer oils, the architects, the orchestra,
the blenders of textile dyes, the twins tumbling from a van,
hoisting their sacks of suet cakes and Persian coins, we are
blended with these others blown against us by circumstance,
these for whom no introduction is needed, they hand us
a splinter of blue chalk with which to mark the parcels
and leave a message for stragglers on the roadside shrine.
For a time we tunneled forward in a humming cage of sound,
in a divine fury we bit the very ground, believing in it
were the same minerals animating the meteors the blind
girl woke us to point to as they arced over the Biscayne Bay.
Do the eternals see us filling our pails with creekwater,
skinning white squirrels in a bus shelter? Did they leave
us any fruit from the sephiroth tree? How strong our children
look, how flushed from sprinting along the ridge, their arms
buzzing with verse. Children, look, we found the queen’s ring
among the barberry rimming the quarry where last night
Jasmine heard a moaning. Last night was the last night
you will have to sleep on the saddle blankets in the yard
after a meal of turnips soaked in vinegar. Farewell, floods,
vermin, the skulking magistrate, shrieks from the polio tent.
It is as if we were never in those suburbs, those favelas,
those shanty towns, those villages reeking of shrimp and oil,
over which the planes flew low and rumbling toward Cairo,
Irkutsk, Montevideo. We are the instantiating torrent,
chewing shards of moonlight, bringing no armistice papers
to a bloated sovereign, smuggling no oil, no coal overland,
manifesting our traumas in ways we need help to see.
Our dreams are rinsed, the polestar is red, whispers the oracle
returning from the salt mine, one hand on her third breast.
Two jays flit ahead of the vanguard. Cabbage fields glisten.
We listen inward as we go, fingering our silver whistles.
Minister Plenipotentiary
In the fourth decade of his life he was made,
after years of what his undersecretary called
empiricist devotion, teasing out the locodescriptive
influences in the early volumes of Buffon,
standing barefoot in the dewchilled plot of mown rye
flanking the Vendôme Asylum in order to suture
without distraction the drifting plates of his dream,
shunted to the arena of his apprehension
through a pneumatic network of capillaries
and crystalline conduits the architects of which
could no longer be found beneath their blankets
in the millhouses by the Loire, after absorbing
countless rejections from potentates languishing
in the byzantine empyrean conferred upon them
through who knows what past decrees or inheritance
or chance, rejections delivered by nameless paralegals
with linseed-oiled mustaches, arriving breathlessly
at his cottage outside Jauret, dismounting their clay-
spattered velocipedes and removing from wicker
panniers the official document on Whatman wove
paper watermarked 1802, whereon even the profuse
introductory pages rehearsing the administrative
procedures by which the decree was reached
were bordered by etched framing lines, the whole
bound in blue levant morocco by Rivière and Son,
elaborately gilt, with the original blue paper wrappers
at the end, should one care to flip past the coded
dealer’s note in pencil on the recto of the back
free endpaper, absently perhaps, still pondering
the implications of this fresh failure, the prairie
warbler quietly piercing to death an acorn weevil
in the shade of the dooryard, beside a spray of jonquils,
beneath a persimmon thickening with the first warm
gusts of spring, after the death of the duchess
whom he had held like a Nereid in his estimation,
the victim, so went the speculation, of arsenic
poisoning in her studio at Forcheville, and after
the deputy directorate’s craven efforts to deflect
his mistaken claim that Admiral Tourville’s tomb
was in Balbec when in fact it lay in the incense-rich
western nave of Saint-Eustache, perpetually garlanded
with a wreath of Oconee Bells replaced weekly
by a novitiate, after the lengthy illness that had
compromised the mobility of his right hip,
forcing him to bring his sandalwood cane
on his ambles in the foothills of Haute Garonne,
he was nominated Minister Plenipotentiary.
When the sedan arrived to transport him to his post
he climbed in without assistance, his face retaining
the strained stoicism of a provincial oboist
whose solo has not yet come, but is promised.
