for K F Pieters
 
in arid cities we have read as syntax flooded streets, marked tides in museums

where classical shadows
build birds of dust on their shoulders: the old tongue sleeps, forgotten, in patches,

but still the thirst:
the sky, a desert of tiredness, without image to drink, but almost the memory of

rain, half-tasted,
like jealousy in the back of the throat; the lake, maybe eroded, or a salt, unfed

expanse, a wilted lip,
dragging dust boundaries, outside the circle of light, the marble horse's pupil

gilded. sight splits a line,
a dry horizon, a pen raised to the chalky lips of cliffs, the vanishing point chewed

ragged by wide skies,
a seedless devouring, graced by neither coherence nor splendor. where we live,

on the edge of the letter,
a view pointing stillness, behind gray glass; time ripened under the eye's black

canopy, the plum
of a newly born century, split under the hard foreknowledge of a thumb; and after

the music
there will be the calm, a relocation  of light, the movement exact, a trace of anger

held between hand
and paper, and in the wind, where cartographies click, and the surfaces rearrange

their notes, the desert
flaring, pulling a long story from our feet, after a lifetime spent suffering the stilted

innocence of flowers,
to avoid the belonging, the dull love: to walk horizontally along the edge of a word,

blinded by sun,
to forget what was seen, and what there is, and beneath real heel, to tread the fiction

of a hill: