From “Odi Barbare”

                               xxiv

What is far hence led to the den of making:

Moves unlike wildfire ^| not so simple-happy

Ploughman hammers ploughshare his durum dentem

             Digging the Georgics

Vision loads landscape ^| lauds Idoto Mater

Bearing up sacrally so graced with bodies

Voids the challenge how far from Igboland great-

             Stallioned Argos

Vehemencies minus the ripe arraignment

Clapper this art taken to heart the fiction

What are those harsh cryings astrew the marshes

             Weep not to hear them

Accolades Muses’ dithyrambics far-fraught

Borrowed labour ashen with sullen harrow

Cruel past that ^| Sidney and vesperal Tom

             Campion courted

Put to claim not otherwise vowed the era

What else here goes ^| I am no Igbo wit well

Versed in Virgil Pindar Euripides child-

             Hallowed Idoto

Revelation blessed in its unforthcoming

Closed with tempus aedificandi tempus

Destruendi bringing discharge of measure

             Blasting the home-straight

Lovelace there come difficult times between us

Though in your place I cannot well imagine

Why I should not follow her chequered steps in-

             Out of the sunlight

Candlelight here given the invocation

Starlit even ^| whatever else is silence

Gratiana somewhere still ^| she is dancing

             Dancing^⌒and ^⌒singing

Singing not her heart out beyond the fable

Grand carotid arteries self-fulfilling

How the blood’s tempered in its modulation

             Balanced impulsive

So are our storms trackered from solemn orbit

Turbulence granted our sequestered sphere now

Buffetted now spun on an awl now baffled

             Wreathed in cloud-garlands

Masques do so challenge and compose to labour

Hers the masque-like venture the scenes mechanic

Stars have held being since creation’s fourth day

             Turned to their music

Noble her frame troubling the fame we yield her

All rites well done short of a consummation

Treading down nothingness to ever-dealing

             Maker unmonstrant

Łodz I’ve been there done that the vanished children

Klezmer makes glad music at Lazarus gate

If as straggling voices the dead return now

             They have our number

Breathing hard we wrestled asbestos brake-pads

Luminously radioactive watches

Fizzled green plaque riding elastic wrist-bands

             Glue smelt of peardrops

Someone those taut days was predicting biros

Not my blubbered Jewish pal bright a bully

That we knew klezmer I much doubt the Wedding

             Dance for the Old Men

Time released me from him as I could not have

Many then had foresight but I was not one

Vital spinners counting there’s no subtraction

             Ever can oust them

Odds are for pittance where redemption strands us

Debts of those long-dead sparks of phantom brain cells:

Who’s to dance broyges tants the dance of anger’s

             Conciliation?

There is no known voice but a clarinet sounds

Almost human touting a melt to die for

Hurl of things fastbound the last-known survivors’

             Wailed diminution

Breathe on my nesh eyes as upon a glass ^| this

Something so exquisite I scarce can bear it

I do not think I ever could have borne it

             If not for real

Make estrangement all our desires that age so

Perfect empowerment the imperfection

How indemnify a degraded legend

             Lost to computing

Contumacious that I am and that now like

Poggio I ^| too much enjoy invective—

This for our good—so what you saw me turned on

             Mind if I stress this

Breathe on my nesh eyes I am tired of sleeping

Well becomes fierce Didone trionfante

             Lyric oblation

As fantastic here as in those odd films we

Watched albeit singly The Tales of Hoffmann

What we must be not to be worked with mirrors

             Hives of perspective

Could I have found you in a film by Ophüls

Silent resonances of glass configured

Had I but struck us off The Masque of Blackness

             As it was playing