Murmur sift incomplete and sudden—
Spring on bowed feet
and lend no purchase to the flagstone floors
These our inhospitable welcome
and the imprints of numberless penitents crawling
sandlike sieved with trips and busted strides
impart digressions
tangled in riddles of empty
chant that unseals the eventide
and we suppose a posture from the curvetone tethered
to idle heights and swoon beneath hieratic
scratches on lappets in the recesses
lean among posts and
jambs hammered upright veer a twisted balance
scavenges chevron for sphere’s proportion where catenaries trail outlandish prodigies and we commit to stray
so remote imagination aiming at oblivions construes
scales of the actual peculiar to exaltations of fling and whim
that elegance strangles
from a lute’s neck
strings up on transparent notes and plays like phosphor in the tempered glow
Minutes out of time when time was short
hover pluck and strum tallow glister
through opaque frames for the morrow mass
and croon O patiently patiently misapprehend
another low chord to atone
for routed octaves clustered in the architraves
lanced under canopies without means to luster
and gone from us as gone before a harmony
that difference rifts and tumbles disenchanted
but in stooping we perceive
how instinct beats in the skeleton’s rattling pulse
and unrests of flesh and final prayer
inhabit plumb and thread trajectories