A Summer of Unruly Loneliness
ran out I foraged
in grass lust
and cut from an
unsharpened arch blade
all those who poked at corpses.
Being told, on a drive,
that common genocides
to this day toll like bells
almost at
some unbearable sonar
of history and balanced accounts
of tracks pursued
and immediate flaring vengeances and a diurnal
brick bridge holds it all fast
for commerce.
I took to bushy streets
sang at milestone posts
on a country road
like some bard
recalling Ossian's Dream
and the valiance of
Cu Challain at
the dread peninsular
which I've never experienced
but at dislocated hours
I had certainly wept for
like a fairytale at forty
and I couldn't enter again
for sex and lost thresholds.
Diogenes wore a barrel
and his search was a home.
I sought the brilliant eyes
and grace taken in steps
yet I carried that lantern
and doubted populations
somewhere, that doubt was justified, of course,
an axiom, the necessity to grind and to stop grinding
I'd brought back no money
few gifts and a documentation
of little slaughters
that have already
been resolved
but in spite
of magical speeds
there was the certainty of grudges and everyday abuses
and of loneliness as spur.
As all scholars know hermitage
of an emeritus who sought decency
to ask for forgetting
of just another common genocide
that has simmered
and been contained
with a fire break to stop
any damage
from a fire that found out
not only did it give light
and warmth but burnt
and the whirlwind
went to the trees.
