Arc of the cane is the curve of the earth at earth's end:
the ruined world, the globe burnt out,
a corpse by the pond at night.
Sing that crippled walk to maidenhead,
on the silk grass road to the fountain of Lourdes;
here's stepping-stone mud-cracked path to
the marrow-cliffs of Envy, creeping
along a crest of the southern Pyrenees.
Punctured eardrums of the hoar-frost
philosophe can't hear which Corsican winds
deaden the impact of the tempest on
my insides; we walk to the edge of coriander
and look up, to see two suns rise.
This bald-face Azrael could be my father's
father the night he decides to pole
away from islands off of Florida,
in search of the ungreenable black jaw
of the narwhale. Or a boneyard of the last
capucin of Rome. Let dusk come, God,
for Schiller's mausoleum opens up on fog-lit
dragonfly heavens: on what's angelic still
about unmapped surrounds of the 38th parallel.
Black Magellanic cloud of trapezoidal light
at the outskirts of a city dump: pampas of Madrid,
where bat-men whisk about the one-legged lady
rooting molars out of the mouth of a garroted
hulk on the hill of La Manola. Volaverunt.
Metronomes clock the bleed, up/down
entrails of garlic and onion. The orb
of the head of the wave of the scream dissembles
as spindly fingers coddle the ebony cane
in fitful sleep, a marmelade, wall-eyed lynx
crying out for the honey incubus,
fathoms above the noise of corn,
the speed of sound ebbing out its force
or fortitude and fury. My homesickness beckons
the ferryman home. A snake-bone drum rattles
last chords of this choral fantasy, bewildering
every new-born star seen in the light
of planet Pluto, as the shadow of me takes
shape in a pool on the floor in a corner of the room.