The farmhand burns the leaves, though the bodies of slaves
Lie at heaven’s impasse in the trees of dying looks, barring them
From peaceful death, the sad emulsified perch of love and heat,
Hung at noon like John Brown untended, bearded of sticky summer,
Heavy-headed swinging noon and the smell of honeysuckle blood,
Fetid day like the coming dirt of graves, the clinging air of disease,
Snake-winding down from the trees with no pleasure of the bitten apple.

Paraselene,
She kisses like the mock moon.
Her lies have beauty.

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.

The rain-modulated trees and the hoarse leaf
That in themselves tell a love so complete,
Were once the playthings of lovers’ sights
Who passed here once and once and never.
Love the destitution of love.

The clouds loosened from the sun
Like a frock from a tidywoman,
Past care with her labors done,
Crumpled rag thrown over a chair,
While a fan blows the loose ends
Of the apron ties like misty fragments,
The clouds loosened from the sun.

Long ago, the mother died who made the thatchwork basket with her daughter for the fish wrested from the water to the stove,
     Long ago, the sun that loved them both died while the rope-wrought hands of the fisherman grew old,
          Long ago, the lid to the teapot stopped its clink when closed by the hand of the granddaughter who would think of them all and the buried sun when she looked at the stove,
               Long ago, someone like me wrote a poem that no one will read in a sunless room with a cold stove.

To spend the hours compiling skies, indexing unearthly strata,
Mark the dog-eared page of moments with the hesitant thumb,
Waiting to turn each day and find death a bouquet of words,
All to view glowing creases under the closed eyelids of time.