War. Movies. Roadtrips. Keats, Shelley. Grecian urns. Veiled concerns. Riots. Racism. Modern history. Strip malls. The feast that is always the sky.
Originally published in Blueline, SUNY and at Hollins College in LA:
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
(found phrase) after Rilke
the rosy fingers of antiquity
still with us, now, leavening
the sky across black branches
curving, hatched and glorious:
alive, as we eke human cries
through days and centuries, believe
our own words and the purpose of our deaths.
She disdains us at these times -
casting serenity in shadows of trees,
holding her face in plain veils
like women whose countrymen forbid them - she keeps her power briefly, then
in the permission of flowers to bloom freely
along highways. In dawn spilling blood
beyond colorless earth as we lay still sleeping.
