The Myth of Er

0. The Unity of the Harp

Always were my words like dust,
colours to twilight, whispers
to trumpets, yet though I would
be winds beaming, say singing
beseems me better, what then?
music so unlike the truth won't weave
this world apart
nor others. And lips
all my songs seduced in face of syntax
meek that luring won't make manifest
the mooring of my speech. This
is no sacred copse. This is the last
resort, a dive
into darkness.


1. Mystagogy

against the blade of light
that sinks and blooms
against the stained glass
and tulips-God and bloody eyes for towers
against what bliss could come
from much-repeated May
leaves that smell of flames
hallowed storms of sand
and saints interpreted:


2. Matter.

like a book half-read, a horse full-fed,
always was I mad at possibilities.
if you burn a heap of feathers,
they say you can see Palaiologos. Once I drank, drank,
drank, until the irides of my eyes were a lifeless sea.
You were there, your feet were empty, you could walk through fire.
You were a tumid fire full of the past.
It was only when I fought you
for your name that I learnt from the ether
there must come spirit,
hot as the ghost, and marble as our ship.
I was like a city, a gelid port
where you anchored and bought off my age.
She, the no-crone, the winged confessor: No,
if you want to talk you must sleep
alone in silence and motionless. Then maybe I'll come,
and sail off. You were like a wall whose idea I crumbled,
whose dark chalk stood, whose cement the vineyards
mimed as the walls of sacred Thebes.
Once, twice; and you were silent. I a dog
to maul you when you'd enter. "In the mines you breathe just
like in the monasteries," Alexis said.
You could go, drown, speak. Or you could be an halcyon,
lay your eggs in the corners of my lips.
Revisit me, like you once revisited home
by prestidigitation. What did you bring
from there? Rocks shaped like a book
written in a tongue you just half-get.
I was broken bread. I thought aged wine
could bind us both together. I climbed to your blood,
it was blue yet had no oxygen.


3. Lamella Aurea

Libel luring of the wind, would I but need
no roaring seed for you to carry. Miles I would run
for fleeing, loam I would not plant for farming
always will be opposite, settling town, hoary dawn,
fight faces of a ghost in mist, all inhaled haar,
a throat of song, a flow of milk– at shores that never wither
long we watch and long we draw on sand,
and long we bear the weight of rocks upon our brains
against the wind that mocks our dusk, our souls of salt.
Provided still the moon commands, revolt is far
from over, and life comes seven roses later, burnt
to spirit, and blasting ere our worlds are sunk.



3. Pentecost

although you're always too Summer, always too much
the juice we drain from ripe and rotten worlds,
instruct me: the language of the earthquakes
it took to empty you of miracles. your hair
is long; your eyes are bloody. and I am one to arm you
with my heartbeat, and learn your accent's pitch. Poisoned
by the shadow of a crossroad, the meals are saltier,
you are slightly less unholy. a challenge, to wait
for the tanned women before we drained the river and made pottery
from the riverbed; a challenge you could not accept. I did it,
I waited and banished the pines from my forest of Autumn.
there could blossom a man, who had shells for fingernails.
when the sea is empty, our children are dead
and we drown them to the algae. when the sea
is happy, our ships are smaller, the sails are leaner,
and God is the rudder we turn and the ropes
that we tie and we cut.


Miguel Monteiro