Tuesday 19 July 2016

Relic Environments Trilogy: Book I, Part 1.xvii

from Book I, Part 1, Mystery Tramp Eclogues



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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