more perturbed quietude from Siena...

5

 
When droning sages dared to speak of God
they seared their tongues (sappy mountains
of audacity).  They stumbled - they incensed
the panicky demons (with their babble-screed).

 
God shrugged, and turned his back.  A vast
crescendo of dry leaves (frail Armada) sailed
out of the library.  Humble, inconsequential,
the serviceable word.  It accumulated (ballast).

 
Words and spittle split the world's contempt.
Only harsh masonry of absolute dream
(prestidigitation, Midas massage, scam
of platre-de-Paris effigy) appeared exempt.

 
From anemone-whorls of spooky midnight blue
on the edge of the highway, to zebra-
stripes of an ineluctable cathedral
the dumb world answers back (I see you) -

 
I see, I see chants Dante too
in the celebrity fresco of Ambrogio
- there like an angry bee (gone solo)
thrust from the hive, pacing his peripetio

 
(longhouse-home).  Playing hide-and-seek
in marble rafters painted with images
of marble rafters, in the troubadours'
hill-town nestled (hidden) in peaks

 
of hills (with Beatrice).  Horsing around
with pals of Palio - cantering across his
can-can-cantos - toward a Ramirez ferris-
wheel, in Mexico (tiered vale of Jehoshaphat).