Morning was sudden-made as an onwardness of hills,
Meant for donning crusade in chainmail glistenings,
The sun visored in misty slats of cold steel,
To glimmer fusty through the godded grove,
A holy sepulchre, earthly-dim to its rafters of oak,
Where the forest-fall of sunlight shed its rosework,
And a red-breasted bird, its song-flight of dappled gleam,
And in the meadow, where colorful whorled the tale of Saladin,
Wayside flowers shook beneath the destriers' cloth caparisons,
A sunny fullness of vales for the crusaders' forest-heartened lungs,
And when this furthering of sights was sunken from,
Still an onwardness of hills to Jaffa like steppingstones.

Sings a small boy whose hair is tousled by the wind,
As too the folds of his mother’s peplos and the robes of clouds,
When Greece gathers in silence like the stillness for a deposed crown,
And all Athens around, the song of eiresione for firstfruits of Autumn,
Singing boys with the olive branches of colored wool and garlanded gourds,
A fall-bird to wander the Ionic sky, foretelling of new sunrise.
How that joyful ancient voice still haunts the songbird of sunset.

I never learned to weep
But ground my eyes down
On the griststone of a mill
Turned sadness into powder
Then choked on my own weaponized sorrow.

In our love for the wind and all that passes,
Each smote of self, a wisp of loss and absence,
Like the snow pendulous slips over last grasses,
In the glow of the lamppost and unholding fences:
So too the thousand-grains of breath
Blow through our bodies’ incandescence,
And in the starlit-smoke from the dragon's mouth
On wings of filth swirl the bone-edge of death.

She kisses like the reading of an ancient poem
With lips clouded by their own sighs,
So too with all her mock moons, paraselenae,
Obnubilations over her luminous mind,
Her last desperate pulchritude of night,
Chaste labors of assembling unspoiled dew:
Just crumbs of breath at the Greek feast of wind,
New sun pouring in to the clay flowers of our lungs.

A knife cuts clean the jugular of Greece,
Sun-shattered Autumn spurts in breezes,
Her face falls like crumpled sails of the trireme
~This is the sound of sinking clouds, mammatus~
The slow tottering head sinks into itself,
The arm of once-command lies lengthwise
Next to the sea, as waves erase all her form,
And the drear and maddened moon in its cage of stars.

Even when
All is said and done,
And I have become
A guardian angel
Over my past self,
Even then,
I have failed.