What you taught at the turn
of the mystery, the change, happened
in resonance, in the face of my ignorance,
full of doubts but drawn forward, I set out
on East Slope, to tend the abandoned fort,
plow anchored to dirt, plot cleared of over-
growth, spaces for air, carved seal sown
seriality, breath watering greenery, signs
marked by your generosity of mind, spirit,
your generosity of time, what you taught
of the fire bringing words to the light
guided by fire, the knowledge in fire,
struck by Apollo, caught, dazed, afloat
in the halflight, Helios arc, your periplum
bringing the stars to our shorelines, your
work Schatzkarte or carte aux trésors, coordinating
Provençal geography with Gironde’s rough sheafs,
shadowing Walter and Asja on a sleigh
through the bitter cold of Moscow’s streets,
Animosity and love ... shifting within me like winds,
Your sustaining ear, rare scholar spark translating
dichten as condensare, anima into aura, meta-
morphic bridge across the abysm sea birth
see day, in the fullness of time propounds
the fullness of life, distilled historical aftereffects
in intro, chronology, afterword, your grinding Lenz
suffers the madness of boredom bordering
nonexistence, you who smuggled salt
onto our tongue, your poetry singing
both hymns and fragments drunk with light,
and the spirit of animals / rests with them,
You, instigator at the crag’s edge, of the over-
looked romance, the forgotten key scaled
to the whole relation, margin circling to center,
reverse sunfish decomposition to “material
of extraordinary magnitude,” periplum bathed
in the glow of the footlights, friendly
echo of Sylvie, twice lost facing the cité
merveilleuse (and Aurélia appears in the vision’s
mirror), your prophecies, your geometries, your
love and emblems of Délie, being moon & sun,
your unreal cities, chimeras, dreams, Labé
dying of that Love / Which slays me ten thousand times
a day, your chrysalis and Plume, days of silence
making a sign / peak, abyss on the same line
rest, at the interval, remission’s gift: life
for us enriched, belonging here in our late
civilization, Richard, heart’s accord, embarked
upon the circle’s seventh arc, shaded
by the leaves of Tyrol in Ratzes by the Schlern,
towering dolomite peaks, talus reef, attuned
to the hurlahei of the stream, the nightingale
the thrush, the morels and bellflowers
wind a ruin of walls dissipating fog
and the wolves, howling at the lion’s feet
__________
written in the second half
of the seventh month of 2018
from waxing crescent
to waning gibbous, after
returning home from Berlin
to Beacon above the Hudson
for R. S.
Jeffrey Yang is the author of Hey, Marfa; Vanishing-Line; and An Aquarium. The poems in this issue from "Langkasuka" will be published in his forthcoming book Line and Light.