Dear Horatius (Dear Michael) (7)
The time of light comes back, the vapor
from water that makes the throne
comes after the light, and the book
is empty until it is not a book at all
but a garden of exquisite statues.
The throne rises out of the garden.
The garden flows to the delta, rapid.
The corpses sleep with their lovers
bodiless, thin as the water vapor
blown through stellar gases, hot
cores of constellations that falter
silent and catastrophic and with-
out meaning. These too must perish,
Horatius, the strong man and the pimp
anemone mimesis market
the crystal threads of your beloved
the crystal meanings that give delight
and hurt not: their fate is certain.
Wax tablets draw near to a furnace.
But if all of it will go away to air
was it for this that they dug pits
all those rows of year after year?
Was it for this that father crawled
out of a dungeon, a mother lost sons
and daughters fell from aeroplanes?
Wax tablets draw near to a furnace.
Does the poem vanish or does it yet
move on the back of a sphere, the words
you wrote and that I harbor in heart?
When God made the Pen and wrote
the world, did he first write the day
or the dawn, the throne or the water
it sits on; did he make the sky pale
from paper, and did the throne
always rise on the seabed, beautiful?
One day the trash compactor
will fold together like a prayer book
the wax flower and the harvest
will come to grief, the bedraggled men
caked in dirt from digging the pits
the script doctor who writes on wax
her bevel and thumbprint, the famous
syllabaries found at Knossos and paper
airplanes and kites hoisted at passages.
The throne was made before the day
and day before the water and the sun.
The light threads ropes among the trees
in a forest. Ropes of light and again
and again the light over a table
falls, and tumbles, and falls, and again
the wax melts before it is complete.
