After “In the Golden Hall of Mazarinus (after the Restoration of Images)”
Greek Anthology, I.106
instead of law another image in the Loeb-green
a living syntax in the gathered bittercress
a child in the meadow holds and also knows to make a shield
of her shirtfront for her mouth and nose so I can pass
in open air unharmed absorbed
instead in the specific tenderness of bract and culm
and beardless node a wedding-mist
of tiny florets structuring with multiplanar variance
the foot or two my eye is from the ground as if
autochthonous an auto -focus beep this
little reflex prism -song that keeps the handedness
of pictured cress the rightness of the earth the lens
inverts that mirroring restores to fresh complexity
and makes again a golden hall as if
of Christic images it is too easy to destroy the dogma rose
is rose is rose the living Word is delicate and iterates
the world on world my mother needs to know is there
to hate the less the one she’s in in chronic
pain this interplaning leaf on leaf into a book
that doesn’t hurt for once the ones I love
a loving atavist instead the antique feeling of
obedience when law was lamb
set loose and gentleness
was not achieved was not an amethyst
of Syracuse engraved with Victory astride
a plunging horse of perfect workmanship or not
astride but with her arms around its neck restraining it this
brokered peace an image is an armistice an interval
of breath of rocket-cress to soothe the field-wound the angel
Syntax cripples you then heals you too
After “On the Church of the Holy Martyr Polyeuctus,”Greek Anthology, I.10
must-lute, now-lute: a song is plucked as is
an epigram at random from a stephanus or wreath
of copied lines inscribed in stone they indicate
is veined with river-green and glorifies the parent
of the renovator who alone with added ell
and apse did violence to time a chance or glimpsed
integrity integrity as glimpse a speckled bird
that knows to rest behind the eye the ounce
by ounce a daughter is at first the fear she won’t
amass the stone on river-stone retained inside
the mouth that straightens speech precision is
a heap of cones and cardiums and murexes that teach
the golden increment that adds up to the armored
home you leave the multi-family edifice among
the ricegrass hills of Kennewick where cousins
emptied firearms into a bale of hay by now
is sold my mother helps her mother throw away
a life’s collectibles and asks and this and this does this
have memory attached this image of a lamb
in porcelain that hangs upon a string you
randomly accrued a fleece with dew the mind
wrings dew into the bowl a poem is enough to sip
the morning’s tangent through the wetted panicles
that hide the bird that knows its silence is its best
defense the future is secured withholding
singing’s thoughtless ordering of air that just
as soon decays the narthex cut from meadows made
to flower in the rock these lines were graven in
to prove that children also build where others built
to barricade against a rage for images the vivid
stippled baby’s-breath beside the ditch the infant
daughter of a friend upon a zeroed scale to see
what she retained what milk-weight sucked
her tongue un -lasered of the minor web that makes
the mouth a future knot of seed and stone and shell
