The sea calm as if sleep had been poured onto it.
Only a pencil of white foam marking the island.
Many of the stars have gone out.
In the deep water no jewelled wrack nor kings undergoing transformation.
Having died and not yet having died, he returns
in the time before mind falls helplessly into body
and they lose themselves in the erosion of the dark.
What is this interim for? Surely there is no retrieving now
even the late leaf color of his devoted body,
let alone the candle-lit, wine-lit transparencies of
lovers passing into and through one another in their
engendering dance.
The island is as it was before its discovery,
before exploration and naming, in its own dream of
itself,
if there are dreams.
Tall cloak of the wind’s feathers, mirrors of eyes
equal to inward and outward, remembering or
remembered by,
he is here to exhaust this memory, unpick
what his magics wove into garments of land and water,
into the little figurations of breast and thigh,
to discover what echo is when it does not answer.
Outside ourselves, even when the clock bites
at its bread of hours, even when the Perseid storms
illustrate approaching autumn, heartsblood on the
navel stone
tries to cry back from the zero mouth of winter,
is an other of unconcern only the air edges,
a purpose of interruption.
Are melted into air, into thin air,
and beyond that emptiness, which his urgent body,
even his withering body, has avoided,
plucking at its compass points of head and belly
to create direction.
Now he neither
walks nor does not walk through his film of island
toward a crisis of inattention,
less realizable as a center the farther in he goes.
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