Throne / Falcon / Eye
EMBARKMENT
Is this yet to be the freight of Claude Lorraine
The gold of Sheba for a king's ennui
before his thousand wives and concubines
across the archaic night sea
Is this yet to be the anachronous Greek cartoon
calipered to the columns' groove
Are these sunbursts yet to be the blind
scalpels that would sign
below the breasts of the fleshed sky
to fit the heart into the body to survive
O surely I do not like to care or to not care
that the passage of the soul
takes on some second-rate nubile queen
Although I do not seem to turn the blade
from the prose of these rapes and revulsions
Perhaps it is how steel must remember the vein
or how sleep must unwind the bandages of the Pharaohs
who refuse to die
unclaimed as the shadows on their stones
But is this yet to be the reply
to the body drugged under the dawn as if alive
as the clouds ride slowly through the rooms
Is this yet to be the verdict under the ductile beams
That a slave must be chained into the ribs
to beat like the heart of the figurehead
whose nipples spread the waves of that sea
That a rower must sweat under the sun's day in the hold
so that she can sail in the dream
on the dream of that sea
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THRONE / FALCON / EYE was originally published by Random House.
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