The shining gray raiment of the sky has a song Audible over the clanking of metal and failing of scholars. More the lance pricks as to make a secret sound In winters bleary breast to frigidly resound. Now it’s time to flight the axel over hills And chorus hearty shapes to billow body long. “Desire fissured from love,” the secretary hollers but alas, the car has no song. Opera sketches in the classic cardboard back of matchbooks To determine the illustrations of a new and limitless mythology. Streetlamps are exiled along with the nimbus of headstones. The operations of a grand collapse. In fields the nickels twisted falling hooks Transcribing roads to rakes, to blisters and bones. “Despair fissured from death,” the hollow moans assembling the perspective of a machine from a stack of songbooks. The willow gate, that Flemish print, that diamond chime, That clamber of moderate prose of sterile shimmers. Mad names of scholars in stone, in progress carving locks. Addled in ashes like winter, like diminished time. Rosy red carrion—the dish of decay in handsome dinners To measure by attending displeasure animals and clocks. A silver book clasped in graves and the red caskets ceiling Occupied of disintegration by subtle flashes. The statement singing without a sayer, Describing transportation to the patient birds. They understand the phonetic involution of occupation. Now it’s time to mention mountains, earth, and horses. Each in an empty movement turned on the symbolic ocean With weary joints and drastic posture of missing verses. Clay transportation in daylight. “Feathers,” I’ve often cried To the inconsistent idols-- mechanized destruction in parts. So the faithless fall on their knees and crawl. Alas, the car has no song, These moonish canticles may try and replace it. But the streaming harmonic spray of money isn’t warm enough, Not enticing enough and, so I have heard, not warm enough To be a song.