The Idle Movements of Ancient Libraries (P.47 TB)

A poem, a poem, a small poem.

Here the women lay reposed in the day
Here the wild wolves sulk in labyrinthine castles, wary of the minotaur.

Hear the quiet fields, the silence from the end of the last war. There the bodies lay wrapped in ribbons of lilac and splattered rose red. There the fields lay until the bodies and the earth become one.

And the sound of old irons clanking like war desires in the rusted tombs of dead chivalry’s renaissance armor, and the music of swords open to the love of whores who brought us our finest ribbons to pin upon our helms before we marched in coated horses out of the marrow to tilt at dead machineries and broken gear teeth. And the languished ray of darkness sitting there behind us, we call shadows but we don’t know even why they are.

In the shaded glen, free from the company of men, lay our blossoms of nourishment in vessels of painted clay. In the pig pen, the slop is sluiced through troughs, and where we saw the farmer’s wife we knew that witches had been real.

In the lost decay of old formulas we wrote in our notations the workings of a simple tool, the ancient spade that mortars and smooths, that digs hallowed hollows so that our fire may keep in the cold stony bog until what the earth will say when it goes away, “It is day and it is night.” The woman stretched over a man, the two as lovers wrapped in sun and twilight, made lithe by the draperies of the stars.

And is it for us to understand the sound of the world’s (sic) words, the quiet moon and the taciturn smile of its cratered canyons? Is it for us to interpret the flows of even a river as it lazes out and ever? Hold on to water, hold on to an ocean, hold on to a love that never says “blossom,” and you will discover your true weight like Sirius the star.

The robot of robots in the office of offices. The sleek slap of laced ribbons flitting like tasseled whips in the lines of orchard dreams. Dusky scent like mirth and white vinegar. Trouble in the ancient talk. A fire crossed by water. Old light meeting new darkness. Old darkness amid new light. The end of shadows is where light begins to open, for void is a closed closet and light an open window. The robot office of robot offices.

In the lost decay, in the shadowed May, our whistling rain whirled red by the whipping wind has snapped our fondest nightmare. Dead insects in the shoebox of ancient memories. A glass of wine, a glass of glass, a liquid rouge blushed by the age of old grapes. You were born amid this. You were born amid the wild flits of an ancient wind.

Oh how terrible to be told! What worse than for the truth to be said, to hear with uncalloused ear the steady rumble of thunder’s lover, the lightning quick flash of truth shocked into the heart of the ear. “You are dead.” And yet never more alive with electric nerves flowing in fire flame the snap of sparkles whistling with the tone of human thought, with the desire of the polyglot who asks for a dessert sherry in four different languages. Ask, nay, demand, and you shall receive. Descartes was right but kept it in a lie. “Do we sleep or do we dream?” should have been “Do we live or do we die?”

And the saints were open to the sound of listening unlike some of us, unattuned to simple words like a drummer beating the march of war upon the breath of sweet lilacs until they wilt with loss of dewy sweet dangerous life.

You have come a long way for a short poem. You have come a short way for a long life. Time will not abandon you my sweet sad friend. The ticking of seconds is just a manner in which the measures of movements we call situations instill themselves through all the coordination of a drunk dream. Whistle through a thistle and shave your name from your chest, what’s ours is ours unless we make a gift and even then it is made more and not less.

Here the day reposes in the soft arc of women’s curved daliance.
Here the minotaur has already died long ago, and is wary of mere wolves.

Here dot dot dot you may begin to live period exclamation point