Palinode

O dove, fly to Aleppo with my Byzantine ode And take my greeting to my kinsman. –Mahmoud Darwish Before I was born, I saw a tissue of ingenious detours, an inextricable tangle wreathed with mistake. Perhaps the ghost does not limp away, but rather forests flee me, frightened. Look, they are setting a place for loss, clearing the table for the first glow of antiquity. Here we see William T. Walters in his little library illuminated, carefully smoothing the lip of the continent. What form bounds forward from behind but The Atlantic Railroad Coastline Co.? The whole Roman Empire was sold by ascending auction in 193 A.D. A globe enclosed. Bottomless years. The train has stopped on the platform and no one is there, for these are the Public Days, when the “Poor Association” claims the museum’s building. As if bound by the knots of invention, I found a wrong road dotted with weeds and sorrows.