From “Dark Honey”

In homage to Osip Mandelshtam I am sure I do not believe we can move a pencil through a white field, pulled by a team of upside- down ox-head letter A s, and in real fact furrow it. Poor old page-earth — sized, cut, scraped, ploughed with mule-pencils or impressed by ink, illuminated, printed, obscurely inscribed, and revered or destroyed, revered and destroyed, and here comes yet another walled-garden crop for eye, ear, lungs, legs, mind. • The cranium dome hangs from its own silk conceptual thread of thought, conceiving its infinite in- complete perfection: its Zeno, its Zeus, its Dante, its Te Deums and freak shows, frescoes, twine theory, money, bread, bricks and wine, six-syllable abstractions, axes and facts, its every variation of custom, including vertical graves of men buried upside down without their heads. • (In dusk-lit, telling ways, tell me, little swallow, Tuscan or T’ang or wrung somehow from time: since I have neither feather nor wing, how I too can go into a grave made only of air.) • “For your sweet joy, take “from my cupped hands a “little glittering “of sun, a little “honey — for this is “what Persephone’s “bees have commanded. “A boat can’t cast off “if it isn’t moored; “no one can hear a “shadow that wears fur “boots; we can’t best our “fright in this dark wood. “Our kisses — these are “all that we can save, “velvety as bees “that die if they are “exiled from the hive. “They’re murmuring in “the transparent groves “of the night; the wilds “of mountain Greece are “their motherland; their “diet is time, lung- “wort, pale meadowsweet. “For joy, please take this “pagan gift: this rude, “rustling necklace of “the bees that died, for “these had transmuted “honey into sun.”