Ugolino dreams behind the heavy doors, his growing hunger
reverses to plenty, the doors— mercifully unlocked. What removes
currents, a voice reproves, firmly resists the flow of power,
Arno’s ebbing forces soon secured. The count wakes, and moves
shadowed on the floor before his weeping sons, between
verges of daylight, the narrow shafts on the walls,
searches beyond those inner corridors—where new hope precedes
below dreams, where a shadow can overtake all miracles—
Pisa’s sudden forgiveness for Ugolino’s crimes, their freedom, then
coastal waters beyond his vision; where his family ingests
towers in perfect rows. Swallow, a voice summons them:
conceives to keep its hidden form. Take the youngest.
Total the bones tomorrow. Unfolding terrors reveal his heirs.
Power is this— unspoken schemes are always eaten first.

The wheat glistens in the September sun,
as bright as the fine hairs along the cheek
of a girl who points at the horizon,
where the sky and her index finger meet,
tracing the long line of her origin.
She anticipates the expanding flames
from the earth, her incandescent prison,
that vast, infinitely shimmering plain
of light undulating in the north wind,
which spills into the corners of the room
when she opens the long yellow curtains.
Combing her hair by the window, she moves
as deliberately as a composer,
her blonde rows now burning in the warm air.

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.

“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.