HELOT

Oh but
the hot city
and memory.
you wouldn’t lie to me
but I
would lie.

the mirror was a hard tunnel
buried fat so near
my old face.
the young hoplites crashed
by out the window,
‘cross the asphalt,
and my plume
withered;
and I
was filled
with heavy things.

our trees
by the church,
pink blossoms like
a fresh
bone of want.
but I
would lie.

Some things are not enough. And we are too tired to pursue.

I can’t confess

to being Catholic, but they’re onto something

with those alabastine figures of theirs, enthralled

within saintly washes of light,

staggering through the muted stainglass and oh--

each reverend hair on their molten faces

splayed out in sunlit fiery points, red-gold

candelabra combed out in gilt braids back from

their virginal mistresses’ faces,

softshadow cheekbones and

that dead ancient ashen pulsing terra cotta feeling

--you know it too--

aching out from lips and eyes swollen

with some ascendant pride,

their supple throats poised

at godly angles,

and the taste of white water in my mouth

for want of that holiness

--you know it too--

The crucifix embraced in lover shadows--

these churches stony and warm,

like careless sheets rumpled humbly,

still warm just after those young bodies have

crept away into robes, lightheaded with the

scent of coffee and someone else’s

breath lingering between their glistening teeth

that flush pale shoulders from behind

lips still red from violence.

And those haloes slung white as orchids behind devout hands--

those Catholics are onto something.

DOUBT.

I said to the wrinkled ashen boy
sprawled against the rock, hey Have I got
any prayer?
But Prometheus was dry as a cicada,
dead with a black tongue.

Rain plunged down like cathedral bells
and slandered itself against my skin
and steamed off his hot dead arms--his chain
sung against the stucco cliff
of my house which slacked its brows into
the mud and lathered there like a barren mare.

The oleanders shuddered fecund and smelling
white, rustling like dark colors against
the breathy gapes of rain and wind.
They purred against his glistening gray toes.

I creaked with thought
within the eyelid of the porch and
blundered into evening while
the footprints about his crumbling body
stippled away and I fumbled my way inside,
thewless, leaving
the oleander leaves jutting from his mouth.

melancholia - n. a form of insanity characterized by great depression of spirits.

A depression of spirits--a swooping of lucid, transcendant ghosts teeming downwards in celestial bombardments, a sweet white flood of light stumbling and crying up out of your lungs like moonwater: a chalky insanity so suffused with life that your pale wet heart sutures up against the bellowing skin of willows and elephant grass, old skins of beating things still fiery, like dusty swans flailing in dry rice stubble, bleating out their last hoarse chords. Brass saxes whimpering in the night, smelling of crickets and coolness. Herons plowing the glassy ditches, their hooked claws silent as ecstasy, feathers bristling like the scent of street lamps limpid within the dark. Melancholy crazy, sure as the day I was born.