subterraneal yet unsweet, recurring, rhythmic,
a flux pattern rolling up from rockbed 
teaching us, though we’re children,
how to keep the way utterly everything…

we keep it, raining speech quizzical
pliant in the waves of moving seas 
                                                            the sea
always comes to we who live on shore
but are never sure of ourselves
our hearts congested, arrows sent 
in odd directions flaring out 
hiding under waterfalls under meadows 
but cannot escape

the Ictus excludes no one: 
rioters fire shots, pirates spirate,
orphans redound. 
                                                In Turgenev’s tavern
in the saddest town in Russia I pause
a hot afternoon to listen
and there it gulchingly is clinching with valiant fist
its claim on me, waiting for me to slow up, meet its
sorrowful Spanish eyes, stare me down with its
dreadful home the world. I
pretend at first             then play         then quietly start 
to sing a silent listening song: 
guitars, bamboo, crosses tilted over fields.

The ictus has organs that squeeze the rotary dark
probing as a bird’s beak probes,
refrains compressed to a single, whole note,
and three-dimensional space shakes
from all the rhythmic spinning, all these canticles
of dawn. I brace myself 
in dark earth’s rocking, dark and blue
with bitter glow.