I The warm ashes of the word still come unravelled from a fibrillation of the blood a few sparks weave the grey thread the hand follows a flash and nothing more Cuncta semper: of course... but who knows where they settle amidst immovable oaks across a still sky more still than time's bending time blue to the point of agony and bent where the crest confuses wind and aromas and our tiny caravans do not arrive overcome as they are by the desert of habit Inside...cuncta semper...of course... a tangle, the thickest indissoluble clot of words-events warm ash grey ash where the act no longer intervenes where it would be enough to believe we'd been alive and indispensible for a handful of days II One among the endless dusty distances one finally filled opens out in this customary entrance of spring if the eye comes to aid and follows one by one the broomflowers as they become a sea that unearths and restitches the yellow swaying of the mountain The distance searches out of habit always the same grey habit for its place -- prospect, passage -- and for its time the peremptory consonance the same that demands as its own the broom in springtime when the wind seconds the grass's murmur under the feet The pool of light annuls vast flash with no frayed edge oh at that point the light seems eternal and cuts short, annuls the winding paths, the narrow paths that meet in an underbrush of memories, presents again the miracle of repetition III Another fog, the bright one of uncertain mornings in May across the hill the one the sun later takes apart olive by olive the one that exhumes the home's breath another fog has levelled sudden eddies and filled them with its grey exhaling and the irremovable fog of night this time where words come out as echoes ramifications tenacious, persistent essences Where faces in a throng toil breathless from their deserted regions the faces' marble they, they who coldly ask for permission and reconfirm time's particle at once consumed along much-travelled roads now crumbling roads that do not retain a single sign of their persistence. Used by permission of Story Line Press. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY: AMOS SIBLEY by EDGAR LEE MASTERS ONE WORD MORE by ROBERT BROWNING TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN: THE FIRST DAY: PAUL REVERE'S RIDE [APRIL 1775] by HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW THE YOUTH WITH RED-GOLD HAIR by EDITH SITWELL AN HYMN IN HONOUR OF BEAUTY by EDMUND SPENSER THE TWO VOICES by ALFRED TENNYSON |