Brazen in the fluent rays of the sun,
A herald disperses pronouncements
fused from council and expedience.
Those who ascended in these late afternoon judgments
gather in the squares drawn out by veteran plenaries.
The skies will break the day after tomorrow
and hasten us toward contested intimacy.
Oh grant apprenticeships for victories to come,
able sentries throughout the florid labyrinth,
indulgences to moisten this clay.
Appoint a cloister for immigrants
Who will celebrate your persisting graces.
And the evenings. And the late nights—
their ancestries lit across the skies.
She rustles as she arrives on her own, not granted,
not withheld.
Already far beyond the tepid descents of guardians,
the canon is complete—
as someone declared the other day
—penned in catalogues whose dusts whisper of obscure intentions.
Yet more auguries may be pulled from the brine—
holiness resides everywhere, after all
—but at last she is redeemed from our dilated aspirations.
We were offered a guiltless breast as
antidote to the era,
so engorged and tumbled with cannibal portents.
Downing large gulps,
we came alive with the vocation of a precocious Zeitgeist.
Rattled by cold-hammered enamels,
guzzled infringements,
A plan for the future has been planted in a fluorescent grave.
Gaze further,
and offer alchemical digests
to they who judge the fountain of reverence.
Rounded at a quizzical point,
these transfigurations are struck dumb with arousal.
Their treads are heavy upon the glosses,
briefly cited,
that maintain a personified encounter with recognized coronation.
None who note the path into the evanescent
will question this passage with aversive moralisms.
We accept flares and digressions and incipient mortuary,
and upon receiving absolution
from maritime adventures,
we inherit it all.
Sated, we call on our mobilized reserves
And greet a virgin confirmation.
Here, where contentment returns to the naked valley,
votaries glisten in truncated introspection,
justified and sanctified
more by example than by presumption.
Incipence is no longer in contention
with the gilded scales of fortune,
but returns in virtue up the stairs of elation.
Heft, mantled, high-grown,
We glide to the next station.
Andy Oram
October 28, 2024