from toward the end of July

10

  
         A halting freedom   hesitant, grieving
 draws her on   she's limping
 on the empty earth
 toward a last vagrant

  
         flowering   the way the Yenisei flows north
 more slowly   under the rustling ice
 and the crackling of timbers
 the way a clay wheel   rotates

  
         more slowly   after your hands have
 gone away   the way he walks
 (the greenish iron   of a broken
 spring   Hans the yurodivy

  
         lifted to his lips)   the last ecstasy
 blooming so   invisibly but   sounding
 there   diminished   minor A
 15th Quartet   staggers so

  
         delicately   drawing on   does not want
 to end it or   to leave   the weeping women
 there   behind   as his   wind-dragged
 accomplices   (heart's magma  Opus   1-3-2)

  
         so in the myrrh within   her casket of acacia
 a pair of stones breathe   from-the-depths
 where   two lines of their footsteps
 meet and   her wooden pine-box

  
         makes an ark as Julius sees her
 yurodive (steel spoke di-ditched)
 a J-stroke (C-B fl. Shostakovich)
 from the C and sown   so recedes

  
         (just a kinetic holey furled seashell)
 into the mirror once again  (an easy-
 does-it Yenisei   or   seizure-salaud)
 (let us pray for them   sailing away)

       
                                                        2.6.2000