Reading our words,
We have come to where we could not come.
In the emptiness of the old villa,
The dusk lake hung like a simulation at open windows –
Blue infinities past sleep,
In a clone of autumn beyond our reach.
We are our oubliette –
Waking in the small hours to matins of turning fields,
As meaning escaped like charcoal birds
Into paper heavens.
Above the duomo,
Stars swung in unapproachable thuribles:
A hiss of finished light
Above the haggard faces of painted saints.
From all this distance,
It was our lives that could not be recalled –
A redacted detail of years
Where accomplishments were staged,
And morning never came.
Reading our words,
We have come to where we could not come.
It was the end of evening,
Or merely wind’s mass in antiphons staging another night –
A cul-de-sac of static time without freedom.
It is said that something like angels watch over the living,
But they are not angels,
And we are not the living.