The dull talk of the year: dust

blanches the winter sounds. Hyacinth

break the earth, and upward the assassin’s

violet lips press skyward, kissing

the last snow. The sun, far too near, flanks

the river-animal’s pelt. Soon snakes

glisten along the banks. Yes, far too near

and across the field I heard the archduke

crossing. His row of stallions clear

the hard light. Treason seems removed, but

at eleven o’clock in the morning, the Miljacka

fades. Still, cattle’s stench carries the sky and sediment

through the window. Night’s nausea

descends through glass. At eleven o’clock in the morning

my mind is steep and I circle reliques, the remaining

triumph. Notes in my daybook go lost to the same light under

the Latin Bridge. A Mercurius heat

empties the room, lies like an agent

tethered to pale consolations, but it is only

sunlight peeping the curtains. A hunted

measure, this light that tastes

the body. I remember the future died

in absent secular forms. I remember

the grand army. The men’s shadows laid

like wool across the road. The trees, horizontal barbs, sunk

beneath the sun. Autumn rain flickered as they ate

sandwiches and sang to shelter themselves

against commotion. The bullet slowly, a slow

bodily ration, made wound a last adventure. As if

circling a ring, the larks swoop and thicken

the wet hills. So then the birds, once

evil if not simply new to the landscape, held voice

to further dusk’s song. And we found places

of good within them, a movement we believed

as origin. Toward this hour death made descent.

I speak it aloud. It was a second birth

or the first? At this hour, the sky is a blue division,

so deep no one can climb back through it.