————-—I

——–—Back there somewhere the blood of christ
is my vaccination a sign on the window

of a half-block-long empty storefront, helicopters
stitching nets of shadows above the courthouse,

clouds around the Bridge slashed with violet,
workers with nail guns crouched on beams,

so cold I see my own breath. A close friend
writes a close friend died last week after months

in the hospital from a condition so mysterious
even the doctors can’t agree on what it was.

 

————-—II

——————————–—God, no God,
transubstantiations, transmogrifications,

Tacitus in his Annals, empire the name given
to the slaughter and plunder, Baudelaire

in My Heart Laid Bare, exactness infallibly
brings its own recompense, each morning pray

to the God of justice, pray to Poe, as intercessor,
Raphael’s fresco, The Prophet Isaiah,

in the church of Sant’Agostino, assists me
on my return to the inferno.

 

————-—III

——————————–—Of grammar,
of syntax, tone and pitch, notes, notations,

days without tears a rare occurrence,
the secret heart of the clock, the heart’s

core, torturers, riflers, inquisitors,
slavers with death’s-head armbands,

these specimen days, yellow, the full
moon at sunrise, in indigo sky.

 

 

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Lawrence Joseph’s most recent book is A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). A new book, Precisely Now (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), will be published this September.

 

 

 

Photo by Jack Cohen on Unsplash