Frailty

On the windowsill,

a radio has been left on, softly leaking static

into the kitchen. Outside

the tram rolls by and rattles the teacup in its saucer.

Rain pitters on the window, through the nude branches

of elms and plane trees, and I watch their runnels down the pane.

Two crows fight over a chicken bone on the railing of the balcony,

their forms blurry and rounded.

There is still time. There is still time

to do many things.

In that case, how long have I been sitting here listening to static?

Minutes are consumed, by the eyes, the lungs;

syllables become a colossus bestriding the world.

I wake up and the sea has frozen over,

the waves like the ridges of a fallow field,

gulls swooping and calling through a vast

and spreading blue, a blue like a colony,

like love in a violent age;

the answers coming back off the face of the ice,

almost a foreign language, almost incomprehensible,

a thing not completely unrecognizable and so

not able to be ignored; what is this music within

the signal? It sounds endless, like a bell

ringing to the end of the universe, a long note

expanding in all directions at once.

The eyes beneath the sea, eyes overhead, passing through air

and stars, seeing the growth of things

buried, folded over by the plow; our hands plow

the rich black ground and blood comes up, tendrils

filaments ganglion, tortured things born of torture,

born of good intentions; brought up into the light,

into the breath of sky and sun, to wither to grown stronger to sprout new

invasion. Reaching and grasping, breaking the surface,

a desperation like combat, rhythm out of step out of sequence,

the last first just as it was foretold,

and a great and fathomless forgetting, knowing that something

is being forgotten, the knowledge of it precise and empty,

a vessel to be filled, never to be filled.

Plains, like glaciers or the craters and canyons of other planets,

open unobstructed ever-onward to the line where they become

something else, something bounded and so vulgar, mundane.

Ice cracking, something rolls and shifts.

There is a blinking blue light that never stops, the telephone in

its cradle, the tea in the teacup cold, everything falling into

place, slotting together like geometry,

a line down the middle of eternity, or just my own portion of it,

down the middle of my good intentions,

my bitter fruit,

the sunshine and my golden skin, numb the body the phantom limb-

mouths and geometry again, fitting and parting and fitting,

a sky overhead, a forest deep and black at my back always,

the undergrowth teeming with heedless eyes and lungs and

coiling plans, cunning tongues. I saw an osprey once, slicing

across the field of my vision, right to left, like an arrow bisecting

sight; my head remained fixed, did not turn to follow its flight,

and my lashes came together like the church and its people

and I slept in pale arms.

Shedding time, like skin, skin is time, our cells are increments of

existence. A needle, a thread to stitch them back,

the gears of a watch spread out on a tabletop, swept into the palm

of my hand, tossed into my mouth like pills,

washed down with cold tea.

Thunder frightens the crows away, dropping the bone to the street below.

It falls and never hits the ground, the distance constantly

halved, until there is no space no falling thing no ground

only mathematics, only a music made of numbers and the absence of

sound, of long flatboats carrying wine-filled amphorae

and papyrus scrolls. Skin floating on water, water sloughing into ears,

mouth, nose, pulling, the faint resistance, the sense that the sea

is filled with a greater gravity than the land;

stepping onto the beach, tall grass, dolmen, a gleaming white

superstructure, endless the things I do not know,

but there is time, still time left, still

time left to learn all the things I should have known all along,

like the calls of the birds,

or the names of the flowers outside my window.