Friend Joseph sent this along...
In Plague Time
A drop of oil burns the sanctuary lamp
And all fear is absent; substance and accidents
Exhale from appearances. Outside the wall
Of scenery, outside the walls of siege,
The handmade steeples and city spires
Make puncture wounds that bleed with wonder –
And breathing goes on all the same: the scene
Includes a panoply of stiff ordinary time:
Time’s music employs the lute ensemble
Intoning banquet and requiem,
All the while smiling with parti-colored dress.
Deliberation parades ceremony
And judicious talk comes to cats and rats.
It all stinks of poor rhetoric: the death
That clicks a solemn hymn of bone and stone.
The close-knit brick and mortar of streets
Includes a skeletal, academic crow gowned in robes
Of judicial black, loping in morose carnival
Suggesting penitentiary aftermath.
This is how civilization accrues and skews
Its sobriquet: a crow walks in daylight
Unmolested, silent, social as the plague
It blackens with its midnight pall of feathers.
Its obscene beak, a grotesque cone of blooms,
Gives a sense of the crammed and trapped life
Found in the wards, tired postures praying
Before supine monuments, draped with rough linen
Rising and falling between bowls of leeched blood
And splendid water clocks that float and sink
A moment’s bubble on the sharp verge
Of last words. The will dissipates, fades
As a pulse. Morning light streams in,
Extreme in its unction of shadow, night.
A drop of oil turns to vapor, hisses, ignites,
And fearfulness is found in the prayerful quiet,
The absent air.
The spider scurries up the spine
Of Boccaccio, weaving strands
From Dante to Petrarch, pages and pages
Contextual with the autumn of the year.
The shadow of Greece, the residue of Rome,
Forgotten now, and the afterbite of all
That civilized the tongue and calms the heart,
Now found in sudden blinks of light. The pain
Transpires with lesser evils: itching boils;
And crazed and helpless, a child’s lifetime
Lost in the moment his tiny hands would reach
For life he learned to value, too late, too much.
Toxins in the blood turn with the leaf.
The young turn old without the help of age.
Another drop of oil glowers in the sanctuary,
Anoints like a rubric…
Introibo ad Altare Dei…
Crimson tints from the humble baldaccino
Will to tell the bells out in slow breathings
Of dying divinity.
And all absence is feared
As final things and fevers are more thought
Than spoken about; more real than either book
Or spider, trenchant as the web between.
In human rooms, time flows, flushing out
The evicted waters of Babylon,
The weeping sound sounds like a welcomed rain.
In spring, upon each hill, a cloud descends
And farmers and merchants tell their tales
Like daily pilgrimage, squinting sunlight
Between each passage.
Between each passage
The villages and towns remand redress
In a fruitless hush descending from the towers
And over hanging garden walls… balconies
Unpeopled and random as a judgment day.
In human rooms, stillness hisses unbearably.
A drop of oil burns the sanctuary lamp
And place and time are one, accidental,
Appearing as one in substance with life
And death.
Sills and transoms, doors and casements
Are thrown open, yawning empty with passing,
Unlocked with none to keep them, carelessly
Successful, successfully abandoned
As a final febrile breath burning,
Abandoned as everything to a final prayer.
