Keep your trees, keep them for your heaven of ashen dusk
And night like the pale-faced deathmask of emperors,
No reason that the commoner to oblivion is hushed,
These old-wise woods and leaves, peopled without us.
Keep Macedonian dust lightly conquered over the breeze,
So that it shoots its tail like the centuries-sole comet,
The scorched earth left by Alexander’s mapmaker eyes,
Swung wide like his Sarissophoroi over Persian might.
Remember the lesser grove of his teacher Aristotle’s tribe,
They have only slipped their sandals off, to bare themselves
Of sound and the concourse of the foot’s impulse,
Caught the lithesome wind, to flow outside our hearing,
And muse as empire of air and loss and forgotten walks.
Keep your trees and the darkening sky through them
That remind me of the passing into the past.
Never is the poem from tongue of ***** or plow.
Sarissophoroi were Macedonian light cavalry under Alexander, so named for the pikes they carried (sarissa).
Aristotle taught Alexander until his mid-teens.
