who leaves with pompanos with bread in hand who quits tired Oracles framed heaven’s dissent who rends the garden host called Earth who rakes auspicious tenants bares trees strips cracks wide deveins makes spectacle the daring phrase: We are a company of ghosts Ω No angels now the sea will say but language for each forgotten life marketed as metaphor spelled scaffold of children ours theirs in thunder of time in space once filled the emptied place now called chair at the table bed gnarl of feeling twist of throated terms the hopeful bend in vain the cry loneliness loneliness from the isolated breast as sea verbs thunder rumbling heads cloud-over flood flashing OM against the stratified against all structure enpoemed as this: Hero, it no longer matters war makes your lips Dust is your body your birth earth-all created skin grown over fleshed again Hero fertilized omnipotence sewn deferential possession obsequious tongue-ranked imagined before you were born— Hero sifted you drift among ghosts drafted intellect lexicon separated sacrificed for ground-Worshippers on Sundays bring the word good Worshippers on Sundays bring the word bad for justice and company in freedom with gods for which the sea prepares itself in rain for which deception’s fragility finds Kin for which concrete conceptions rubble down taking deserts forests prairies taking all saying ‘Hero we are the ghosts of the emptied eye the haunted poem the silence formed in uni-verse ghosts by now well-known’
LEIGH HERRICK ~
78
~
Ω
Bernard-Henri Levy: Preface, war, evil, and the end of history