collapses and the corporeal flames
flicker long into the evening,
when wind collects bits of ash and makes
the tips of the blackened fields glow. She
will arrive soon, intemperate and
invisible, to inter her breath
within the broken houses of men.
She has been present since words and myths
were realized, and gods were conceived
to enforce them, holding the courses
of temple and water, steadying
the trees as they gripped the shifting earth
with their knotted hands. She was at rest
in the white sails of man’s first conquest.

You’re predisposed to attracting the wild.
I’m not deceived by your far-off gaze
or the canted edges of your smile.

The gods confer—perhaps they are beguiled
enough to send the animals your way.
You’re predisposed to attracting the wild.

The geese and rabbits shadow you awhile
as we converse or kiss—they can’t but stray
to the canted edges of your smile.

With this, you resurrect the god of wine,
the moribund branch, the shriveled grape.
You’re predisposed to attracting the wild.

In Eros / Thanatos, you grant new life—
Prometheus flickers in your gaze
and the canted edges of your smile.

I can’t resist the revels—half a child,
half a beast—who needs the right to say:
You’re predisposed to attracting the wild
with the canted edges of your smile.

The Japanese gave immanence to age,
a furtive magic in the oldest cat,
or so says Zack at the Meow Café—
headset mic askew. A special breed, to be exact,
of courtesan and kitten—a lineage spanning
Hello Kitty to yokai. He notes such prostitutes
were often found by customers covertly
choking down a fish, a dark rebuke
against desire’s aftermath. And then:
a Classic Persian jabs its paw
from a fuzzy peephole near Zack’s head,
precursor to the playful clause
that curiosity—the bane of cats—
can also kill a writer’s act.

True peasant-dark, that Siberian claw—
drawn out of birch and ice into their law,
gone soft with silk but animal, the skin,
to Petersburg, his hunger dressed as peace.
Soon the empress sends her women after him;
dawn to dark, where blood finds no release—
upon her boy, he breathes his mudded word
construed as covenant—the bleeding stilled.
Again he feeds; again she calls him Lord,
kneeling as the boyars measure out his will—
before the feast must turn to discipline—
condemn him to the ice-locked room,
shriving every rank and matted sin;
unmoored into the gloaming, out of view.

He fell off the balustrade, another
small misstep toward glory, just one among
the litany of injuries my brother
has endured during his short life—each one
a peculiar work of art, prosaic
yet absurd. He’s the jester of martyrs,
the black comic who has enough nicks,
gouges, and breaks to have suffered,
all told, one fatal round of martyrdom.
More Buster Keaton than St. Teresa,
(whose beatific guise belies marble
but still does not suspend my disbelief)
he laughs, doubled over in the front yard,
then tries to walk, stumbling toward sainthood.

A cross-dissolve might be construed
as too sentimental for a seasoned eye
in a non-antiquarian such as you.
Which is to say, you would decide
to show the portrait of the young aesthete
enjambed against an ailing patriarch,
like Kubrick’s up-cranked primate
hurling his bone in a heavenly arc
cutting to an indolent craft in focus,
marking epochs in between
the static grace of Discobolus
anticipating still this box of dreams
and a thousand statues flickering in the dark.
That would be you. You’d drive the reel ahead
past creaking scenes, past dialogue and arc,
past diegesis heavy with the dead,
past hemlock, ailing masters, acolytes conjoined,
and say: Just cut to the fucking point.

They drank like gods—by which I mean they fell.
My lord would chart the stars with drunken proof,
then chart again the table’s edge, the bench, the wall,
declare them wrong, and call the stumble truth.
He swore the sky was his, or so he fought,
measuring heavens cup by cup, until sundown,
till even Saturn reeled. Young Kepler watched—
smiled thin as ink—and wrote the good parts down.
Good Lynx, you rose with all a noble air—
antlers in the candlelight, your crown awry.
You lapped the cup, turned and climbed the stairs,
then fell like Icarus, much too drunk to fly.
All the while, two fools disputing charts—
your constellation, Lynx, burns beyond their stars.

“I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that’s the record.”
— Dylan Thomas (White Horse Tavern, Greenwich Village, 1953)

I will not sip the dark. I drink it neat—
Four Roses, please, poured quick—no word to waste.
Your bar keeps tilting, free of gravity
or is it me, untethered to this time and space?
The mind draws tight, a star to single grain,
then breaks—rose-bright, galactic, drunk with sound;
Not truth, but song flung hard against the pain
of knowing breath must spend itself, unbound.
I will not sip the dark. I drink it down.
The night still answers when I strike the bar.
My breath comes bright; my blood refuses crown
or calm—this pulse outlasts the dying star.
What’s that—my breath is neither galaxy nor rose?
A pox on both—pour on. I’ll drink until you close.

“Rose, oh pure contradiction, desire
to be no one’s sleep under so many lids.”
— R.M. Rilke (epitaph, Raron, 1926)

The window holds the lake—a grey ellipse,
Geneva flat and cold below the pane.
My hand, wrapped tight in linen, smells of spirits—
iodine, and under it, the autumn rain
that silvered Muzot’s garden wall,
the pear pressed flat against the gate,
and last, the frosted rose, its small
translucent hips, the color of a faience plate—
I cut the stems at eight, the light was sparse,
the Valais folding into dark, between
the Bella Tolla and the evening stars—
one felt the center hold. But now, dear Baladine,
the night falls past my window’s architrave;
the rose required a hand; the hand a grave.