6

 
The little autumn door leads nowhere.
Set against a hillside in a fresco
fading on a wall.  Tiny square of yellow
flame, a single leaf.  Twilight atmosphere.

 
It was you who brought me here
(by way of a passion for obscure painters
from Siena - by way of the black-iron fritillary
in the campus gate).  Here to nowhere.

 
Nothing behind the supernal colors
on the wall.  Nowhere to turn.  Send back
the Antikythera Mechanism (Hipparchus's
hunches no help now).  Somewhere,

 
through some word-hole, we wormed across
between empire and empyrean, making the sign
of black sheep on a parallel (dim gnomon of
lulled hearts, importunate (with     )).

 
That blackened wooden frame around the icon
was the smile around your lips.  Which was
your arm across my shoulder.  Which was...
which was.  Like Russian dolls (infinite

 
recession.  Fine recess).  The little door
flames in its woodwork (limpid, desolate).
Simple primary colors.  Light green, involute
pine-needle blue, sand, solitude.  No more. 

[p.s. for the "Antikythera Mechanism", see today's NY Times article (by John Noble Wilford). Coincidentally, also came upon this today, in Chapt. 1 of Moev book mentioned previously : "Hipparchus's discovery of the precession of the equinoxes about 129 B.C. implied that the motion of the sphere of fixed stars too was complex (there was a slight west-east slippage in its daily east-west rotation), and so an invisible ninth heaven, 'which many call Crystalline, that is, diaphanous or completely transparent' (Convivio 2.3.7.), was posited..." (Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy, p. 16)]