Not Before but After Us

The burning cities on the high debit hills

ignore the hundred wooden boats

that are rowing

away from them, the nervous oarsmen

looking over their red shoulders, rising

birds squawking along the very

limit of salted granite fences.

Bells in the towers are heated

like pears muting processional trumpets

with gun carriages weighted in war drums

that vibrate the morning air as if viewed

in storm through green pond water—

moving them along are heavier wagons

with wet hay, old jars of plum wine,

and giant spools of yellow hemp.

Women are beating the mules in conjunction

with the drums. There are

heads on pikes around the open public garden.

There’s the occasional funeral march, the elderly

mourners are painted. They are naked

and we are struggling to refuse our poem

beautiful innocents and the pleasant doldrums

of civil massacre.

Later, with night falling the city walls

are rouged ember blocks rolling down hillsides

into seasonally cooling rivers—

there are steam baths to the north

and to the west they are boiling

enemy citizens with their wives, along with

the young tax collectors from the rebel countryside.

Wind lifts into the trees. The fallen birds and apples

in the smudged orchards

smell like the hemorrhaging around the surgical tents,

then we fall farther to the cliffs again

where solemn priests are feeling

a certain emptiness:

at their feet pooling intestines

have nothing to do with any of this . . .

Though it is a scene

now clearly lost and contemptuous of loss—

all the good people have become

pilgrims, all

counting blisters like coins

local, in time, this is not before

but after us.

The priests still crying in their sleeves

now faint into yawning legends

of cold living rock, too exhausted to cry out.

You will know they have found bottom

with the wide sound of melons bursting . . .

war is such an adornment

and abuse of homicide. Could we ever live without it?

Please, hush,

listen to the busy work song of the flies.

They vomit eggs into the open eyes of the dead.

The flies are seen eating gunpowder

from the bleeding mouths

of the governor’s daughters.

They contrive a smile in the golden neck

of the general’s old toothless lion.

We are exiting, he says, to his aunt—

we’ll have even more good fun here

tomorrow. She is crazy also

and says we have forgotten the two

picnic baskets, by early night

they will become tenements

of red and black ants. All the insects

are writing eulogies on napkins for us. They insist

this is not before, but after. She repeats

we are exiting the lawns and ballcourts,

more good fun for us tomorrow. Please

don’t forget the wickets. They

are solid gold, of course . . .

who can afford such luxuries anymore.

Or a cold-boned trout for breakfast.