Vigil
midnight never falls at midnight
—Blanchot
I.
Dissimulation’s inside
the song too.
A letter darkness
in spring’s
cold reparations.
A troubled hindrance.
Wind pours its verdigris
favor—
I choose its parceled
intercession—.
A discontent settling.
A tattered, insisting
configuration with all
its devotions gone—
all the dialectics and names—
in shallow evaporation.
II.
Intractable, gleaming
subjugation of
day and night
caught in the rock and pitch
past grief and its lack.
Entwined wheel,
railing through absolute
and unturned waves.
No minor wind.
No interval
in the graven sleep
to burnish
or resemble
this famished
mourning
for disavowal—
adamantine
decorum—
oblivion’s hive.
III.
Then, an inscription on the catastrophe.
Late shade and ash in the day telling
of an obverse name spelled out in air.
(We were there, in its scarce elaboration,
one vowel darker than another.)
On the beach, I hear a blunt edge
of wind and waves in brief convolution,
their axial dominions of symmetry
and brittle shell mouthing the closed
syllables of earth’s continents—
a volcano’s deep echo from a boat’s keel—
