Aygi Cycle

Michael Palmer

Aygi Cycle (1)

·And here the rains
think little of us

their music is such
and the wind is such

and “the time of ravines”
the tiny wild orchids

in the damp fields
Night again

and the life-book
writing itself

Aygi Cycle (2)

·

Our walk then by sea’s edge,
land’s westernmost edge,
and the waves’ violent crests
that day, when my despair noticed
the shifting, the silent migration
of the dunes, and you
the low alyssum flowering white,
artemisia, hence Artemis, her
rites, speaking as we walked
of things other than we thought

Aygi Cycle (3)

·

So the bright
cadmium fields
of wild mustard

and the dark crows’
eternal arguments
and we wonder

if the poem
if the poem will unfold
toward them

and the coiled voices
their summonings below

Aygi Cycle (4)

·

Coarse hawthorn
beloved uncle’s
memory entwined

among its
gnarled and
armored limbs

copy of
Lolita by
his deathbed

Aygi Cycle (5)

Within the small poem time
and tales of the preening gods
among the sliding stars

and love’s silent
mirror held up
to the crimes of war

within the small poem

Aygi Cycle (6)

Invisible
between tree and field
that nothing

zero zephirum that wind
whirling leaf
wind

between tree and field
wind - wind of paradise? -
that zero nothing zephirum

Aygi Cycle (7)

The late ice
begins to sing
in the winter
of Aleksander Blok’s

great poem Twelve,
and now here
outside the poem
beneath the eaves

Aygi Cycle (8)

This house
so known

and not
the late

wind plays it
at times

tunes it
at times

to what
slant pitch

recalls its
voices lost

their tones
sudden laughter

brittle rage
as though

on a
burning stage

Aygi Cycle (9)

·

There at horizon’s lip
hurtling clouds

of deepest red
over tiny, listing ship

and I a passenger
by a different name

Aygi Cycle (10)

Spare light
of this world –
not entirely
of this world
not entire

Cooper’s Hawk
dining on a sparrow
in the pepper tree’s
thick, aged limbs,
feathers floating so

slowly down
to the moist
earth below –
O book
of bleeding branches