The One Thousand Days

There is the mourning dish of salt outside
My door, a cup of quarantine, saucerless, a sign

That one inside had been taken down
By grieving, ill tonguc-tied will or simple

Illness, yet trouble came.
I have found electricity in mere ambition,

If nothing clse, yet to make myself sick on it,
A spectacle of marvelling& discontent.

Let me tell you how it came to this.
I was turning over the tincture of things,

I was trying to recollect the great maroon
Portière of everything that had ever happened,

When the light first stopped its transport
& the weather ceased to be interesting,

Then the dark drape closed over the altar
& a minor city's temple burnt to ground.

I was looking to become inscrutable.
I was longing to be seen through.

It was at slaughtering, it
Was at the early stain

Of autumn when the dirt-
Tinted lambs were brought down

From the high unkempt fields of Sligo, bidden,
Unbidden, they came down.

It was then that I was quit
Of speech, a thousand northbound nights of it.

Then was ambition come
Gleaming up like a fractured bone

As it breaks through the bodiced veil of skin.
Imarry into it, a thistle on

The palm, salt-pelt on
The slaughtering, & trouble came.

That the name of bliss is only in
The diminishing-as far as possible-of pain.

That I had quit the quiet velvet cult of it,
Yet trouble came.