It was when the last bird flew by the window
wounded in the leg, its feathers a curse to be lifted
by a still wind and the sun’s red crest as it slides
backwards to its fine collapse, that he stood an exile
in the streets, shadows anointing the cobblestones
to the deep gray glow where the dead preside.
It was a drifting across an inaccessible ledge
to a place of familiar wonders wide as a span of wings
and short as the pain of hands that draw away
to the cold fissures of distant truths,
the god of flowers sustaining the undone dances
and distant visions of a virtuous man.
The stolen hours carried him beyond the lands
he surveyed, following the arches of the moon
hanging in the sky like a guarded mirror
that reflects horizons far and wide, the high bridge
of salvation that whispers his name as the rains pass
somewhere in the East and the three kings float
up across the garden’s trance, caught in
the shifts and scrolls of beggars in the market square,
the nearest exit a periphery of space and light.
But all this was out of reach: the hawk of redemption
freeing us one by one from the darkness of the world,
bent westward by the cold spears of miracle and sin.
Fish and flocks, the unsummoned image, matter and time,
the earth-brown core of unbordered lands dreamed
like the broken ghosts of absolution as the branches spread.
The stitch no world can offer, the pattern that holds
the last lease on time, the moment that swells and dies
winding and unwinding a spirit that will never fall.
And when he turned, the sea drew back into the river’s
cold waters that cannot be crossed and whose sands never rest.
The two halves of the horseman of God broke the tunneled heart.
The stolen hour widened as infinity staggered the earth.
And the darkness, the darkness stayed alive.