MINT

Full moon turns the city to silver.
Silver the streets, their bodies,
the ghosts, the hammered moon-coins.

It shines down the mines,
through layers of dust and midden.
Its silver seeps through strata.

From the city of gold to the city of silver,
sky becomes leprous. In the house of bones
each bone’s immured, all mass becomes marrow.

But here, tonight, there is no mortality
where death's rays are white and life's transfixed.
The city persists in argent dust.

His Sol, her Luna, float as they embrace
on a bed as solid as a cloud, near the opened skylight,
inscribing a Book that may not be written

yet exists, no less, as they sit on the train
and watch for hares in desolate fields
as tomorrow's light re-robes them. 

   < < < < < < < < < < < < < < < < < < - > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > >

AT THE CORNER OF THE MAP

White secrets recline on snowfields
above the cabins, far from his room.
Wooden decades pile up in sheds.

In clean rooms ready for ghosts,
grandfathers shuffle and yawn.
Redundant boundaries are sloughed.

He would like to traverse this chain
and cross the abolished counties, one by one —
Bereg, Ung and Ugocsa,

nailed to the ground by pines
as green-grey evenings close in,
as dogs fall silent, and bottles are unscrewed —

he wants a wooden church in a wooded valley
to display her eidolon, her hooded eyes
as night reveals its harvest, far from cities,

close to saturnine peaks, their angular granites,
wants no message to reach him, as he sits
on the stranger’s bed, and ignites her name.

   < < < < < < < < < < < < < < < < < < - > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > >

NOCTURNE

The white road leads to a village.
Night falls, to the sound of geese
in the violet pond. How frosty, their cries.

In the village, bells are silent
as a violin strikes up in the darkness of a tavern.
Blood moves slowly, in the shade of a church.

How heavy, the gravestones and their shadows.
A mouse flits, golden in the gathering twilight.
Names become illegible, their ghosts anonymous.

How good it is to wander into silence
when bells have ceased, the day redeemed
by blue sleep that follows, the amnesiac moon.

And, after so many moons, the village
settles down to another, slides from the map
to be vacant, nameless, hewn from air.

Tracing his finger in the dust,
he recovers the Book of Bells and Candles
from darkness, as if bound in his own true skin.