Excursus (1)
More houses greet daylight
as it careens off course
and enters wherever it can from east/each
fissure of sleep in a narrow range of
jays and nuthatch trawling a low-
skirted beech of law dropped down/again
as even moonlight drops in rain’s light
aftermath/in torn brown paper/streamed
from air’s high gutters/lookouts where/
separate enough to count, breathe
through labor statutes torn from a block/now
dropped as someone writes a letter to neighbors uphill
seeking between this house and the other
as clouds/pass over the flag on the rutted lawn
and flammable loyalties/discounted/leap
and signal his arrival and cross the span
of lake bereft of houses/doubled down
in the mirror’s clarity of porchlights dimmed
as midnight swims once/into mind and crowds/
the air where the demagogue leans/over himself/
the water filled now with only his voice.
Excursus (II)
Keep moving, the cloud says, time is scarce
in the (promise of) words that come from the seat of power.
No time but (this) pressure to discard
a vox populi no longer recognized. To stay
as we are or thought we were, all else destroyed,
however, would mean to bear the consequence—
so runs the logic (Bourdieu) of capital:
Hurry up, move on/the markets drag their stalls
onto the town/greens: the banners read: we are all
the same in transience, and all the same in “presence
in the world,” whereas eternity is “out of bounds,”
for “nothing is larger than death” (for some).
As when reward and punishment become the image
of nations (Fichte); duration and transience meaning this dread.
Excursus (III)
I come to the window
as if to that territory
to see shelters outlining
the lake’s own boundary;
“compelled to treat
the future as a threat,”
I might otherwise
have reasonably felt myself
forbidden to look out,
imagining devastation haunting,
like fog over near hills
diffusing once more
the small cities and towns,
local and nameable,
as somewhere else
dissent hammered
its iron, cast
from mundane use to
a cooking pot,
a horse-drawn plow,
facts in the full
weight of doing,
improbable spring
bringing these things
one by one into
the frame: weapons, armor.
Synecdoche of everywhere,
the required voice
answers repeatedly
to focus, before nightfall,
first heat, then hell
in frieze.
