Monody

Years from the disaster, of course, they quelled the days
Quiet as six steel petunias scarred by a sun
Though had we trained our lungs for the virile air
such things we’d exhaust in the day’s loose jaw

We’d chew through oceans waiting for beauty
And noiselessness would blow us into plot
Would score our missing speeches on new odds
of coming to this century, trading our metal legs
for black quartz, if fluency helps our becoming new

But it is morning now and the globe in our clear chests
spins us a bluff, breaking into the mouth’s strange depths,
The quiet we drag, vague blood and the rusted silence
of android newscasters disremembering every childhood

There, we’ve ruined the clock: the hurricane hums
Now, fresh soldiers, turn our heads from the line
Of defeat: become our art, we anticipate a future
to turn from again as an hourglass against itself, we are

Deliberate as music, ghostly as sand, and anything
here could be bread, anything here could be the mask
Now hanging itself up on our descriptions, we hear some-
One fluent in living announce

good evening, here is a home to sort,
Remember to open and open it, bon swè
in each wall is an abandoned

peninsula. Yesterday we closed ourselves in the erased
century’s browser-history, here today we are
left to interpret the coral’s need again. They offer
us signs of brilliant corpses, our friends
and their handful of horizons losing even death

to the algae’s good bloom, Babylon shells, a house
did you try the past participle of air, look and hush—
on our way back to war, with an order of suspension
against another home, this window folds our time

our memories bound for the clouds, where they are
mute and undisturbed by sirens storming in our flesh—