Debris Field


The robot penetrates
the last, abruptly colder
layer.  It bears,
unhesitating,
twelve thousand pounds psi.  And
light.  Unaware that
they’re blind, fish
and something like a fish
approach and flee.
On the seabed, transparent
crabs.  Would you rather you
steered there, a casual hero,

or are you satisfied with images?
You can’t expect cloth,
leather.  Possibly wood:
a sprung, empty chest.
A perfect demitasse
with, somewhere nearby,
perhaps, still, a molecule
of tea.  Like a word
among all words, a memory
amidst fact.  And everywhere
gears, struts,
plates separated when

the hull broke
in two, no, in three.  The tech
at the monitor drinks
soda, sweats,
lacks reverence, is likeable enough,
unreal.  You can’t expect bones.
There is a leaching effect;
whether they lay in
the dark and cold
of cabins, or tumbled out,
they are not even a
fine powder now.  They will live.



Siege Engine


One hungry month
we have watched it rising,
just out of range,
on the duke’s land reverting to weed.
His woods beyond that
went into it.  Tonight, it
creaks forward.  Our burning arrows
slip from its iron hide.
It shies from hurled stones but comes on.
A virgin doesn’t prepare
for rape, nor a child for the sword,
nor a street for blood, but they come.

The duke is mad,
the king on the other side
mad too, the men in that tower
mad for loot and murder.
Priests urge
them on, and us.  But when fear
becomes general, and realized, it
displaces fear of hell and hope of heaven.
There’s a lightness that comes,
unmooring from words,
from what priests say, from the orders
I myself issue.  You thought you alone
knew such freedom, fortunate,
self-flattering future?
Really it was always possible.
One day as I rode
between wars, light broke
through winter.  Speaking neither
from above nor below,
it said I had wasted
whatever time I was in.

Now the siege engine
grapples our wall.  From
its topmost story,
archers quantify
a universal.  In torchlight
we jostle forward, brave shadows.  Soon
the plank will fall and a man
in armor step across it and say Hello.




Ice


If you stand long enough
by the ice in the crosswalk,
seeking without success
a way round,
shadows will come.  They will take you by the arms
and guide your tremulous feet
to safe places.  Then, facing
the hard, jagged snow
between you and home, they’ll say, *This can’t
be allowed*.  And more shadows
will emerge from houses
you never quite noticed
along the way, to clear it.
You’ll want to thank them; and, peering
directly at them, see
not shadows but thick
stalwart men, strong willowy wives, a motif
of plaid wool.  (Though should
you look away they’d be shadows again,
so you don’t.)  It’s far
to your house, even on new-swept
sidewalk, and lonely;
when it comes, you’ve no reason
to refuse their invitation.
An impromptu party fills
a living-room, with a fire
against the dark noon.
There are paintings of ships under sail,
red textured wallpaper, cats,
demure but interested children,
antique tools and an air of tools
that work.  So many cars,
you’re told,  have landed in snowdrifts
they have banished cars from the street,
and are leaving theirs to dissolve into ore.
While winter lasts, they walk en masse
to the supermarket; but
come spring there will be cows and vegetables
in the joined, fenceless yards.  And if spring
is late, they will send expeditions
to settlements across
the half-admitted, half-forgotten
city.  Someone plays guitar.
Here and there in the house
are traces of flute.  You sip
homemade cordial, quite good, and say
how happy you are
they found you, how much you intend
to do your thoughtful, small, debilitated
bit.  But now a young man,
increasingly edgy and visible
among them, attacks.  Is this
what you dream of, afraid and old
before a patch of ice?  This
reactionary niceness?  And what is
the theme?  The dregs of utopian longing,
or death?  Have the two become one,
does it come to that?
He *will not accept it!  You turn
your rheum-closed eyes
away, as if needlessly apologizing
for him to the shades, or as if ashamed.