I
In a limbo of things that accept the past
the blood grows softer, glossier, in the shadows.
Here the string goes lax
that holds the sky, fluxes of the will, the vague far places.
The distance opens and closes the palms of my hands.

II
Trying to go back
fulfills fantasy, patterns of childhood, the clear bondage.
Yet perhaps the soul, dispiriting enemy
inside my own age, tribe and tongue,
gives proof enough against annihilation.

III
What can remain to meaning here
deadens gestures, footfalls, faces of our nature.
Disused things yield themselves to our
arrivals and departures, sun and rain, relationships:
cold reminders of gods I had hoped to escape forever.

IV
In high ceilinged rooms the lofty uncommon light
frees things from one another, each object
on its own darkness, definitive, as though charged
with the voice of a bird no longer there, sucked into the skies.
The century’s smell floats in the air like an act of treachery.

V
If I hesitate for dreams to come, the memories
of this light, the quartz staircase of flight;
to invoke the last glance of a lotus-footed princess
who fluttered across the now-deserted corridors of stone,
isn’t it only my soul staggering on the meaningless
blue of the sky the bird carried away on its wings?

VI
The rot and dust pick up such casual afternoons,
sifting their aura of power across the senses;
what souls are proof against the knowledge of where they live?
What brings us face to face, across the palace’s
golden light locked inside that secret lens?
Not the thought that succeeds in pushing the darkness,
                                                      evil and ugliness out of my life.