I Miss the Ligurian Bees

for GWH


i.

I miss the Ligurian bees
Their fresh congregations
To consecrate taste, tasting
Before the time of this
Unsettling assizes

ii.

The birds too have lost
Their song, their new sounds
A searching cacophony
—Their old calls are ghost notes
I cherish but cannot tell —

iii.

What is the language spoken
When every last syllable is broken?

iv.

Instant voles—
A tabernacle of the relict

I live in this flat gospel
Against my will

I would synod the recalcitrant silence
That gathers, unceremonious

v.

O, the scriptura continua of a buried curse!
As if feeble, crumbled words could
These fortunes reverse
— I don’t even distrust magic as such —

vi.

If only a calando!
If only, a calando.

Latedwelling night does not tremble
As Morpheus filches dreams
Molto piu

(It was not you
Who came to me
In the discordant evenings)

vii.

Darned as in stitched
Or Damned?

Both.

The tongue is its own
Requiem.

viii.

Fault scarps of the soul
I trip upon
Rift valleys
Of the most somber moanings

Don’t pretend
There is life and death
In these truant gloamings
— pretend, pretend —

ix.

I cannot recall certain facts
About you and am ashamed
Which one of you
Am I to remember?
The startled passersby
Remark on this strange palaver
With the unseen
— no one imagines
Devotion

x.

See what the electricity has done!
A parade of convulsions,
Convulsing

Look, I am a shook thing

What does the light even mean?
There is no remembering

xi.

The body as cloak
Were we so woven?

xii.

Even the witness that was I
Vanished in the swash of that fake sea

Dendrites slopped like stipes
Of sargassum
Tricked by the swell,
A deceiving sea level

xiii.

What is glass but cold refusal
Of the seen?
Intercessory — why intercede? —
Disfavored stone whose occlusal
Banishes me

xiv.

The sulking light
Of all my unremarkable
Afternoons…

The dispelled lexicon
And its paltry “memorial”

xv.

Pursuant to the Law of Finds?
Or the Law of Salvage?
Get serious. There is nothing
In this lugubrious haul.

Words I have blotted
From my dictionary:
Ashes, Lazarus.

xvi.

Ineluctable reluctant mirror
I am to incant my affirmations
— Enchant myself with dubious cant —
I cannot

Can the soul reweave the worn?

xvii.

I have thought myself dead
Since July 16, 2014, June 8, 2015,
September 5, 2015…

My life reduced
To an ablative,
Ablated

xviii.

Archivist of us, earthen us
Decay is a whole, enticing world!
Poor scholar to your beauty
For failing eyes

Your dying whispers
I still can’t translate

All I have are the husks of words

xix.

The stone of the heart
Isn’t such a rare diagnosis

Days I feel concrete
Spreading to my limbs
But too slowly

I wish I had buried you
With a golden tongue —
Do you speak to me?

xx.

The swollen river’s invective
I dismiss on behalf of a good death
Beware the bridge Marsyas

In the corridor of
Spanish moss
A pall of nothingness

xxi.

You flowered white
As if from the black root
Your last breaths
A pavane of the unwilling
Fire into whose door
My mortal eyes could not see

xxii.

O, I forsake resilience. I reclaim
Forsaking. I forsake foraging.
I forsake nowness, thenness,
The thin slake of gone