V.

Father, your howl at hour three lead me
to ask why you sought that prying color,
those leather-loving stories of failure,
which were not fiction but lies, obvious

to glean. From the space between banister
rails, I thought of that high pitched wail which
was not you but your cells, freezing in pleasure,
under a wash of blue conical light.

Here I live-- in a country of baby elders.
How am I to respect the sagacity of your fires,
and the fallow fields you’ve bequeathed me?

The slow rise and swivel-shot of flycast wires?
This land is cold: Icarus stays below the trees;
Achillies never seeks himself over the sea.

VI.

Jesus never walked, he only hung,
on Golgotha, for thirty-odd years.
He never overturned money tables,
or appeared on-the-outs with Rome.

When moths gnawed into manuscripts,
his followers preached from palimpsets,
pyred inquiries, packed lacunas with plans.
What surprise is it now? Podiums in sand,

bombastic requests that welcome war, studded
doors that swing wide for rumors. Mustn’t there be
an early service? Tank tracks echo ahead of a late galloping.

Let us mourn: love’s language locked in their
stolid necropolis, their impossible sword
of peace, their bloodied baton of dogwood.


VII.

Yesterday I woke to hear the sound
of canes banging against battle maps,
derricks ambling toward an island,
in atlantic distance from five continents

in protest: out of earshot of a new
Leviathan’s screaming cells. Indolent
suitors of influence, geriatric warriors
wading through wrinkle dreams, waiting

to wrap and rattle the unsheathed silver
sabers of youth, envisioning impotence
without patina, sending sons to blast

a personal dark. Lear’s tantrum strikes the world.
Our daughters die for these errant elders’ envy,
their flesh made memorious, their fear of the field.

VIII.

At night, Siddhartha rushes back inside
castle walls well guarded against wind,
miscreant thoughts, his parents’ palace sins.
He falls to his duvet and turns the TV on:

“Run with no need for water,” an announcer says.
A recorded scene flashes: four thousand
albacore thrashing through dunes, with smile-sized
gasps, making desperate paths into elaborate patterns.

Outside his stone house, thick stocks of sugar
cane refuse to whistle or sway. They clamp,
root tough, into rich soil.

Siddhartha, curls into Maya’s folded affection,
sleeps under the castle’s cross beams, which are
splintered, like the king’s steepled fingers.