Considering the Extraordinary Lateness of the Hour,
____________________________________________________
might it not behoove us to retire, to pull away
into a sanctuary our minds might reconstruct
of balsawood and twine, an ark of our covenant, or
transportable temple we’d shove before us into what deserts
of ashes deserts of honey we might find, considering
the noon sky’s deep-dusking over cherry trees
shaken now like a scourge,
antiluxuriation of pink blossoms scavenged by the wind
in the latest of the hundred-year storms,
and ridden side-by-side with hailstones,
shouldn’t it behoove us to set ourselves
loose like them and lift the barrow handles of the ark
and exile each other into more hidden
exposure to manna-fall, together-gone,
considering how few decades
of habitation of this earth we might expect, and the continuous
offertories
of the variable and mutagenic plagues,
closure listings and the quickening
eschatology of twice-burnt dust and lightnings from the mountain-top and Moseses
with faces candescent in this dark from the 40-day presences
of their unpresentable god,
considering the smashing of the tablets and the beaten work
of gold idols why
would it not behoove us even now to set out
toward the cities left in ashes the cities
of camouflaged and itinerant
angels given the sub-
sublimities of our time
why
would it not behoove us
to retire into each other’s minds, pillows plush with all these ashes
Quitclaim
__________________________________
I’ve come after you
George Beesley, of The Hill, in Beesley’s Lands, Goosnargh, Lancashire, 1586
to nobody-knows-
where-or-when-you-died,
heir of Francis, nephew and namesake
of George Beesley Catholic Beatified and Martyr, I’ve come
after you
bearing a torn and blotted page
your sale
of all your ancestral possessions
“quitclaim” of 1632
I’ve been transliterating for months
slash by violent spiral inside and under and between each phrase,
and hired a man in Wales to tell me the thirty-three words
I still could not decipher,
the ones that would divulge at last
why you shed your lands
for two hundred and three score and four
pounds and “went to Brabant” (why there why then?)—I’m
intent, you see, on learning
all your goings and your comings your
wanderings to and fro on
and into this earth:
There is nothing I will not know
There’s this itch, this It
inexplicable
like an antecedentless pronoun
that knows not what it might be
in reference to
so absorbs
whatever its past
gives it
to have always meant. I won’t
quit my claim on It, on
all that’s unbeknownst of
somewhere-in-my-blood
you.
_________________________
The 33 words came back today, in an email:
All and all manner of Error & errors
writ & writs of error & errors
Cause & Causes of Error & errors
& all & everie miprission mistakeinge faltes
Missentries & misnomers
whatsoever
—Forgive me, George Beesley, formerly of The Hill
in Goosnargh, for mis-
entering your life
389 years late. I’ll find you out,
believe me, why you
“went to Brabant” and all you did there,
gentleman, recusant, refuser
of all inquiry,
there’s a plague or else I’d get on the plane today, It
summons me there without apology or release and I
will answer It, scope out It
and you, I who am
elusive stubborn irrecoverable as you,
Your Most Worshipful
heir/refuser-
of-all-erring-
and misentries tracer
of your escapement and all that’s anywhere
rightly writ of it,
Bruce Beasley
