Contents
I. |
In the Dialectic of Over and Under Truth in the Larger Sense “Lives in the Balance” On Death, and Dying’s Threshold “Give Me Men to Match my Mountains” Going-to-the-Sun “But Eternity Remains” Convergence of Time and Distance Tantum Ergo Blood of My Blood Only the Rational Is Real Ecce Homo |
Other Ways to Read
Tarlton Reads from the Chapbook
Other Matters
About the author
About the Artist
1
what if the memory of all
our labored actions
had gone to seed,
old corn stored too long?
what if all we did had been forgotten,
nothing remembered
across the long afternoons
and into the night?
2
we were all of us dying
every day, anyway,
a little more each day,
from dust to dust,
each small mortification
coming in on the thick wings
of coffin worms,
piling up,
smothering our lamps;
3
the dust of the streets
transfixing each
mid-trajectory,
on an interrupted sequence.
holed up in dark rooms,
eating small meals
cut with dull knives
from the common rusk;
lonely shepherds and guardians,
plowmen and street rats,
disabled ones, dreading
these deaths, trembling
choking down, one each,
each day, his own black cup.
