Refrains
The unearthed village in Italy held nothing
living but it was alive.
Ercolano. Vesuvius. I cannot explain it.
The bedframe of dust
remembers the lovers too deep in their love
to perceive the mountain of fire falling.
If the heart is a stone
what is its composition?
We are the ash of stars. A cold wind
fills our ship’s black sails, a king falls
from a cliff to the sea singing
hallelujah hyperobject,
heavy as stone.
Ariadne is still alone.
“Every summer I forget the snow,
every winter I forget breath
without pain.” Did you remember
to buy volcanic ash from the artisanal
market, as the cardiologist instructed?
Brother Apollo heart-
broken at the laurel tree again,
his hands dragged down the bark,
until he’s turned back to sunlight
and she has no choice.
Have you noticed in our beloved stories
beauty disguises violence
and violence beauty
and still you and I won’t quit
telling them? We cannot
perceive the fire we set.
Look past the specks of ash
in the air, stir the embers,
warm your hands.
Tell me how the ruined woman
became seven stars.
How she seized a god with a glance.
Or how by chance we accessed
the first fire
and used it, just
as we saw fit.
Later I will tell you
how the fire used us instead.
On First Looking into the IPCC’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees Celsius
Crater Lake, Oregon
Told no worst,
there is none,
pitched past pitch of
reckoning, we grieve
beauty—its lying ways
—at the mile-wide
caldera of the lake
in Oregon.
Its water rumored
preindustrial blue
now obscured
by wildfire smoke.
Is this our century?
White fabric masks
covering our mouths
like the hands of saints,
a red bulletin
suggesting we not
leave the house,
not today, not today?
In the seventh Homeric hymn
the god of vines
is a lion, then
a hyacinth, then a trireme
sinking. In this one
I am a brackish
river tributary, then
a cinder glowing, then
a story ending.
Crater Lake is
only the remnant
maw of a volcano
that erased
a former world.
These are my clean hands.
There must be a new
discipline of ash in me.
Follies
That’s what the English bluebloods called them.
A ruin when approached revealing it is no ruin.
Stonework no Greek knew of on a lakeside in Austria.
Pale templesques dotting the misted vista
beyond a Sussex manor’s portico:
The desire for an unstained past
so strong someone willed it into the present
—or rather the curved backs of laborers did.
Wasn’t that the golden age,
the wearers of starched shirts pined,
if only it were real…
When Ireland began to waste from hunger
the structures went by famine follies
built to spec for a week’s rations
and that was real.
I want to know
if the circle of limestone columns
resembled the jut of ribs now encasing
the torso of a man who is lying down
in the heat. If his closed eyes
are like the domes
his palms helped shape,
and whether he cares
for ionic orders over dorics.
If a stranger’s fictive glory
is more real to him
or to the soft man who directed him,
who is growing bored with the gentle
towers on the hill, now
winding a pocket watch
but otherwise keeping still.
From Another Litany
In the Maple Street Cemetery walking home among the pale teeth I praise the soft fingers of rain on my shoulders.
I praise the long smiles of trees.
I praise the mud cleaved to my groaning boots.
I praise the idea of beauty which does not mean what it used to.
I praise the great flock of sparrows which is like the shadow of a man.
I praise the cardinal leaving red wounds wherever he goes, the finch’s tilted head.
In fact I praise all birds except the crow, which knows the reason why.
I praise the bronze horses of Rome shining sadly under the moon.
I praise Santa Monica’s golden mask that I wore so willingly.
I praise the transfigured memory which is greater than the thing remembered.
I praise my youth of water in Mississippi which was like liquid sun.
I praise the dark bedroom that beckons my eyes flutter open.
I praise the gash of pale golden dusk opening on a mountainside.
I praise the mystery of stairwells, the futures of doorways.
I praise the calloused hands of strangers which are like secret languages.
I praise nothing that does not praise itself.
I praise the monogamy of life, the polyamory of the mind.
I praise every pane of glass incapable of falsehood.
I praise the vanity of children.
If I did not praise I would be forsaken.
I praise knowing my bones will turn to emeralds.
I praise any lonely soul who makes of death a poem.
If I did not praise I would be forsaken.
I praise the untended forsythia dripping color onto the asphalt.
I praise the roots which are avenues to heaven.
I praise the endless roof of clouds which is like a great fiction.
I praise to augment my finite world.
If I did not praise I would be forsaken.
I praise all forms of empathy with the innocent dead.
I praise the low gravestones needing nothing from me.
I praise their rain-softened words composing the song of a hundred lives:
I praise the restless night that sings it.
Pastoralesque
I never saw a field firsthand.
Where are the sidewalks
for roots to interrupt,
where is the hot glare
of a glass tower? Why is the milk warm?
A deer at the tree-line terrifies.
A buzzard draws a tightening circle.
At night I am told look up,
and the light from a pale cocoon
dismantles me
all the rest of my life.
Matt MacFarland has been a finalist for prizes from New Issues Press and Nimrod International Journal and a semifinalist in the Sowell Emerging Writers Prize. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia MFA program in poetry, and his poems have appeared in Ecotone, The Southern Review, December, Third Coast, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Fugue, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Header image by Nanne Tiggelman, courtesy Pixabay.
