Death is to become sunshine,
To break open the self to the world,
In sunwheat gold and peasant hearth,
(The sun is the only empire of peasants)
Every grain of annihilation is still a seed,
And the sunlight carries the sleepless dead,
Their melted voices are warm upon our ears,
The sounds rooted in, but when we do not hear,
No more than the dead worshiping the dead.

Methuselah, old profligate wastrel of evergreen time,
In giant generational strides, close the striking distance,
Take my face in its failed vision and drink out the eyes,
One fang at my cheekbone, the tendril of silver music
Shown through, pull out its roots and the topsoil of skin,
Blow from your cadaverous lips to the beadhole of ear,
And whisper about the hours of my hummingbird life.
Here you sing alone with weak-winded isotopes of your half-lives.

The soul has as its sextant the ribs opened wide,
The heart its compass in fluid circuitous diatribe,
When each to zone the geometry of Greek sky  
With its powdery fabulism of centaurs and jars
From Aesop’s wine of words, the untimeliness
Of sundials to Charybdis’s bloom of giant watery eyes.

To know oceans by the dry riverbed of my pulse,
To scale only as high as the sparrow’s tomb of my heart.

Says the soldier to his love,
When he holds her handful of fantasy
That itself recalls holy wine and bread,
The blood seeps into his own hands is all.

Says the soldier to his love when he crawls
To impotence of mud and stone sediments
That augur not a fleshen but a fossil birth,
Like the bone of the once-masticating jaw.

Said the soldier to his love, when he fell face first
Into the nuptials of lily, delphinium, and dark earth,
I only wish to be the petals for your wedding, my love...

From the first, the fluid-filled sacs of stars,
The yolk of yellow lightning and oily rain,
Then the placental storm, birth-giver of roads and oxen loads,
Witch towers made from silk hair and the peasant sucklings of plague,
Whelped there by the milk of the river Arno, by turns pacified or stern.

The Dark Ages is a storm nesting in the sky, built by posthumous stares,
Piece by piece, a raven’s birth from eyes and saliva of roads and rivers.
Of the woman who gave birth, the sway of leaves where once fell hair,
Only her lips hover in the air of warm sun,
Like a fountain in the bare palace courtyard
Suspiring, flowing, extolling…

I remember the hidden chapel bells in her voice,
The little cloister of her abbey looks that opened
To a lovelorn courtyard of cisterns and well works,
The sounding pulleys and ropes from the springs,
I will miss her nothing said to my infinite misgivings.

A vintner of aged leaves in the wine-press of the sun,
Thin-skinned like the lucent grapes from the vine-runs
Of the island trellises and teal-cordoned waves, lowest slung
Fruit-laden bough of sky, Sicily, whose ateliers of rolled cigarettes
And uprolled sleeves like tides tease smoke into studio paints,
The black apple wine of storm made into mouthfuls of pulp rain,
Before the sunrise is gathered again in fishing nets and crab pots,
The coastal towns with their salted roofs of pied clay and pigeons
Along the lava stone streets, and night from the chanteuse of Egypt,
Singing her coral to heron, as when her bird-like barefooted slaves
Left tracks across Old Kingdom wastes, so this dreaming old man
Leaves his wrinkles to these grapes and across the sand-island pillow,
Asleep with his fathers, hay-hauling peasants of wandering darkness.