The furrier tells the bell by the time of skinning,
Archangels by their clipped wings as they fell,
Statesmen by show of divided hands at plenary ringing,
The wind by quell of truant petals from daffodil.
And even love tells its beginnings and endings,
By lips shorn of lambswool words and yield of bale.
In light or darkness, though our animal souls uprisen,
Still in their wordless and naked measuring dwell.

Love has become less and less than the loneliness that abides,
Shaped by death after death into morphological surmise,
A sense of evolution without atavistic ties,
(Like her lips forever disjoined from mine).

Pleiades seven maidens sigh,
The sweeping, coruscating gown of stars,
In stillness-rapt, the cosmos in collective gasp,
At Atlas, his amalgamated bulk of last breath.

***

We breathe in the gown of ending,
The snake tongues of our synapses
Flicking out the decomposed praeludium
For the saprobic stars to feed off the detritus of night.

Death comes close and breathes a little over my lips and smiles at my terror,
No more the night has songs for the snow, has love for the whiteness,
But lets it go to the last hallucinations under the sun.
Grandfather, lift my soul when this boyhood is done,
And think of things to tell me when darkness grows too cold,
I will be in the corner of eternity, writing poems for no one.

The most beautiful poem is written on a shroud,
As if the stars closed their eyelids at seeing the gods die,
But still-gauzy foundlings like cities of dusted sunlight,
Bound so long between the pillars of Athens and Rome,
Disconsolate remnants in after-golds and winding sheets of stone.

The most beautiful poem speaks only to death,
So it may know something of our loss, our bereftness,
And like the turnkey of afternoon to evening
Under the warm-felt pressure of our reminiscing hands,
We too shall pass like long-limbed sunset along the barren grass,
Like so many solitary walks bundled up in Autumn mists,
And eyes filled with someone once there and absences to come.

We have made too much of love,
Something it will never be,
Without touch or place or rosary bead,
Beyond ourselves and the human race,
But no nearer to infinity,
Without cause or prompting by war or peace,
Simply quelled within its own embrace,
The wax seal on our lips for its unity and defeat.

Moon of Pythagorus, such proofless arithmetic derived,
No sigmoidal curves or cold calculus of the divine,
But pale barbarian, war-bringer of straight lines,
Your sea drifts commandeered like lit ash-spears in line,
Or the thrashing of wind-whipped rags of horses’ manes.
Moon of Pythagorus, the phantasms of your campfires
Of waiting armies flicker like fireflies along the stream.

Burn me, Moon, with your fire-tongued spears,
Your haunt of horses, unbridled and reared,
Burn an eye through my heart like the oculus of the Pantheon,
So I can see my pulse beat against the ash of naked footsteps
Of those who make false shrine to me.