I. Solitary Refinement

At the hour of second sight, he scrawls
two marks—one holy, one erratic—
an incantation on his office wall,
like the sympathetic magic
of his primordial kin—whose curves
of ochre bison, hunters, horses,
the French so lovingly preserved.
He’ll be half-blind like them, forced
to squint while scribbling in the faintest light
where shadows move like feral beasts—
he’ll press his fingers to his eyes
to prove he actually exists, to cleave
the borders of his prison cell
in every hollow of his skull.

II. Horror Vacui

The noble savage is a mythic lark,
yet proves no less compelling.
How then does man outwit the dark
without putting out his eyes, or sailing
heedlessly toward the burning sun?
Must he lash himself—and his brother—
to a rattling chariot, and run
to death beside him for their mother’s
madness? His choices are more limited
than tracing filament through a maze.
Perhaps the ‘enlightened’ primitive
will cry into that boundless cave,
only to hear voices beyond the room,
echoing deeper into the vacuum.

III. The Persistence of Division

But then the office space grows dim,
the only light, his thoughts—refracted through
his bourbon, ice, and the tumbler’s rim—
a film unspooling out of view:
his final moments drawing near;
a flicker caught between this world and that;
a blurred frame for each passing year—
now ending on this faded photograph:
He’d always thought his wife had smiled
a bit obliquely for a bourgeois girl,
sunning on that imperial virgin isle
by a native decked in costume pearls
strung from his belly to his nose.
He gave her horns—the native, a halo.

When Venetia Burney first whispered that name
into her grandfather’s ear, you ceased to be
a faint albedo on photographic plates
on the furthest shoulder of our galaxy.
You were thenceforth Star of the King of the Dead,
Lord of Tartarus and its portentous rivers,
the ninth planet—destined to be neglected
by Gustav Holst and silver-winged voyagers.
More cryptic than Ganymede or Callisto,
you beguiled us with your scale and your distance,
master of the Eighth House and of Scorpio
(till The Epsom Comet cleared Venetia’s fence
and left your name swirling in her morning tea,
dissolved by earthly gavel and committee).

Of gamelans and pictograms I sing,
of satellites with gossamer fins
arrayed with Apollo’s flaxen rings!
With ancient hearts and minds, contained herein:
may you accept this interstellar ark
which cut the vacuum with its ivory nose
and bore its noble calyx to the dark,
a billion nights of spinning in repose
until it fell upon your alien shore.
Of the Brandenburg and glorious Fifth
I sing, Queen of the Night and Morning Star!
Like dew, you must shake the stardust from our lips—
O Melancholy Blues, O Devil Bird!
We’re resurrected with each passing word.

The rough beast does not slouch, he walks erect
while speaking at rotary club luncheons,
charity balls, and a late-night public
access channel, building his dominion.
He is pudgy, hardly a feral child
brimming with preternatural powers
(an unassuming grass-roots antichrist),
yet he has been cultivating his charm
since the advent of sin. The world won’t end
with a whimper, but with a mobile phone
ringing out the Requiem Aeternam
beneath the seat of an El Camino:
then at rest stop near Idaho Falls
he’ll catch the endgame from a bathroom stall.

Nothing registered as wrong or right.
The room kept customs: cup and spoon,
a table scarred where mornings set their weight.
She knew at once. I looked away—too soon.
No gauge for harm, no light to score the dark,
no server queued to audit what was done.
The moment sealed itself, a postal mark
pressed to fact and sent into the sun.
From nothing came the laws I learned to keep:
first matter, then the habit of the nerve—
this heat, her lipstick on the coffee cup,
a stain the morning carried, then observed.
The clock advanced. My pulse obliged its turn.
I called it cause, not choice—and let it burn.

Your breath, a white net, a gossamer veil
falling into the dark waters beside
your hand. Your hand, a coral branch, a gray
comb, now parting the curtains from your eyes.
Your eyes, two halos, fire-ringed coronas
beaming bright as moons against the blue skin
of your face. Your face, a cobalt opal,
a smooth luminescent stone balancing
upon your shoulders. Your shoulders, a wood
frame, a cross buried in the sand, pressing
into your spine. Your spine, a marble road,
a long porcelain serpent constricting
around your womb. Your womb, a burning house,
a violet light pluming into your mouth.

Laocoon turns upward, drawn beyond Earth’s curved prison,
        watching broken cloudscapes sink, then dissipate—
turns the salt wind in his mouth metallic,
            the copper taste of prophecy held back; and then
upward snaps his spine in a white arc, breath splintering the ribs
                as the weight of heaven begins to sink
drawn like wire through stone, the body singing under torque,
                    a struck bell ringing into cloudscapes—
beyond carved pediment and horse-ribbed hull, the old sea-law
                        reasserts itself, paternal covenants broken,
Earth’s grit in the teeth; the boys’ thin arms
                            wheel air too vast for any god watching—
curved through rib and hip, the scaled rope kisses tendon,
                                pulls their living shape into a prison—
prisoned in salt-spray glare, the spine arcs like a column
                                    cracked and serpent-curved;
watching his sons thin to shadow, he tastes salt and lime
                                in the wound and feels the pull of Earth.
Broken daylight gutters in the sockets;
                            even marble seems to lean and tilt beyond
cloudscapes blackened at the rims; the upper vault sags
                        heavy, every last bright margin drawn.
Sinking begins at the groin where lineage gathers,
                    a downward drag no mortal can lever upward
then the face hardens into something gods mistake for praise,
                the rictus tightening as agony turns
dissipate blood, dissipate lineage—marble cools
            around the twist and fixes the father, Laocoon.

For days we ran, the axle shrilling in the heat,
the cart-poles grinding deeper in the bone;
no oxen left—we bore the weight alone
of mother and the road beneath our feet.
We ran because the wheels would not retreat—
the weeds snapped sharp inside the turning spokes,
the road pulled tight between the fields and stones,
and Delphi lifted pale beyond the wheat.
They say Apollo gave the brothers rest—
sleep sealed their eyes like mercy in the dark.
But legend lies. We woke. The harness bit
again the flesh. We turned our faces west
and saw the glacier’s old, receding mark,
a line of stones still marching south of it.