1. Bronze

Mid-July well past the end of summer
untuned with sagging strings.
The old world women gather
near the moldering bricks of their tenement.
Does this mark an end? The El passes
roaring through their skulls again.
 
In suspended time they talk and do not listen.
In suspended time life must have its ears
torn out to assure itself of hearing.
Do they know that Catherine de Medici
poisoned her lover on an afternoon such as this?
 
Fragonard’s Lady doesn’t care.
Swinging along
Swinging along
Life is but a dream.
Let her fall gracefully into the flower bed;
there, wisteria and jasmine grow forever in eternal bliss.
 
The women gossip on. What brought them here?
In the first place, they don’t even wait for death.
Or will forgetting it all stop the nausea
shooting through your questionable flesh.
What is their flesh but a series
of wall panelings that move — depending
on the length of time you stare at them.

If they had eyes they would see the patches
of plaster crumbling from their walls
or the massive blocks of glossed aluminum
glinting from the sky, through their very bodies.
It is quiet in the room upstairs where time
seeps in and out between the cracks,
where gas lamps flicker on the mantel
books are written threading histories
of rising and decline.
Men-kau-Rá has risen but cannot
recall the River Styx. Unlock the jaws
of the deceased. What good are ideas
if they cannot be eaten?

A folding chair is moved and scraped along
the concrete. The women whisper
drifting by like summer vapors breathing in decay.
And then, again, the El shrieks past, suspending time,
a dream within a dream,
swinging along
suspending time
suspending time.


2. Iron
 
If I had told you there was nothing exceptional
Sunday after the grocery fire,
there would be no shifting in your pineal gland
and time would stretch its legs successively
over a paper tinsel calendar.

But blacksmiths know better than to smile
if their blistered skin is too charred
to forge the sacred sound. Can they feel
that blazing Sunday in January,
smell the tarred warehouse next door?
But they have not yet been begotten, and I am
mindful of their mothers begetting great
grandmothers and then more daughters,
all behind mist and fern somewhere
in a flaming prehistoric amber room of glass.

Burnt wood past one decade then the next,
once in every ten years, or in a hundred,
just as if centuries span the aftermath
of Goethe’s death; there is no time unless
self-consciousness begins to ride the ticking
needle at the moment of birth.

And even then, the dawn of history
appears for the precise first time
in each new brain that forms itself
while untold pictures flash and disappear,
but for a moment unnoticed, within his ear:
Nathan Glover 1660-1753
seed catalog and almanac
by the wicker chair and of the diary
written near the blue-tiled fire
alone, with the buzzing and shadows of rain.

And of the colorless memoirs —
Always to have used gray ink of whiskered evening
Never to have been struck by sunburst.
And now a burnt-out crumpled portico of dust.


3. Steel
 
Churning factory noise perpetually sizzling
through the quiet of night lamps long since faded,
and across the street, where pebbles and dirt crunch
beneath the worn-out boots of J.C. Doyle
the war veteran, who stopped his evening walk
in search for a gap from that infernal hissing.

Somewhere in the mid-thirties it was said
he found that all Saturdays are full of
early green leaves and sunlight, that the
pillars on his morning porch were circular
and did not bear the mark of ages.

It was around that Saturday — did he
fall into a Byzantine bazaar,
a market-place of sprawling sweat
or back into a dream within a dream.

My dreams have built thick poles of fencing wire.
Not even leaves of climbing vines
can choke the midnight echo.
Ipomoea bloom late in darkness;
you can hear them in your deepest sleep.
I am humming in the old brains of drying bodies:
It is the repetition of sound that kills.