DiaBLOGue

My knot, my clot, my Utah, 
Good gouty wrinkled nurse 
Turned dear disease, insufferable 
Sweet scurf, my bloat, my fever, 
You’re all the pain I am. 
And I’ll prescribe our health: 

How things really are
we would like to know.
Does Time flow,

or is it atomized
in instants hammered
around the clock’s face?

The mass grave here is set with stones 
Piled low inside a low rock wall, 
And marked for travelers by a sign 
That tells us briefly of the murder 
Of six score emigrants, whose bones 
Lay here and there once—on the plain, 
In the gulley—left to the weather 
Of almost a century where they fell— 

Leaves and fruit were falling 
And I only wanted to know 
Why this, of all the trees, 
Kept alternating greens 
And browns and why it dropped 
Those ugly pods and stems— 
I only wanted to know 
Of the roots, the crazy clutch 
That broke the ground, the branches 

Let’s see. This morning—since you’ve been gone—
I’ve taken a walk on the beach, naming 
And naming and naming, until I can name no more. 
Comber, anemone, crab. Will these do? 

I talk to myself now—so I’ve found—
As never before, when he’d leave me, often 
Now, and now you. I guess I’ll get used 
To the feeling. But it’s funny—the way I get thinking

A landscape lies under the open sky . . . 
(Open? The sky’s the limit, 
the daylight veil over the illimitable, 
withdrawn for revelation from the darkness 
beyond of Adam’s first—and longest—nightmare 
trying to count quastars telstars from pulstars. 
Nth grandson Blaise, a rodent of nocturnal 

In the west door for kings alone swung wide, 
the leather-padded wicket, left behind me 
stifling a gasp, expired. 

No more fresh air: 
I had entered the dim, mouldy, hollow hush 
of a dead church—the silence of the ‘grave 
and reverend’ sirs ghosting it in their gowns—