Transitions of
Plane in the Appearance
of Attic Korai
Beyond the window, in the fields the
flax yellows.
Who has taken the months, the
festivals,
the deep belly of our flame?
In our memory images of heavy wrong
whirling –
slogans and the wreath of blood at the
door
with all we owned – a weave of
restlessness
and cobwebs, from the missed heartbeat
finding
no way back.
Rain soaks the fires. We are condemned
by seconds sinking silently in space.
The sun hangs in the ropes of morning.
It is itself,
as high as the day, the stories
disintegrating
along the way we went,
the place without reason never reached,
with everyone singing through dust
and black loaves and the names of
slaves
a salt burn in the mouth.
Tyrant shadows enshrine the sun.
A thousand times blacker, the lunatic
unrolls the parchments of memory, of
hope,
droplets of music marking the hour,
the scaffold, the crown, the henchman’s
axe, the burst of blood
a red lark in compasses of poplar
leaves.
We are walking in rain, silver linden,
meadows the dead
came to, my sisters as tall as flowers.
In the old battlefields
Antigone
the pine sap clings to birdsong,
flowing through us.
The world is deceived, not smelling the
blood, the deeper sun
captive in plain scarves of cobwebs and
terror,
this meaning of bread and flooding
light,
a prayer to gods older than burials,
in the oat, and through the catacomb
where the well springs, and the stink
of the dead
is washed from us,
in the first fall of the first sun, in
the yellow dew of torchlight,
carrying our own ashes, the high silver
of the stars
we climb to.
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