Capricorn


Here the heavenly horns of the sea hunted the goats
and the four-fold snout of the night rattled
inflaming the tentacles of deep sea
broken branches of the southwestern wind and sirocco
and in the middle that tree
of Abessalom.
Here the tropic craters shone
burning the forests of exalted reefs and
slicing the bread of the fog at midnight
months cross-legged
yellow chasms and red-golden cracks
smell of sulphur. The light is out.
Here we sat and lamented the leadership
and domesticated animals of old days.
Oh, uncalculated turn, geometric order
where we’ve lived under full sail listening to fairy tales and
the nightingale songs of water mills
where we’ve lived page by page counting the immovable mountains
or retaining the lecythus of calm
amidst the loose hair of the Aegean horn
during the third century of the glaucus dynasty
with signalmen surveying the map of the tempest
at the gateless foreheads
the sun strikes the quarries of green
like a wing over the ancient neighborhood
with canaries on the garden fence.
How have we lived?
Time fulfilled and time that fulfills and
deciphers the ancient writings and oracles and
the fire-emitting birds it calls to emigrate
sent by chrysanthemums from the other slope
that the mythic clang repatriates unbroken and
again it transforms into the steady triumphal
march of the legions.
There where the musical pleats of summer
once shone.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763408