Poetry Archives

 …but infinities also passed out of this life,
    not having any witnesses, how, when, or in
    what manner they departed.
                      —Boccaccio, The Decameron

I.

Continuation before the event.

Elusive in
its hue.

Gnarled rhizomes (lily)
to protect

against sudden fever

or the body’s response
after exposure

(as the outer, gaseous layers
of a star’s core erode in death.)

More lilies

and baths of lavender to bring reprieve—
incarnate—

Nature will send
such poison

far from the noble organs…

The moon changed positions slightly
in the night

but to no great extent.

The plough failed to cut
the field.

II.

Sometimes they lived and sometimes
they died, the one or the other,

the earth taking them after the unlawful
hiding, the illicit care

when stricken, or abandoned.
An accident of pain of the body…

A refusal indistinguishable from salt.
Salt of refusal

to constitute a precedence of the physical, outside—
in the hammer, the lathe, in the loom—

which revelation could not destroy.
To hide inside the visible…

within an opacity, at noon.
Occasionally an oscillation

of movement in a passageway, courtyard, window.
Or the illegal step out of doors.

Impossible to leave the density
of that light.