Or to Begin Again Read Online Free

perishes
in time, just in time, for the jackhammers
to build an emblem science, and the small figures
to move in its midst like so many futures.
    Dry Sargasso. The rash-lit arm, the virtual shoulders.
Tendrils of the chive and of the nodding leaf.
City I never saw
its music drenched
with journals and floating beds.
Lazarus, sky hewn among the dark boughs.
Dry Sargasso, its diary of husks.

REALM OF ENDS
1.
    Francis turns. He has something to say. He has an
announcement. He says, snow in summer and falls silent.
    Â 
    Â 
    A single egg in the nest. Francis turns.
It is not metaphysical; it is merely distraction.
    Â 
    Â 
    Time passes. The nest is empty.
The snow, bountiful. A girl dedicates her last weeks
    Â 
    Â 
    to a show of force. She writes gracefully about force.
Francis turns. He seems weak and small and without volition.
    Â 
    Â 
    Thus the bird lands on his head.
Thus there are radiant seconds.
    Â 
    Â 
    Is it reliable? Not the garden. Not the bed.
The streaming elocution is more or less prosaic.
    Â 
    Â 
    The bird lifts up onto the bare branch.
The tree, an elm, is dying, almost dead.
    Â 
    Â 
    Francis is indifferent but the bird, a cardinal,
shines on the barren branch.
    Â 
    Â 
    Tit tit tittit tit hovers the weary pragmatist.
It is hoped, by Francis and the rest, that she
    Â 
    Â 
    cannot know heartbreak, not
the melodrama of the nest’s margin of error.
2.
    All day in the fir trees, night remains.
Time passes. Francis is immobile, bereft.
    Â 
    Â 
    He has recalled the condition of stone.
He has resumed his incalculable origin.
    Â 
    Â 
    And so the second comes too quickly,
follows too quickly upon the first.
    Â 
    Â 
    Others, mobile and incidental and lush,
attest to the perishable variety at large:
    Â 
    Â 
    shark, polar bear, other political incidents
having little in common with the immobility of Francis.
    Â 
    Â 
    A fence and an alarm, a cat and a cradle,
these also are not acceptable, not progression.
3.
    The day has become abstract; I cannot know it.
It spits and complains as if it were real
    Â 
    Â 
    but it is only a matter of time.
How, for example, forgetting
    Â 
    Â 
    becomes opaque.
As if, dark on dark, an inert stone.
    Â 
    Â 
    Francis is only a sentimental stone.
Francis is impoverished and mute.
    Francis is a fiction of the glare, turning
into the Tuscan sun, under the juniper, among flowers.
    Â 
    Â 
    Doves perch on his head and shit on his sleeves.
This is an example of natural observable fact.
    Â 
    Â 
    Yet the day is opaque
despite recurring flags in the graveyard
    Â 
    Â 
    lending their gala strophe to the forgotten;
despite the fantasy of the saint
    Â 
    Â 
    turning in his soiled robes
under the heavy lemon trees, the ornamental
    Â 
    Â 
    beds: rose, lavender, creeping thyme.
Along the path the lovers come
    Â 
    Â 
    through the thrash of sunlit leaves,
the heavenly scents of lemon and rose.
    Â 
    Â 
    The day is a tide of sensual foreboding
in the salty sweat of their backs
    Â 
    Â 
    riding on white linen
in a luminous small room
    Â 
    Â 
    in the taste of cool wine on their swollen lips.
The day, for the lovers, heaves with potential.
4.
    The reverie stalks the real; it stretches abstraction
to its limit, deposited at the feet of Francis.
    But given the impermanence of birds,
the cardinal’s nest on the deck,
    Â 
    Â 
    given the domestic and the spiritual
the utilitarian and
    Â 
    Â 
    the forgotten, given
these cold mercurial shapes, arbitrary
    Â 
    Â 
    hinges, islands, perpetual desires
and their advocacy among the least entitled,
    Â 
    Â 
    given that one falls in love
with the condition of hope
    Â 
    Â 
    and falls out of love with its
cruel replacement, hope,
    Â 
    Â 
    so that what is valued is not the same
and the shape of the body in the window
    Â 
    Â 
    is foreign, the picture of the woman,
her body and face
    Â 
    Â 
    at odds with their person, at odds with her
curiosity, her