I didn’t know that men and women lived here. No saffron,
Cardamom, no epistolist made my last ravine a heaven where
You and I prayed for our foolish ways and gave back
To the needy what was theirs for every break in the human skull.

Now the tasty guns seem proper in a roomful of remnants
Of another river going somewhere, searching for wife
And child, to be succinct in plastered down walls, walks taken
To be rid of this useless unguent, the false dream of the mad.

But Heaven in a child’s clothes came to rummage
In the old picnic area, waiting for swings to run away
With the change of morning in an old man’s chair; I saw
What never became a travesty, I saw lips claim a fortune in love.

That was your old name, the one that looked like a clown’s
Ravaged smile, the paints of death and dream have populated
Another city where I live tasting wasted waters, leaves left
To dry without spirit; can I claim some woman as the last turning of the sun?

I asked where the cousins and aunts and other marauders
Might enjoy a white whale, devour a faith, a system entire
Of vanished wool and skin in whose flesh the killer’s rode;
I have not signed blessings meant for me nor seen any life in its totality.

I saw you roam along the edge of peace time,
The valley of the moon was dark blue, yellows,
Green touched by the bracken; we raged to be
Alive when all words were calm, deliberately unsolvable.

And such ridicule as ghosts of China can never remember.
It was another partition, another cell of memory
With long and rigorous discipline which I never
Touched with a human rag. It mattered to a child

So we would never break apart any God-made thing,
Any employee of the sands and shells where the boats
Hum with cargo, doing the only version of this song,
A reply to enthusiasts who belong elsewhere with barnacles.

I have the perfect map, never seen on earth or read about
In legal texts or scripture; I would like to see love pass
Me by one more time in the wreck of glorious passengers
To their own blood in the sand, creatures better off alone.

Now the clouds are letting mercy down to return to
Her cage and Mary was blessed by what one man did.
I return to the city of glass and mirrors where nothing
Leaves me; I am no longer the shadow nor the point of no return.

I could feel the bullets of the rain race against time.
You suggested invisible ruminations along the grey
Walls of my corridor. Is it true you invented everything?
Those water lilies that hold saints by the wrists and
All looked shaky, the walls rattling and the clergy
With their diamond rings running for cover.

Antiquities of the scar in the sun revolve around
Some truth, some twilight of happy revenge and mimicking
Every dime I stole, I go about my business still not
Caring about the art of window washing, trimming
The eyelashes and beard. You say promised places
Will do better next time but there are no better worlds,

And the wash is drying while purposeful books lend
A hand at the invigoration of an already worthy cause.
The center is boiling now, rafts loaded down with
Flesh and bone makes its way secretly up the Yang-Tze
While this unusual way home is kept alive somehow,
By riddles of the mind, homilies paid and great ships sinking.

I thought the throat and lips are no place for your language;
You turn faces to shades of ruined cities while all about you
Sing that merry song about the rebels and the pumas and
Prayers in the stockade or the ditch. For thousands of years
Mad gales hung about the slaughterhouses, the hospitals
Looking for strange women, little beauties carefully free

Like the whole draught of the country of oceans, landed
Metal shards consuming the ice age of years. It was old-fashioned
Begging that did the trick for the clowns, when weak boys and
Depleted stores of food led me here to gather another
Charter into the tribe of ghosts, the middleman invisible
And another loss to serenity populating too many souls.