Ink

A heavy planchette of ice substitutes for the Inuit sunset,

fog over snow in column inches, walrus

lips of solid fat like live cartridges in firepits—

baritones rising from the dark crêpe set of the Metropolitan,

in the shadows

the smoked leaf bearing an old world

onto the swept earthen floor of a recessed ebola ward—

the Elders smearing otherworldly green

as smoke to the same colors

in the surgeons’ blouses, journalists

with a long stick baking small red potatoes

and bushmeat, fruit bat and gray sloth,

in the dropped horizon, an inscribed

inclined moment of Inuit sunrise. . . .

on its yellow pine axis, they know

this is the chattering of Hamlet’s father’s mill, the stone

wheel made of a huge clear quartz

in his green long johns with banyan trees

like big stoic birds

hovering in mythology above the Ebola tents,

the loud sermon of green, unforgiving in the early morning.

3

On the radio at 4:30

in the evening, the chattering of Mozart. I’m leaving

for the supermarket with Laura and Dan

and their two little girls. The youngest

is shivering in desert rain. Her sister

is jealous of the hug that follows. We tell her

once we are inside I’ll buy her

an enamel sports car with orange flames—she smiles

and skips away. William Wordsworth in susurrus

is scolding a tenant who beat

a plough horse with a white stick—

I’m thinking Galway told me this, or

Mark Strand, in Donnelly’s, that lost hot summer.

Both of them are dead without anecdote.

4

Both of them now the source of it. The world

5

with its chattering box

of a lost journalism, lacquered

ghetto box of thoughts, the Capulets’ graveyard

gone to seed with painted hens. Light motives and props

of the Mimilocos standing

in snow

like the shocked glass dolls of some

narrowing passage to the south . . .

The balding freeway

climbing through blue space, ships of filiated platinum

lifting up out of the lake—

χάος, χάος—written twice, like this, in Greek—

the galaxy like a washed plate.

He had seen things you people wouldn’t believe:

6

attack ships on fire

off the shoulder of Orion—a time to die with the sun. Time

enough, he thought, to deny

the arrays of colored jelly beans on the cooling clay

plate. Mr. Citizen,

the cows are also over the old ranch, inexact

with Mrs. R’s perimeter of snakes. Sky wars

of the dark horizon, stars like white tacks

in the crushing velvet night over the Arctic

where the fat rye grows

just beyond the river that lights, that annihilates

the little sweet-shop of delights. Colored strings

of Christmas pastels and chalk across the empty lot

where small living trees were sold and bought . . . .

7

The empty lot, in Paris, where two bombs

went off smelling like wet canvas and pepper—

the deserted lot where the Elders said small living

trees were sold and bought . . .