Any Old Station (B. 36)

Whose pale order approached behind masks frozen in speech?
The ash-work of Pompeii settled in our souls, and through the
Resonance of music we discovered the shapes of what wasn’t there,
A fascimilie of man and woman locked in a death embrace
And the lost last words of an landslide volcano.

When earlier we had been simpler.
A glass of wine in the Roman veranda
And sprigs of lilac in her charmed hair.
Now the sky has boiled black and burnt
With the edges of curled flame like the wrath
Of an ancient god, smoking cinders peppering
The air like ornaments to transformation.


The sequence of the sea’s waves lost our orders.
A broken lute lay on the shore in seaweed’s disarray,
Mistaken for a whale bone smiling white in the gleam-star
Of the sun’s wealth. Who knew old instruments could
Carry the resonance of such beauty in the glens of the sea,
Who figured that the discarded impliments of old irons
Could be fashioned into such a picaresque screen of
Antiquity’s lore?

Pompeii, Vesuvius. The beach, antiquated in looms
Of wind and the skein of sea spray, a shop for the
Senses and a chart for any old road to immerse itself
In time.