This dust that wakens my dying
with the waste of the crossbeam-sawyer
of darkness that shows where corruption’s
serration has worked in the wood
and passed through, leaving blight
on the pillow, tea lees, coffee grounds:
that lives in the knot and the grain
and rifles a roof-tree of light
with the smut of its daily cremations-
will not stay for an answer. Gomorrah
burns like a match-stick, and the mound of the termite
prepares its necropolis
in the cedar and teak of a table.
Under the rung of the chair
the axe falls, dead-center, the cone of the plummet
goes taut. A pylon of ash, like an
obelisk, widens on pumice. Murder
is worked in the wormwood
and cancer. Herculaneum’s
twilight falls everywhere
while we wait for a plausible sound:
millstones; the tooth’s edge on
the tooth; lava and mud. The palm
rattles its quill and the world
whirls once like a distaff
filling, bedded in linen and blood,
tensed to its slack. Light
smashes on cobble
for the vendors of sherbert and gelatin who keep
watch on a splinter of sack-cloth,
settle their sores and their stumps in Vesuvial
ash, wake once, and go back to their sleep.
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