For K.I.

[…]

of now New England, whose calm majestic inhabitants

cared nothing for silk or golden cloth or knives or steel or iron at all

or even, o other world, for mirrors […]

–(after Sauer) Kenneth Irby, from Catalpa

Knowing something, not of 

but for you, the words

wait a thousand years to switch places;

the adepts, those who bothered to sound it out,

who would ear–see a vocal rattle analogous

to it, go–

Dark voices of the blind also dark.

Because now there are ways,

clarities we called understanding

motions clear, painful because unseen:

a being in the dusty harvest season

evening, bluish genie rearranging as it settles

through all the faces of anyone’s ancestors.

Here are so many cities,

all next to each other:

talking hurriedly of concepts top bottom duality

but you know what they mean. Squint eyed lovers. Here Verrazzano

or was it the Pleiades

travels appended, blind to time 

(isn’t that the sight one’s given, the gift of fire?) 

refreshing themselves, evening’s lordlings, theirs

The open welcome to the New World.

I believed every word of it

a man in a blue shirt welcoming you 

to your own continent.

The heart its attentions

still speaking the hand 

that says everything

–from Paradise till the shit was shot again–

that never moved anything.