The Marian River, Milan

Snow slabs in the dicey cedar hedge,

     robins and winter wrens thickly, or this as much as possible,

          inside, taking stick from the cold.

One wren looks to plant a nest in the shed’s roof

moves around the complete structure below the overhang,

feet pinging on the anti-raccoon wire.

Moan of the weather. What does it really mean?

The shed backs into a half acre of maples and fir,

which joins an oak sprawl beside a cliff at the west side --

                                                     my body -- of a rounded horn  mountain.

In summer there’s a galactic gold spread of lichen on the cliff stone

behind a bungy cluster of blackberries.

The pear tree at the window facing the mountain – one May a rubythroated

hummingbird sat weeks on two bean-sized eggs

in a moss and succulent nest, which stood at eyeheight;

she was fierce and resolute,

equal to or perhaps exceeding Augustine in Milan

and even later in Hippo from which he writes to Atticus, patriarch of Constantinople,

thrice in 421, definitively on sexuality, “on which he had meditated for over two decades”

and hears nothing. Dusty, now in his sixties, buried in the rural stone.

Atticus holds stories he is dead

he reasons true.

Winds swim under rock on the mountain,

flowing down, each with its own face.

A muscularity of breath, feathering.

My seven-skeletoned name

makes out the smell of these,

these faces which are each a scent

and also a name. So I come toward the winds,

empty, yes, but with no disinterable docking mechanism for them.

But he is not dead. Rather he sits in Hippo,

later called Annaba, which is pretty and hick on the wrong side of mare nostrum

and which will wait six hundred years for thonged Italian and French tourists

to come and breathe,

just as Mousterians waited in this same cove for homo sapiens to claim

their beach space with geometrical thought. He waits for his letter, barely caught in the imperial swell,

his foot nevertheless on the Donatist neck,

Rome north and above him glittering like a universal Turing machine

in which anything could happen.

Leave him. Roughly nothing will come of this.

Marx, later will work out the small epicyclic gear system

operating the whole affair. History

rolls forward

on treads which are rivers, the river-system perhaps of Mary,

these rivers which are the colourless, alkaline lymph of the world, idea’s

body.