Autumn was an old Viennese street held up in sacrifice to the sky,
With burnt-song offerings that still see through the clouds, as they see through you.
His was cobbler craft of reed-winded flame for the foot in tune,
Amid the outsnuffed shopkeepers’ lights and the candlesmoke of midnight hours,  
Pulsing above the inner heart of the Ringstrasse
Of brass signs and paving stones, misted and mute.
His was the candelabra of wick-notes
Wanded through the windowed rooms of forested night.
His were those woods filled with doorways, bookcases, and stairs
And everything dim and warm with people, no longer there.

***

The winter sunlight played across the keyboard of crypted windows,
And in the muted under-roofs of ice and snow,
On one window, like a hand in whole rest,
The caramelized glass swallowed the flame-image of the stray redbird
And the black carriage wheels that passed.

In the long hallway of the Viennese flat,
One candle remained lit in the mouth of song.

The cicada husk of the crescent moon sheds in cyclides light,
Molted whispers of life, spread like perfume behind the ear,
Or like silver earrings unadorned and scattered around the night-lit table.
Here too, the garden gown of Babylon lies heaped in soiled ruin,
Beaten down to sand at the foot of the bed of the Tigris and Euphrates.
  
Though the dunes are its aerial, root-bound springs,
Though the underground nymphs tend with cicala wings,
And underspurt of incessant summer song to lure
The resurrection rose of Jericho to bud once more,
In desert-faith for the hanging garden of a full moon.

Fall to me, all you streets of Rome,
With your embrowned oils from torched walls and breccia of shadows,
The pizzicato of stairways and afternoon slowly closed
Like the thick, leathery-echo from this book of all roads.

Fallen, smoldering empire of storefronts and back-shop heirlooms,
Your lupine hills unbound with milk of cur in the wind and woods,
To your fallow fields rowed deep by a conquest of oars,
To the deepest silence and soot-muted oneness of Pompeii,
And a sky that is an ancient coin, without worth,
But still rubbed smooth at the edges by overfond lovers.

Pure sorrow is too beautiful for this world.
Pure sadness is too human for us to feel anymore.
But grief is still a snow-covered tongue whose melting chokes and overcomes.

The immortal is the time before the rain
When we have thoughts of it afterward.  
By then, the mosaic of tongue and its words
Are broken stones swept away
By the shuttling broom of storm.

Alstroemeria, Southern-rooted watcher of the skies,
Angel tongues of Peru, with your ******-blushed annunciation
Or Incan-hued sacrificial fire.
So much like the moon tongues of all rivers in first frost or first harvest.  

Like first love, first death is the truest form,  
And blooms in scorn of all its many-mirrored rivers to come.

There in the box lives all of Christmas,
All of the serendipity of the midnight cross,
All of the iced tassels and tinsel-worn frost,
All of the gazed-upon rooftops that turn
From emptiness to stars to ever-wondering thoughts.
All of my boyhood eyes are closed now
With those in the box.