Ezekiel's bones, dried to dust beyond this cusp of hill
where a pock-mouthed dawn wakes all Sevastopol,
and every hillock hides a thousand faces of the sky,
where young men's corpses stink, and American nurses
sweat to make love to Sardinian boys on horses
from Balaclava, by Russian cannon shot that missed
its mark. Here, the treeless landscape looms
along a precipice of fear, this first doomed
project of the photograph, a tongue
of the Ottoman Empire waggling out salt
from the Black Sea; Crimea, 1854, home
of the last-tamed pig of the fireweed earth,
a theater for war, a black crude, blue cornfield,
where the Danube U's and slickens, falls
to the plundering Balkan bears,
where buzzards pick at sinews of the last
three hundred of the Light Brigade,
in a valley that hides from the moon.
Then from below comes the sound of scorpions,
the prairie hens who cock their heads and wait
for the sun to rise upon another century.

[past] [home] [future]