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Ger Killeen
Brumaire
The storm discovers
its voice, and the meanings
multiply gust by gust.
It all becomes
a city of one dream. Think
of sleep as a fire
whose blown white heat
brings out layer
after smudged layer
of sentences
quilled in citron inks,
book chapters, perhaps.
The lucky salvage
fistfuls of smoke, pen
them away inside
the orbital cavities
sunk in lovely skulls. So many
eyes the color of parchment
perching like pigeons
on spires, on ramparts,
so many chilling nights
of hilarious weeping.
Nivôse
To one a smoldering
coal, to the other
a mouthful of ash,
each and every one its own
hunger: pressure
enough to hold
the swell and hum,
the clatter tumbling over
the royal roads a night
or part of a night.
Otherwise
only rehearsed sayings
bunched up under
the teeth, fitful
squeaking as of
pipistrelles under eaves
steeply pitched against
the weight of articulacy
that is the sad
measure of days.
To one
a few true things,
to the other
a few more.
Otherwise
tragedy
and farce
and tragedy.
Without end.
Calendar
Now it is one era; now
it is another. The sky
burns purple, unpronounceable;
the hours are a bristling
looped into your nerves.
And so, the rock-doves plunge and swoop
as your eyes strain to parse
their scattering into
verbs inflected for the future;
a hand like amber smoke casts
yarrow sticks, bundles them
promisingly; and so many silvery cities
trilling in the solar winds.
Soon there is the oceanic clatter
of a talus slide;
soon there is the fluent stutter of guns.
____
Copyright ©2006 by Ger
Killeen