Graffiti


Callow and amorphous, not gods
but adjectives flung at the sun
whose hot fibers protest their distance
lovingly, touching our skulls lovingly.
This is not a desert.
This is a place where a pedestrian stops,
thinking the face in the window is an owl’s.
The face in the window is a Renaissance Youth
eternally snivelling under a green umbrella.
Across the street, it is written drunk doom
in large bold, short-circuiting the stifled
drowsy, unimpassioned grief scrawled in London.
Much of London I don’t recall, although names
sail back to me on small craft, like plunder.
Loss of names is a kind of leakage
but there is another: the actual scale
breezing along in daring episodes,
most of it escaping utterance, falling
back into the temple housing Callow and amorphous
as well as enchanted, and waits for something
to spirit it toward us, away from the unrecovered.