Bring out your dead
with the appendages of coal,
a midnight shell,
for whom the bell tolls.

The streets are bleak.
The demise is contagious.
The Black Death is nigh
and nothing can save us.

The Reaper has arrived.
his scythe’s in demand,
with pestilence beside
the right of his hand.

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…