He moves—the mountain tamped in fog,
the lake a blade laid flat and cold,
its ridge-line edged with ash and ferns
that scour the cut where water logs
its margins, where the light won’t hold.
Birds cross the sky in hooked returns;
their bodies score the water clean,
whose surface bends their angled forms,
catching daylight at the shoals:
stone to breath, breath to sheen—
he moves; the morning burns.

Four months will show the pupal form unfold,
a map made legible by careful light.
It opens into something faintly old,
a nearer cousin finally in sight.
It’s hard to mark the instant wind goes by;
it leaves no margin note, no signal flare.
You turn, and know it’s slipped beyond the eye,
its evidence dispersed in moving air.
A breath arrives—unhindered, cool and wet,
a brief concussion close against the ear.
It enters fully formed, as if already met,
before the mind admits that it was here.
Two blue-edged rings around a greener core
tilt, then separate—the leaf can hold no more.

She waited under the stairs, in the basement air,
where I learned to feel and see without the dark’s
consoling proofs, to know that something there
persisted, even when it left no mark.
She held me tightly to the ground;
I complied with duties she made known.
The secrets that she found
were laid on me and carried as my own.
I drifted to her daily, down the damp steps,
and found a love in her remorse—
a thing I could not find within myself,
or divine its origin or source.
There she lay in the old air, suspended quietly
in webs beneath the stairs, whispering to me.

I was a little boy when I met the Blonde;
I crossed the backs of crocodiles
across black water, just beyond
a maze of vaults and sunken isles.
She waited on the other side alone,
beyond a bridge, within a narrow cell—
hay scattered; naked among the stones,
hair drawn down, her face a polished shell,
her skin a paled aubergine. I did not move,
the water slackening near the spars.
Step by step, her cell came into view,
until I stood before the bars.
I held the key. It answered to my hand.
I turned it once, and entered what I am.

The faceless child came down as weight, as tide,
the mattress cupping what it could not name;
she was no comfort, no familiar guide,
but terror breaking over all the same.
You lay transfixed; the dark a second skin
that pooled around her, smooth and polish-blind—
her face a shell the night kept closing in,
a blank that gave you nothing to divine.
You prayed for sleep to pull you from that shore,
to let the body loosen, drift, go slack;
instead, a too-large hand filled up the door
and scattered golden ash above the child’s back.
The dust fell once. The room did not protest.
By morning, only one of us was left.

I. Augury

As a child, I carried odd, prescient dreams—
small details: where a buried locket slept,
or some lost trinket hid itself in seams
of neighborhoods I’d wandered only in sleep.
No one cared much, not really, until I said
our dog would die beneath a freighted truck;
and then my father, startled, bowed his head.
From that night on, my family left luck
outside the door. We’d gather late, confer
in the living room—my “visions” guiding moves
or money, or anything that might occur
to grown-ups fearing consequence. They approved
my awkward teenage ramblings, granting weight
reserved for augurs dreaming out the state.

II. The Blonde

My guide came early—four years old, I think—
small, and dreadful. She had no eyes at all
and lived beneath the stairs, her lavender skin
turned always inward, studying the wall.
At night, The Blonde unraveled space for me,
dilated time, whispered sideways truths
my parents swore they heard when I’d half-flee
my bedroom—her words still clinging to my mouth.
But gifts grow thin. I see faint shapes now—slips
of futures drifting just beyond the frame;
and though she speaks, her voice arrives eclipse-
blurred, changing bodies, changing even her name
to meet me where I am. I try to hear,
but all her meanings scatter when they near.

A wave: a mountain, writ in smaller terms;
a breath: the substrate the clouds require.
A flame: what once was stellar, what confirms
how little heat remains of ancient fire.
A lie: the progenitor of truth.
A life: a congress of the devils’ schemes.
A death: the corpus of the same, uncouth
and plain, a record kept by what redeems.
What did Heraclitus say? We step
and are born again with every stride.
What did Schopenhauer dream? Ask sleep,
or Shiva burning, Vishnu set aside.
What did Giacometti see? A nose—
whatever you inferred, I meant it so.

I was buried beside an olive tree,
with a lamp, three figs, and a loaf of bread.
I was never a mother, nor a wife,
my duties conferred to the sacred flame
to attend the vestal hearth in winter,
to bless the Tiber’s water with my palms,

and then relieve the burning in my palms.
The Sacred Way is just beyond this tree,
where my lovers visit every winter
to share my memory with leavened bread
and hold their blackened fingers to a flame.
I was never destined to be a wife—

They knew they could not claim me as a wife:
the random lots were held against my palms
and made my fingers curl into a flame
then open as a blossom on the tree.
My mother wept; my father gave me bread.
We walked to an empty house in winter

just beyond the Sacred Way that winter,
my dowry paid in full– not as a wife
but rather as a holy child, whose bread
had crumbled to ashes in her palms;
I watched my father pass beneath the olive tree
bending low, as a hand cupped to a flame,

his body disappearing as a flame.
All the days of my twentieth winter
were marked through every season on this tree:
removed from vagaries of man and wife,
I rubbed its soothing oil between my palms
and gazed from windows when we made the bread,

as I crushed the grain into flour for bread.
I pressed bellows, bearing the oven’s flame
to watch the bodies grow between my palms,
rising from dust, then hardening in winter.
I was never destined to be a wife;
to be embraced by lovers near this tree

or kiss their palms, which hold the leavened bread
before an olive tree; or lift a flame
to see their winter eyes expect a wife.

San Domenico is my reliquary,
a temenos of bronze and marble—
the friars removed my head from my body
to suspend it like a thought in the altar.
I hear them chanting as they don their vestments
in the sacristy before evening Mass
and watch them in procession swinging incense,
bearing the Holy Eucharist as they pass.
Yet there is a secret I hold most dear:
no martyr died with grace or dignity,
for still my fellow prisoners peer
from the frescoes and the tapestries
with a passivity that mocks their pain;
each portrait a lie, the immurement of faith.

When I awoke, I beheld a symbol:
the night before, You channeled a whisper
from antiquity: some Roman trickster
slowly warmed his gladius over fire
then pointed north to Lucifer, his muse,
reversed the ancient order of the stars

turning his heel toward Saturn. Yet the stars
like sand had scattered beneath the symbol
before its perfect imprint formed the muse:
and there, in its symmetry, Your whisper
poured freely through a vestibule of fire.
And when I awoke, I knew the trickster

planted the images here; the trickster
caressed his gladius under the stars
and pressed his buckler inward to the fire.
Now I fully apprehend the symbol:
the burning mouth, its half-repeated whisper,
the sandal planted in the earth, a muse

scorching the hairs on our necks; the muse
singing antiquity with the trickster
reduced to broken embers, a whisper
now imbued with the blue ashes of stars.
I know it was You who loosed the symbol,
broke the axis as kindling to a fire

crushed Lucifer and therefore bore the fire
then cupped the light within Your palms—a muse
unto Yourself—who wrung the symbol
from the vestal heart, and turned the trickster
from his proving grounds. Now the twilight stars
align, Venus at the fore, a whisper

born of a sleeping Roman: a whisper
which rose behind the dancing veil of fire,
his crucible the song of evening stars.
You pointed north to Lucifer, our muse,
limned the constellations of the trickster
and charted the path of every symbol:

His cold sword: the symbol of a whisper;
The trickster’s hearth: vicissitudes of fire;
Our muse, his burning heel above the stars