Walk with me
Where the apple and the plane
tree
Issue from the dragon’s
skull,
In which the fallen bones
of bear turned stone
Before the tongue could
lap across the lakeshore road.
Here are serpents in Pelasgian
walls
Where Elias prophesied Olympus
And Komnenos built his
church to the black Madonna.
Regrettably, the road is
clogged with careworn
Pilgrims seeking to out-distance
dissolution,
Mindless that two steps
allure the end-times,
Which flake like frescos
of the old religion,
The eyes put out by the
rising damp,
Contemporaneous with the
Seljuk wars.
Cease; and say
The only peace to find
Is in the shifting faults
of vision,
The cymbals clanging in
my ears,
The knotted brows, the faces,
each
Averted from the specter,
Clay-foot, at last, ye
mighty,
Amid your works, in the
all-common grave.
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