a word, haphazard
   by the thwarted world,
for the word
     and from the word, springs
beyond extension, a cherry-taint
    of tongue and its exquisite redness
yet never what our purloined voices
     hold, falling quick the immense
roundness of the bedlam;
  such is still
in war when all the burly men
and the hubbub of artillery
  make only the commune
this is our utmost, deepest,
   wounded memory.
our life's entrails crouch no longer
  a striped tiger by the door
redolent of the many ebbed deaths;

  nights i lie awake
  and see all language lift,
  leaving in the night sky,
  an array of temporal splendors,
   famishing all the Earth in the dark,
  abandoning it, cross-eyed!