Contents
I. |
In the Dialectic of Over and Under Truth in the Larger Sense “Lives in the Balance” On Death, and Dying’s Threshold “Give Me Men to Match my Mountains” Going-to-the-Sun “But Eternity Remains” Convergence of Time and Distance Tantum Ergo Blood of My Blood Only the Rational Is Real Ecce Homo |
Other Ways to Read
Tarlton Reads from the Chapbook
Other Matters
About the author
About the Artist
1
you were certainly dead,
but astonishment
remained
in the shadows
the hollows
under your eyes
your mouth ajar
as if to wonder
if the likes of you
could generate
such disproportionate dying:
one as rock-drilled
in red columned autumn;
as hierarchical
as bridges flow;
collapsing head to foot
as no rain today!
no washing away
unrealized potential
pedestal of clay,
along with handfuls
of filed-down blades
below an isolate
giant Eucalyptus
first swallowed
in a fog bank
then embarrassed
by the wind.
2
a god lifted his hand,
a cue, and let it
fall suddenly
from these heights
beyond Time.
Still
you could not remain
unscratched,
those spidery hands,
rotted cordage
“the tangled webs we weave”
where you had
always practiced.
Your deceptions
dropped away, a stray;
just a bad habit,
in depleted phrasings
undisguised and held under
brightest lights.
3
but, for an eternity
of stone and word
the city, grasped
by everyone;
the living,
the dead,
the silenced,
raised up,
a chalice held up
between rows of death,
a necropolis, a wall
ducking under a hail
of stone petals.
undying Andean rose
you wedded the reef,
these icy outposts.
