Winter Court

a novella in forty-one sestinas





A.V. Marraccini

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I.    [The Arrival]

First the servants come, turn out the braziers,
Brooming away all last year’s ashy epitaph,
Beating the dust from the curtains, pendulous velvet,
All those loom-cut loops.  Matching patterns, bosses, heralds,
Proclaim the impending arrivals, like the leaves
Scattered now, plucked-up  brown individually from the greyscale cobbles.

It is there first they hear them, the clopping thrum through the cobbles,
The echoed hooves of horses, ribs heaving like a smithy’s braziers
All the way up the mountain’s flank, lashes, sheets and leaves,
He sees the slanted rock, the fifty-two views of which were the epitaph
Of the last tyrant, the mountain’s slow up-split tectonic braziers.
The current one descends from the carriage, all in sable and velvet,

Importance and indifference, in measures both ensteeled and velvet.
Such is power, wintering over, such are the small men, cobbles
On which it treads and grinds, and look, nothing and everything it heralds
Is yet entirely obvious. The ladies’ maids huddle at the braziers,
Their long-belled sleeves and cuffs of mink and ermine an epitaph
Enough for the summer’s gentleness, its green bowering that leaves

You like a forlorn lover. The courtesans know when the louvered leaves
Of shutters mean an ending. We all remember the aspirated velvet
Of the Dowager Empress, her voice in its last year its own raspy epitaph
For her  emblazoned silver cigarettes. The troubadour struggles as he cobbles
Together a tribute to her for tonight’s dinner. She lit them straight from the braziers,
That old enduring flame, the once-spitfire concubine whose story heralds

Hope for all her young equivalences, until they learn how too it heralds
Sorrow, all being grass and soluble, and under the snow brown rots the felled leaves.
The Tyrant pulls his new lover close round the crackling braziers;
She pretends to shiver. She’s pliable, creaturely, the kind of easily draped velvet
They use for Christenings and not stiffened upholstery. On the cobbles,
She caught his eye and tripped conveniently, tumbled onward, an epitaph

For an ankle suspiciously unswollen, unturned, underdone, an epitaph
For the old winters, and now standing outside the glasshouse, the whispering heralds
Claim they no longer smell cigarettes but camellias from the cobbles,
Wafting into the foyer, sickly sweet, her too, and the gout that never leaves
Him, the third unspoken lover. Wincing, a special stool of velvet
Is procured hastily for this or that appendage, and they stoke high the braziers.

The frost begins to etch itself into the cobbles in the night, the stars’ cold epitaph
Refracted mornings in the hungry braziers, the greying sun whose heralds
Greet a season when everything starts again and leaves;
Look, from the high passage’s arcade you can see it coming
-- a whirligig snow! All the hills in white velvet!



II.      [The Chamberlains]

They call each other by their ordinals, outward extending,
Each Chamberlain chief to their own protuberant wings.
In the North they speak to each hushing about the East, deposed of late,
And his replacement, a new shoot green and anxious pacing
All along the interstitial corridors like a harrying omen.
In the West a host of gardeners, orangeries, pruning shears,

Various recalcitrant topiary and the expert in roses crepuscular, shears
Himself down into his cups, he will tell you about the new varietal he bred, extending
Charred black matte into the petals for the Dowager Empress, whose omen
Of finished butts littered the parterre. The South, muffled, wings
His way across sunken floors and carpets, in deliberate soft pacing
Calls himself the Minister of Ephemera and Cushions, but when it’s late

His eyes take on a phosphorine glow, dangling lanterns. When it’s late,
The highest ranking concubines, various eunuchs, all gleaming like new shears,
In glance- darkening finery, will tell you he’s the wiliest of them all, pacing
His decisions, putting opponents in Zugzwang, each move a harm extending
To its owner. East, perhaps his equal, the extended pheasant wings
Waiting to be plucked in the kitchen, the dancing floor of marble, omen

In jade-blush increments like a calendar, North may not think her an omen,
But with her efficiency of scullery maids, she is less new than late
Anyone suspected. Not a new shoot but a reed, strong and hollow, wings
To the wind, the arrangement of plates at the long table the shears
Of change, a clockwork mechanism to which only she has the map extending
To each courtier, each eunuch, each rose. It’s really a question of pacing,

When she will deploy each tureen, each whisper, each duck; dropped fork pacing,
Intrigue pacing. For East there is no such thing as an omen,
No such thing as fate, only a series of actions, before her birth extending
Backward unfurled, the long game. Let North have the sullied late
Morning bedrooms of every courtier, the way that aftermath shears
Into the present like the nestled cliff-faces. She will make of porcelain, wings

That spread where no one notices, sitting on the cedar, like the lark’s wings
The small lark who portends nothing and everything, a tiger pacing,
But no one has seen a tiger in a thousand years and besides, time’s shears
Are crueller than that; it is possible she will fail. East may detect some ill omen,
And it’s back to the long wait, back to the ever-growing service of the late,
Into which, in her dun grey robes with a saffron sash, she is extending.

The wind shears at the crumbling battlements, capping with rubble all the wings,
Hands not quite extending brush in corridors, South imagines East pacing,
But the courtiers, rising from sleep detect no such omen,
They blink excessively, draw the blinds, forget everything,
hold the daybreak late.



III.    [The First Ball]

After an afternoon in the baths, the eunuch Prospero lays
Out his baby blue suit vest with too many buttons, frosted
On the cuffs with new lace. Rounding the corners, North rousts gathering
The recalcitrant pageboys into tights without holes, blooming
Pantaloons in pastel mirages. In her mahogany-lacquered redoubt,
The Tyrant’s lover cannot decide: jaundice yellow or blush false innocence?

The Tyrant himself asks after the dancing hall, and with a cool innocence,
East assures him of readiness, bonbons, those short cups, lays
And pipes from the Troubadour, and the Astrologer promises redoubt
From the present; a new artifact he has extracted from the cliffs, frosted
Metal, it is like a miniature keyboard with no notes, tiny squares blooming
Into a glass mirror shattered on a strange hinge. It glowed once, but no longer gathering

Its magic for the guests, who cluster round the corner table, this gathering
Itself will have to suffice. Prospero touches the dead key squares in their innocence,
For dead things have no other lovers. In his youth, with his high cheeks blooming
Into arias, he might have tried to resuscitate it. Still, he is wistful as it lays
Between the champagne glasses. Next week he will take an expedition up frosted
Peaks, into the buried caveways, seeking more artifacts in their redoubt.

The lover has gone with the yellow; supine, the Tyrant’s hand makes redoubt
Around her clever waist. It’s not as if she wants nothing; the square gathering
Keyboard, the dancefloor tiles alternating, South’s chessboard, well-frosted
With the rime of winters since her youth she is no naîf, for innocence
Is only an attribute of those who inconveniently die, sworn lovers in lays
With cruel destinies; she will not be this, she vows from the blooming

Of her skirt layers. The yellow of jaundice is also the yellow blooming
Of the returning sun. The less wise of the concubines take redoubt
At the card tables. Fortunes are won and lost, spades, hearts, she lays
Aces; a courtier loses his family ring, seal-heavy and gold, gathering
Enmity, a bouquet that will require atonement. He smiles, innocence,
But in his heart the black coils gather and tighten, the pond frosted

Over looms out the paned glass doors, the pond so thick-frosted
That one slip under the ice could prove dancing moot, the blooming
Chatters of hypothermia; the courtier ponders the assumed innocence
Of bitternesses. Meanwhile, on the dancefloor, in waltzes, a sweet redoubt
So many layers of feathered tulle and longing, one-two gathering,
Delectations; with whom one goes, with whom one wakes, one lays?

Innocence is overrated; in the winter palace no eyes glaze frosted over,
While the snow and ice lay creeping, blooming shoots of the new in waiting seek
Redoubt in the black soil, their ensorcelled might, their little nightly joys
-- like all twelve winds, all twelve hours, chimed out, gathering.




IV.    [In The Third Glasshouse]

The Tyrant’s four times great grandfather, vigorous beyond measure,
To commemorate his long campaign south, had all three glass
Orangeries erected.  The ladies’ maids tarry there, picking orange
After orbed orange, laughing. Filomena, who can see her breath
But here drops her shawls, and releases her enviable tresses, a single curl
Dewy in the moist air clings to her cheek; here, there is no season.

Simona takes pity on a eunuch’s parrot, a creature out of season,
Secured with a small gilt chain, and feeds him a careful measure,
Torn with his beak. Simona who pretends to be surprised when the curl
Of dung fertilizer creeps from the Dowager Empress’ roses, rising into the glass
Air. The old Gardener sips his flask continually and says “Take a breath,”
(Because youth needs to remember that shit makes the sweeter orange.)

Youth forgets before fruits were unseeded; when the pulpy orange
Had more pith to it. “Let them have their lilting season,”
He now accounts with not little acrimony for every breath,
Holds every thorn, grub, and twig to a keen and ornery measure,
And no one remembers now, how to make that fair clear glass,
Of the roofpanes, so when one breaks they seal it together with a curl

Of gold, that comes back to itself, as seasons do, the round curl
Of which encircles the year, and Simona bright as an orange,
Has only seen twenty of them. When their eyes stop shining like glass,
That’s when you know youth has fled. Still, winter is a stark season,
And the Gardener likes that you can finally see it, plain as measure,
What it takes for a rose, an orange, a parrot, each labored breath.

And when their lips are sticky with fruit, the very breath
Of Simona and Filomena is sweet, and for a second the roof’s clear curl
Between the parrot and the sky seems permeable, the chain’s measure
Lighter. There is a reason Northern men will give so much for an orange,
Even more in winter, in which the orb abandons its logical season,
And outdoes the sun, weakly protesting through the surrounds of the glass.

Precious things are delicate, but ground with heavy stones, this glass,
The lenses of East’s glasses, the telescope in the orrery where the breath
Of whorled stars touches the earth’s filament, its eternal pinpricked season
Open above the peaks, a comet’s tail a rare and glimmering curl
In the high dark; not every miracle is so tangible as an orange,
Not every lucky thing holds itself so easily out to measure.

Season is the world we tell ourselves from under perpetual glass,
How we measure out the time of men’s quick wakening, their breath
A steaming curl in the cold morning, but look, just walk in your housecoats
And handwarmers-- then cast them off, for the glasshouse gives you
The unlikely caesura of the orange.



V.    [the Fourth and Fifth Attics, Nighttime]

It is a popular pastime, here where the intersecting eaves join
For the discarded concubines and older poets, relegated five flights
Of creaking stairs up, to recall their recruitment letters.
“Come to court,” they said, “We seek your talents immense,”
“Your discretion, your beauty—” “Your uncommon grace.”
Everyone believed the letters; to be desired is all we ultimately want.

A now-arthritic juggler rubs his left wrist, tender want
Of new cartilage between grimacing bones. Two concubines join
In, mending their already-mended sweaters. Darning is  grace
You find when the dancefloor leaves you. They all had flights
Of fancy, minor successes, as when, one night in the immense
Dark of the shuttered ball courts, the Tyrant ruby letters

The young eunuch with a farewell kiss. They all fade, those ruby letters,
As soon as morning comes, and the Tyrant has long forgotten that sideways want,
So particular and momentary as to be negligible, but the eunuch immense
With what could have been recounts it, his dark hair a withered join
With flecked white-grey. Could-have-beens are luxuries anyway, flights
For rare birds. Now they are pigeons that were once doves, same grace,

Unsame dignity. No one here thinks themselves above a concubine in grace,
For power makes whores of all of us, and besides the curlicue letters
Of the downstairs conversation rarely paragraph pigeon flights
Instead of peacock. What doesn’t change is want,
The sense that the universe had some rivet, corner, flush join
Set out for you, that you were in some way unequalled and immense

As alabaster. Flatterers work that way, they make what is immense
Feel small and needling. Even here, roosting, they keep their stubborn grace,
In small hand-copied magazines and games of chance, they join
Together their own society, its own squabbles, feuds, men of letters.
The world can use you up; but you refuse it, that great growing want
Again. The way that hope in the chest beats, up against the ribs flights,

Until you lose it anew and remember. Each of the five, creaking spiralled flights
Has this tendency. Downstairs they forget entirely the immense
Apparatus of satisfaction in maintenance, that even its cast-offs’ wants
Are sent out the high casements to every little god seeking grace.
The old eunuch helps the newest concubine to learn her letters,
To each other, of necessity, these lost orders, they form and tender join.

Want wafts down the palace, and up all the high attic’s wavering letters,
The old eunuchs and the spent concubines still laugh at the immense
And strange grace afforded by a little candle,
Just the same as the chained parrot in the orangerie dreams of flights.




VI.    [The Ball-Courts]

While the attic chatters, the strange white semicircular lines
Of the ballcourt, its two mysterious poles of rusted metal,
All from the Before forgotten, but assumed to some sort of ritual,
Take on new light—there is to be a game! Bring on the torches!
The Tyrant’s gout remits; the five most able courtiers spring ready
Into action. A single round ball, six flat rackets laced

Up with horsegut string are proffered. East sends out bonbons laced
With bourbon, North makes pages into ballboys, West winds fence lines
Of careful carnations, all the Tyrant’s colors. South makes ready
The shiniest concubines, jangling tambourines of concordant metal
And luthiers, who sing about bouts, passes, strokes, and the torches
Of real and unreal burning loves.  Chords progress, the squeaking ritual

 Of rubberized shoes, equalled by a string of pearls on the Lover that make a ritual
Of their shiny newness to be sure everyone notices. The ball’s in play, the laced
Sleeves move to mouths as gasps accordingly issue. The courtier Luceth, torches
The ball out, makes sure to miss when the Tyrant’s shot crosses the middle lines.
He will go far; he tosses a priceless bracelet of garnet and silver-white metal
To a lucky concubine. He is clever with generosity, always in the ready

To make a gift of a favor, but also to recall one always equal ready
Too. In striped, yellow pantaloons the opposing team makes the ritual
Jump at the pole. No one remembers why they do this, this rusted metal
That speaks erasures of longer memory. The carnations all twine-laced
Open softly into the night and sweetly offset the diagrammatic lines
Of tension, potential, and sweat, that potent dripping down torches

Through the silk and linen. The game rests on a point now, the torches
Burn more eagerly. Luceth mouths to Martin “Just get ready…”
Then lobs the ball. Martin’s convenient racket scores the final lines
For the Tyrant’s team. Many hurrahs, exultations, embraces, all  ritual
And expected. Losing sometimes wins, that’s how it’s done up, laced,
The Court’s corseted back, with stays of precious and unbending metal.

Luceth and Martin exchange a glance, currency is more than metal
Here, bonds more than iron. The concubine holds the garnets to the torches,
Admires their faceted bloodwork. The Tyrant is pleased, with drink laced
And lute-song placated. A win is a win. He has the jewellers ready,
He will commission a ring for this victory; this is the old ritual,
Again from Before, but this memory makes sense, keeps to the ordered lines.

The ballgame’s laced with bourbon yes, but all the gossip’s still sober as cold metal;
Remember the impossible crossed lines, all the flaring  dangerous torches.
As North stands ready to buff the floor out after.
In the night again,
    The empty ball court airs out for its next wary and profligate ritual.



VII.    [The Tapestry Hall]

South is sighing as they lay out the possibilities.
Three Eunuchs accompany to titter into the vaulting,
The high echo unmuted, as of yet, by any thickened weft,
Except that of bickering. Trimalchio finds that the acanthus vine
Border is an overplayed motif, with the egg-and-dart
Moulding already excessive. Prospero prefers the craggy minimum

Of a landscape. Actually, he wants just the painter’s stroke minimum
Done in black ink, but Demetrio, most forceful about the faint possibility
Of the Tyrant’s approval invites them to remember the hideous outward dart
From the bottom of the pile. The Four Times Great Grandfather vaulting
Himself forcefully once again into the present’s thorny vine,
Insisted once that every palace had a Goblins Tapestry, and so the weft

Of South’s careful assemblage bends for the puce-green in the dart-dashed
Lines of little extended ear-monstered men, a treasure -chest minimum
Of six. For once they agree:  it’s hideous. Extending the uncouth vine
Of past in the present’s foreground. They say commissions, are possibilities
For the finding of taste, and tomorrow evening when Martin’s vaulting
Into another attempt to kiss dark-haired Filomena behind it, he’ll dart

Into dangerous territory, like a stag into the bath of Artemis, he’ll dart
Himself instead into a slap, by saying she’s just as beautiful as the weft
Of that thing before her. The warp is when Demetrio notices the red vaulting
Of his high cheekbones after, tells the others, and at bad taste’s minimum
Ebb at least they get a laugh. A least the other tapestry possibilities
Left more succulent fruits to pluck from the aesthetic vine.

“Look,” says Trimalchio tracing the gold-thread bowstring’s vine
In a hunting scene, “I didn’t know there were spotted tigers!” as one makes dart
From the deep-set background of the forest, into existence’s sudden possibilities.
Prospero thinks the spotted tiger is an invention of the imaginary weft
Of the world that exists between life and art, but the bare minimum
Is to let the other man hope. Hope is a delicate church-vaulting,

Intertwined into itself, up to the firmament’s own hazy-cloud vaulting
In the cold-fogged morning, and besides wouldn’t it be a good vine,
A good vineyard, a good year that bore such wine that at minimum,
Made spotted tigers real. They could use a good year, like a feathered dart
Into the nestled circled target of the chill season. The good year’s weft,
The history it becomes—better than Goblins Tapestry, these possibilities.

South selects the minimum offensive panels, sighs up at the vaulting,
At all the possibilities this particular choice will vine-weave out and in,
Dart-arrow sharp, into the winter, the tapestries are only the
    Warp of the conversations sparked, kisses spurned,
    Around tables laden and bare, the weft
Is what we might make of them.


VIII.    [The Painter]

He has The Lover hold the squirming goat, to be transformed
Into a unicorn with a little impasto after the fact.
The Tyrant stands behind her, trailing his ermine capes, as petulant,
He reminds the Painter to make him taller, go up a little higher.
In the end the white-bearded man diffuses the demand
To mount him on a rearing horse, all ready for battle.

Now it is mostly with cataracts he makes his own battle,
The old Painter with his big-brimmed hat, so transformed
From when he first depicted the Tyrant, a boy with no demand
Except to stand next to his mother, the Dowager Empress, who in fact
Chided him for his interest in the bouncing rubber ball rising higher
And higher on the parquet. His keen-eyed and far less petulant

Brother, for the younger Prince was curious where the Tyrant was petulant,
Watched the Painter back directly instead. “It’s half the battle,”
The Dowager Empress told them both, “to get  your own higher
Self in a painting, the better one, for the public duly transformed.”
That the wrong son was already born the heir seemed like a fact,
The Painter hid the Prince shadowed in chiaroscuro, the demand

Being clear that painting could not above the birthright demand
An honest depiction. And now it is the goat that is petulant,
Writhing against the Lover’s mauve damask, perhaps the fact
Of becoming a unicorn didn’t appeal. It’s a losing battle,
Picking your station, for both Princes and goats, and what’s transformed
Is still itself in the end, in the underdrawing of the old canvas higher

Up at the end of some long hallway, where the rubber ball’s ever higher
Bounce and the indifference of the young Tyrant makes its own demand,
Quiet still in graphite line under the obscuring paint, by oils transformed
Into a hawk-eyed heir on the surface. Now, the Lover’s chin with its petulant
Crevice is uncreased, and slightly even, the Tyrant wins the battle
Regarding height and gains an inch or two, because what is fact?

It’s supper, a court appointment, fine clothes, linseed and varnish, fact
Is a matter of service really, to whatever good is in the moment higher.
The Dowager Empress, he thinks, understood this field of battle,
Winked at him as he sighed and re-did the strokes, necessity’s demand,
Then as it is now. About truth the artist cannot afford to be petulant,
And with a vertical line’s magic, the goat too, is summarily transformed

The battle with the palette is easy compared to what The Painter does to fact,
Makes it palatable, all transformed into something of higher mien.
The demand isn’t truth, or even beauty, it’s petulant,
Princes and Tyrants, petulant Lovers, slanting and petulant light.




IX.    [The Messenger]


A man comes up the cobbles on a tired horse still frothing.
The grooms take it to the high stables. He runs the length of the North Hall parquet
Panting with both effort and a queasy anticipation. The Tyrant reclines into cushions,
Easy on the throne, and then sits bolt upright as the din settles, a chandelier
Flickers; half bulb, half candle, all economical, but in this atmosphere
A bad sign. There is revolt in the provinces, a gun-oil dynamite filigree,

The kind of pattern that only makes sense as you recede, a filigree
Of discontent. Today, it is about the royal mint, adjuvating frothing
Pure bronze with tin. The messenger flips a coin in the thick, anticipatory atmosphere
Of the Throne Room, it lands light, barely a clink on the varnished parquet,
That light clink’s a firework, runs on the prices of wheat and geese, the chandelier
Of empire tilts easily under a single wax bead, a displacement of cushions,

The way the arranged marriage of the far province’s governor’s daughter cushions
The matter theoretically, but now they say she will refuse, in the silvered filigree
Of her wedding whites, bordered with fur of a priceless saffron yellow, the chandelier
In the local festival hall is put out with the wicks still smoking. The river frothing
At the mouth a frozen waterfall, in this far-flung province, but downstream, parquet-
Court-ward, the ripples and the salmon still come, the twelve winds’ atmosphere

Transmitting Argestes, N-NE, and a servant drops a tray of macaron, light as atmosphere,
Someone coughs quietly, and the Tyrant cannot see but imagines the cushions
Of gunpowder accumulating in their barrels, and bears down threatened parquet
Of terror interlocked with curiosity on the messenger. The situation’s filigree
Is elaborate; the Tyrant was never a man of good counsel. The Astrologer frothing
With his usual confidence says all the constellations chandelier

Themselves into alignment, that the whirling sky’s dotted chandelier
Assures them all of confidence. Still, in the kitchen’s gravied atmosphere
East hears a stirring, writes a letter, sends it off, and quick sends out a frothing
Tureen of melted chocolate. The Tyrant, again reclining into the cushions,
Tells the messenger to dip an almond stick, it will be duly resolved, swirled filigree
Of sweets for now consumes most everything. But the mapped parquet

Of the territories has just changed, and that mountain, sky, river, parquet
Of borders means in the next province over, that governor grows bold as a chandelier
Gaudy gold and decked out, raises the tax, and as the geese run the fixed filigree
Of their winter migrations they fly over more barren markets, up- wafted atmosphere
Of desperation’s edge. Very little between the comfortable and the discomforted cushions
Each other. Rumors, interchanges of hasty promises, speculation is all upward frothing.

The filigree of the throne itself is older than emperors; varying sparkle-parquet
Cut stones interject with each other, advisors in competition quarrelling,
Frothing the spilt milk of news, the chandelier-swinging arc of prosperity,
And in the snow-globe atmosphere of the Palace, life continues;
Off in one of the side reception rooms, a bored pageboy rearranges
On the velveteen bench a series of tasselled and untasselled cushions.


X.    [The Expedition]

The eunuch Prospero groans, puts down the poems of Li Bai, double stockings run
Up his long legs in the sturdy-spun wool of yaks. The penumbra of the bedside lamp
Burns early before the venture out. Luceth toggles the milky button-pearls
Of his puffy vest. South resolutely pushes his small, round glasses up the bridge
Of his nose and hurries them out to the sled dogs, tinkling bells and harnesses
Rigged out accordingly; they all agree the Tyrant could use a distraction.

The sleds set off the winding path, the many swaybacks a distraction
From the steep upward climb, to where the clouds’ tailing ends run
Thin, the ruins of a steel-beamed city whose late-lost footprint harnesses
The crater of a spent volcanic peak. The past’s glowing low lamp
Is a little brighter here, where the thin air of the Before is a suspension bridge
To the Now, all taut wires, the way gravity is itself a string of pearls.

But they are really here for relics, the little seed pearls
That remain in the cracked-open oyster of the ruined city, the distraction
Of a new old thing beckons them as the servant’s pickaxes bridge
Stratigraphy etched into the hardpack sediment, the icy run
Of the ground giving way in lines of time. A yellow lamp
On Prospero’s hardhat comes on in the widening trench, the safety harnesses

Of burly rope make them all feel like puppets, the invisible harnesses
Of power as usual go unremarked, but every princely price for pearls
Is to be paid here, and when on a felled branch they extend a lamp
In the pit’s darkness they see; rectangular metal  backs emerge from distraction,
In each relic set a black pane of long-cracked glass, with fracture lines that run
Across each dark mirrored thing, as when between two folly islands a bridge

In the summer imperial gardens at the Old Palace, a kissing bridge
Calls out to lovers in the long warm gloaming. But the moon’s harnesses
Aren’t out yet here, the mirrors seem dead, and surely the Lover will run
To ask the Tyrant for one mounted on a handle so her reflection pearls
With its pale eminences even the past. Nothing is intangible, distraction
Is easily proffered when that’s where pleasure’s ley lines that light the burning lamp.

Both  South and Prospero likewise can’t seem to snuff this stubborn inner lamp.
They run their hands over the Before relics. They can’t remember the bridge
That once lead to what they really are; that’s the satisfying distraction
Of speculatory history, the sense that artifacts are sophisticated harnesses
For a whole lost arrangement, some structure, some well-arrayed pearls,
The way the world used to mark itself, its triumphs red-ribbon run.

The burning attraction-distraction juncture of the things you find that lamp
Lighting up the dim Before just enough to run it with tinsel bridges of causality.
Whatever they might be, these dark squared off mirrors, harnesses for dreams,
Implications, all shut up inside their quieting selves;
The way the oysters both secret and secrete
The matter of various and spherical pearls.

XI.    [The Viewing Party]

The Gardener prods twelve chrysanthemum bushes into flowering,
They throw the balconies open for the full moon.
The Lover is wearing a headdress of an entire miniature ship,
Trimalchio, sotto voce, claims he can see the sailors drowning
In the copious eminence of her hair, little cast out oars, faithless,
Protesting into powder-set waves, Scylla and Charybdis made comb

Into being, but really it is the array of the stars’ own abalone comb,
The dimmed lights like asterisks swaying and flowering
On tiny copper wires, that everyone gasps at, the skins of faithless
Bears that South has had made into rugs, each of the two moon
Eyes replaced with glass lifelike enough to leave Simona drowning
Her fear in Martin’s cut-velvet-clad arms, or pretending that the ship

Of illusion cuts the same square cloth to wind as the ship
Of real encumbered things. The pistachio and honeycomb
Of the little cakes, themselves in cardamom all bespeckled drowning,
And portered by pageboys each with white-silken pantaloons flowering
Into thematic creases, for everything tonight is its own little moon,
Orbiting the silver three-legged tables, but like a meteor faithless.

One emblazoned pageboy wanders off, turns the hinge of angle faithless
Of the viewing glass down instead of up, and from the balcony’s teetering ship
Sees pale on pale a white hart, itself against the snow an alabastrine moon,
Running silently into the forest. He tells no one, keeps it in the comb
Teeth of his memory for when he is an old man, when the flowering
Of his courtly youth is a story that he clings to like he’s drowning.

But really, who here isn’t a sailor of fate, who here isn’t drowning?
And even the moon behind the clouds is half-shadowed faithless,
And the Tyrant squints up at it, his crows-feet spread flowering
Into his meaty face, and thinks of the legend of the tall ship,
That went there into the edge of the airy world’s comb,
And found it airless there, on that betraying arid moon,

Which could not be this, this full round grape of a moon,
That he plucks and puts in the mouth of the Lover, drowning
Her protestations (false) in his insistence that the comb
Lines that cross the world end at his feet and hers, that the faithless
Provinces will see eventually that his state’s many-masted ship,
Is still at the height of its infinite chrysanthemum-petal flowering.

And so the comb of the night sky cordons and cossets the moon,
No one can tell if flowering and drowning can happen both at once,
    And past the pine forest, down the peaks where nothing is faithless,
    At some far rocky port, the Assassin boards a fast and subtle clipper-ship.




XII.    [The Assassin]

The first rule is to be, in everything, ordinary.
That is what they taught her the job required, that and a sword,
That cuts quick and silent. But the sword is of the least importance.
First you have to disappear, become intimate, as close as breath,
Ignorable, pliable, quiet. She considers this as the receding harbour
Blinks out into the night, that she is no one, the world’s own mirror.

Perhaps she is also fate’s; this magistrate’s daughter whose mirror-
Eyes make her seem like she is not so intent on the seemingly ordinary,
That she is not listening to you lay everything out as loud as the gulls in the harbour,
Wheeling shriek. It’s more like a hawk diving, when she will draw the sword,
Pulling out of the eddies of the airflow, the weather’s normal breath,
Extending her beak and claws and sharp points of importance.

For no one, not even Emperors, has those great scales’ importance
Of weight; they say Justice is blind, but really she sees in an everlasting  mirror
Who does and does not deserve to continue to draw breath.
The blindfold is a trick, so that you think her eyes are mortal, ordinary,
Bereft, that it can be easily blunted or parried, the invariable arc of the sword,
Which comes for all men, comes without tarrying into the harbour

Of inconvenient flesh, the bodies that in their machinations harbour
Their own undoing, the resetting of what constitutes importance.
There is nothing more unsubtle for this than a sword,
A blunderbuss, an army marching north, but this black mirror
Of a girl needs none of that, enrolls in the housemaids service so ordinary
That even East doesn’t notice, some secrets she keeps as breath.

It’s what betrays us, she has learned to keep even the duration of each breath,
Let slip no anticipation, let no suspicions keep curdling in harbour
Of darkness. In her work she does not excel, keeps her head to the ordinary
Labours of dusting and dishes, things of no particular importance,
Until they are of every one, the chance to draw near, mirror
Each footstep careful padding into some chamber, some foyer, because the sword

Is the very last step, it only gives you the final cut, the sword.
There is an incision well before that with every drawn-in breath,
Faceted like a worked stone, sharp on the floor as edges of a shattered mirror,
There is left in the provinces exactly nothing, they can spare no safe harbour
If she fails. She is an acrobat, the wire is itself the Tyrant’s importance,
There is no net, no cross-hatched catch made from the filaments of the ordinary.

The mirror of the adulterated coin is the new-forged sword,
Ordinary in the forge until the bellows’ breath endows it with a deadly reserve.
A coal-fire harbour of welled blood  then tangs along the metal’s edge,
The hand, the sword-- a thing itself of nothing and every small importance.




XIII.    [The Lazy Morning]

Prospero asks that the kitchens spare no peach, pear or plum
For his breakfast tray, every fruit beckons equally succulent.
While he has the pageboy heat the piled bedcovers, full lush
Quilts stuffed fat with cotton, and just as he is about
To lower himself into them, a palace housecat padding comes
Into the room, refusing like Prospero, to touch the snow

Coming down in droves. Despite having the tufted paws for snow
The cat has decided that this chamber’s bed-nest is a plum
Assignment, and arrays its long black fur. If Prospero comes
Too near it widens its yellow eyes authoritatively. So the succulent
Bed is shared begrudgingly, and both creatures cast about
The chamber for distraction, Prospero looks to the shelves lush

With books: all six works of Shakespeare, Aristotle on Comedy in lush
Leathered edition, The Book of Whales, Goethe, The Coming of the Snow—
This, yowling, the big black housecat demands to know more about,
So Prospero reads the opening lines about how the world was a plum,
Overripe and hot with flies. How they shot up into the clouds succulent
Sopping dust, and blocked the searing sun, the Before sun that comes

With a fervor he knows not, and then in equal proportion then comes
The cold, the glaciers furling out over their bright cities, lush
With electricity and wonders. They’re ruins now, to him still succulent
Steel buried in the peaks. He and the housecat look warily again at the snow.
He reads on: the Warring Fracture of the States, the Treaty of the Plum,
Signed by the Tyrant’s distant ancestor, indeed, though what about

A plum everyone forgets. The Before becoming the Now is about
A lot of forgetting. The plush-furred housecat blinks and comes
To flop belly-up on Prospero’s feet. He bites into a cushioned plum,
No treaty, only juice, this one, and the only war is with the percale lush
And absorptive of his now-stained collar. The Book of Snow
Makes it seem like the Before was a troubled idyll, dense and succulent

With thinking things. True, but there is nothing more succulent
Then or now, than a warm cat for a quilt, and as he is about
To keep reading the verse, Prospero falls asleep, the snow
Outside ignoring the indifference of both, and a dream comes.
Perhaps the world is the dream-- but the tilting pear leaning lush
Against the silver platter finally falls over, the cascading plum

Smacks wetly, no light flake of snow, into the succulent laid
Walnut of the floor, the heavy plum. This rousts both about suddenly,
Cat and man now awake, both such lush and soft creatures,
Both so warm and unready for the world that comes.





XIV.    [The Reception of the Prince of Southwest Provinces]

Half-shaven half-smile, he says he has decided to surprise his brother:
The charming Prince of the Southwest Provinces, with mailbags swung burlap
Off the sides of his less-than-notable horse, borrowed from the Dispatch.
Under his tenure. The postal service, a make-duty assignment to keep him far,
Has become the pride of the Empire, even the Tyrant will grudgingly admit,
It is the first of choices in the exams for civil service; and oh her, shells

In her hair, the fish scales and peonies drawn on her cheeks-- shells
“Because in the Southwest Provinces you can always hear the sea’s brother
If you put them to your ear,” says lilting the Lady Laure who marriage cannot admit,
Being only the most beautiful of concubines, and how her swooping letters like burlap
Make even the finest calligraphers seem to her as  silken lines, even here to Court, how far
Her accomplishments have spread, faster even than the horses of the Prince’s dispatch.

As she picks up a five string lute and puts the passerines to dispatch,
As the Lover frowns and the Tyrant wonders if in golden pieces he shells
Out he can make her his. The Prince halts her hands, offers up a relic from far
Of jetsam brought in by the sea, a cord with two squared-off silver ends, to his brother.
The Lover immediately weaves it into her hair; Laure placid as burlap
Has learned from her face’s knife-scar under the fish scales and peonies to admit

Most things, to let them pass her over, since concubines are practiced to admit
More than Princes, Tyrants, Lovers. She does not want the Prince hurried off in dispatch;
She hurries to disperse amongst the courtiers the wax-sealed letters from the burlap,
He winks at her. Together they have their nested plans like shells within shells,
Each act to which another is the long-lost and inevitable brother.
Oh the relish for this smattering of news, gossip, quarrels, endearments from far!

For what is a letter but a long-distant thing made close, the near from the far?
Luceth tears up and draws behind a tower of champagne glasses that admit
Confidence to his mother’s passing. Filomena hears of the promotion of her brother,
Prospero squints over a series of drawings that may or may not be maps, dispatch
From some other learned eunuch idling in the empty Spring Palace, roomy shells
Of sheet-draped furniture awaiting the next season like thick-spun burlap

Awaits the attachment of burrs, this simple conveyance, the bags of burlap,
The letters, extended silvering threads to every post and border far
From the peaks and orangeries and the snow, that like shells
Hold whispers if you know how to listen, how with your eyes to admit
Elsewhere in careful lines unfurling. The Prince loves the order of the dispatch,
Loves a good bureaucrat, whom he treats with soup and plum wine like a simple brother.

There is miniver and gold here, but he is a roughly hewn Prince of shells and burlap,
There is a reason the Tyrant keeps his brother ensconced off well and far.
Amongst the ladies’ maids, Laure laughs as if to admit all the day’s collected sunlight;
Some beauties sustain such that no heavy-handed order can safely dispatch.



XV.    [The High Galleries]

South is pacing along the evenly spaced, frost-nipped panes
Of the windows, soft-slippered, recalling his childhood in the quarry,
His father’s lips were grey with dust, he breathed dust,
He died dust, and his mother and sister sleeping on quilts
Of many mended lines of stitches often remembered his brother, the army
Service which had promised him a life and returned him bleach

Bones in a paper wrapper. And so the sun pours through now, bleach
Whiting out the gallery, and South looks at his life’s own crystalline panes,
His entry into the Court Service, his promotion, the veritable army
Of eyelashes, hand mirrors, throw rugs, and nights he commands, the deep quarry
The full wine-cellars cut into the peaks, the carefully-raked quilts
Of garden parterre snow, and wonders if they even remember the rising dust

Of the conscription wagons leaving the northwest villages, that ambitious dust
Raised by charismatic generals, of young princes with unshaven beard shadows, bleach
Inverse prickles of black. A daughter you could load up with silken quilts,
Marry her to a friend or official, watch yourself grow old in the glass panes
Of the frozen lakes while she swaddles an infant, but a son? Break him the quarry,
Until he’s drafted-up, some unrest, or the cruellest kindest cut, the scalpel’s army

Marshalling dizzying pain, and then the liniments, still the preferable army,
The clean swaddling one that leaves him childless as peony dust
Without the spring’s bee swarming into the limpid petals. So the quarry,
The spotted tiger dodges the trap, but is caught in the net instead, all bleach,
And rosemary, and dizziness until no limped petal himself, the panes
Of the Court’s cabinets open to him, marquetry of walnut and ebony and heavy quilts

With velvet backings, it’s not that love or loyalty pads out his feeling, quilts
The bed of his sense of the Tyrant. Who else here even remembers watching the army,
Watching them leave, and return? All those unsteady ghosts and the ground’s panes,
Soaked with what was left of them? He, sensing the whirring of some inchoate dust,
Knows that East is stirring, and equally, the whiteout, acrid-cut bleach
Of revolution, usurpation, change; they would fear it at the quarry,

Those grey muscled men, who breathed grey, bent at the quarry,
They would know why he took the Tyrant’s gout-sweated quilts
To the warmer personally, their never-found sons, whose bones bleach
-White he sees in every snow. Now the little wine cups and feathers are his army,
He is no careless dashing general with his promises, he does not dust
Them amply like salt or pollen in sneezing rows. He puts his hands on the panes,

Of the High Gallery windows, still smelling of cleaning bleach, the quarry
Downward far from these peaks, these frost-nettled panes and those
Fresh-plumped quilts he has just delivered for the waking courtiers
    Why would you ever summon the terrible army of fate’s crossed sticks?
    Why, when all flesh is already so quick to ash, to shadow, to dust?



XVI.    [The Copse]

In the copse of firs and aspens, up the meadow high
On peak’s cleft end, the White Hart cloven-legged steps
Lightly through the banks of snow. In all things lightly
Touched, settles against the pine’s rough sloughing bark.
The Tyrant would expire at the sight of his racked chandelier
Of antlers. But the White Hart knows better, shows nothing.

When the pageboy glimpsed him, that too was nothing,
Happenstance, rumor, story. This is what all on glimmering high
Is made of, or on low, if swinging like a pendant chandelier
The advancing glaciers crept the Gods back in slow steps,
Tiny and crystalline into the After world, the checkered bark
Of its interlocking Continents-- those behemoths do not tread lightly,

But heavy, as magma and sloshing seas. Still, it is time that lightly
Touches him, the Hart, who has seen and seen nothing
Become everything in a blink of centuries, a dog’s bark,
A single whisper, a rose budded tight. He keeps to the high
Parts of the peak as a vantage, watching men take their busy steps
Quick as centipedes, one night’s candles burnt down in a chandelier.

That’s how he sees it, time, ordered like a branching chandelier,
Forking paths, possibilities with which he might-- only lightly--
Intervene. To intervene is to do so carefully, deftly, in tiny steps.
In the past they were heavy-handed, intervened often, and nothing
Good comes of that for Gods. He sees it from the isometric high
Point outside time, the Prince-Tyrant orbital; the smooth bark

Of the aspen peeling back white to challenge the pine. The yapping bark
Of the hunting dogs he assiduously ignores, but the glinting chandelier
That fractures light a million possible ways: he seems them on the high
Ballroom ceiling refracted like a normal man reads a map. He touches lightly;
He will send a message to the Fates by arranging fallen needles, nothing
Noticeable to men, but clear as day to Them as the first of many steps.

He does not dislike the quick human world. The way the eager steps
Of a scullery maid on her morning duties peak behind the thick bark
Of a juniper hoping for a glimpse of him, a single sign that nothing
Is not the final answer, but something more, at least, than chandelier,
Stove, soup tureen, squabbles, touches her earthen life, if only lightly.
Even the White Hart cannot stay forever isolated in the snowy high.

He shakes the snow-coat from his antlers like its nothing, steps
High and proud in his cleft feet, scores a mark in the bark of the old fir.
In the empty ballroom the chandelier begins to sway, the crystals move
So lightly that no one notices, but lightly too, changes the position of each.




XVII.    [The Second Ball]

On opposite balconies, Demetrio and Trimalchio gawk like swans,
With twined extended necks. The ceiling’s all hung bedecked, with garlands
Of scarlet-orbed holly. Prospero and the Gardener both prefer a carmine red;
Carmine has seen darker seasons. The Dowager Empress, who beyond roses,
And cigarettes, had other untoward interests, once had the Gardener himself, still holding
A trowel in the back of the potting shed. He was, in any event, a novelty,

She soon moved on to courtiers; he moved on to the herbaceous novelty
Of interbreeds and cultivars, crimped-up seeds that are as indifferent to want as swans
Are to mist on the morning waters. The Assassin notices while still holding
A croquembouche, that the Tyrant stiffens at a distance as his brother garlands
His arm above Lady Laure in a pirouette, turning, as her fawn-gold skirt roses
Out into gossamer petals, aswirl all spun sugar, candied apple red

Sweet-tooth; tooth and nail, the Lover in the opposite corner, the vermillion red
Of a thousand angry dead ants boot-stepped. Envy is a small novelty
That Prospero has little of since his true love, last seen coming up roses
With a stout wife and two stripling sons, all reflexive normalcy that swans
Up and snatches back, in a portrait in the Autumn Salon framed with golden garlands,
Now Chamberlain to some provincial governor, but love’s not for grasped-hard holding,

The Gardener offers Prospero his flask in mutual consolation, holding
Out his arm at Martin and Simona, waltzing each in the hazy new flush-red
Of it, as if to say, “well we had ours.” And a kind of gentleness garlands
Them momentarily, these relinquished, lost beloveds having made the novelty
Of the ball moot. Everyone knows the mating habits of northern swans,
How they each pick only one for the other, so unlike proliferate roses,

That bloom and bloom again snipped off, those black-charred roses
So beloved of the Dowager Empress, now in vases of cut-crystal, watery holding
The light and catch of each of fifteen chandeliers and those graceful lilting swans,
All in their dancing shoes, in an odd and mandatory custom, bottomed leather-red.
The Prince of Southern Provinces has opted instead for brazen novelty
And chosen lapis blue, that flashes in the quick coranto enough that it garlands

‘Round the room as a whisper until the Tyrant pulls down the ceiling garlands
In a fit of pique and demands he change, to which in half-measure the petals of roses,
Applied hastily with caramel in jest are an answer. And now this perfumed novelty,
The Prince half-bourrées on petals over to the concubines, arm out holding
A fistful of spiked holly and berried-branches, all offering up their fiery red,
And giggling they take them and kiss as is custom, those fan-waving sideward swans.

The novelty of gaiety isn’t really novelty at all, but still, honeycomb-warm it garlands
And keeps them, the way you can’t see the peddling of swans under the water, or the effort of roses, stemming up—
The way you can’t see how many cards the dealer’s holding,
    Diamonds, Hearts, coming up flashing a full flush: expected-unexpected red.



XVIII.    [The Kitchens]

East is watching the scullery maids engage in snowball pitched
Battle with the pageboys from the peaked eaves of the second rearward door.
She has explicitly forbidden the enclosed inclusion of stones,
Still, they yelp when struck as if some snap-necked wounded hare,
Bound for the dinner-pot. Their fingers are all from working raw
Anyway, and the frost nips them harder, mittens straying in the scrap.

Her mother was a scullery maid, and her mother too, a scrap
Of living in a world that followed with longing after the carts and pitched
Fur travelling tents of the court hoping to sell a stray jade bead, the raw
Torn hem of a cloak, a single dropped pearl, to open the door
Of a new life, one with at least two easy dinners, a fresh-caught hare
With some simple rosemary, a soup that was more broth than stones.

They were themselves all as dun and worn as the road’s long-laid stones,
Between the Winter and Autumn Palaces, when he came with some scrap
Metal to bargain and a story to her town, the man who was as quick as a hare
In running the laid traps he saw set in the world, a low-quiet pitched
Man, bearded itinerant monk. He said he simply opened a door,
But it was more than that, the sense that it had not always been the raw

Edge of the haggard blade, or on the other the silken muff, the bright raw
Distinction between scullery maid and Emperor, old as time, as stones,
Not really—he said— and her grandmother’s arthritic hands on the door
Slammed it shut, but she listened, and came to believe in a scrap
Of a piece of a fold of hope, or at least persistence, for if not her, pitched
Into a new life, her daughter, her daughter’s daughter might be the hare

That finally is treated with the common decency of the rabbit, that hare,
The one that is careful and waits out the sharp, metallic hinge of raw
Snap-teeth of the system of things, the way they keep them, in pitched
Contention with each other and not the eventual cause, the hearth stones
Of the problem, which lived always in a palace, and  just a scrap
Of a girl she decided that this was where it changed, this vow, a door

Into a time without Emperors, or at least in temporary, a door,
Into a halfway decent world. History is slow; but eventually even the hare
Will lose to the tortoise, and she is one of many who waits in the scrap
Heap of the Palace service, having taken this same vow, to shape the raw
Clay, this kaolin slip, into whatever was next, necessary, the halved stones
Of geode that in cracking reveal the sparkling dark quartz, all inward pitched.

East ushers the now-tired maids and pageboys back through the door,
Her ears pitched to the dusk’s gathering winds like a startling hare,
Knowing that the raw tension of the court is coming to a point,
That it is possible to change things even older and more unyielding than stones.




XIX.    [The Third Guard Tower, Far Battlements]

On her way to the little stone room at the top of the tower
Of the farthest far-battlements, Laure carries a heavy tray of tea
With clove, cardamom, and orange peel, spiked with just a drop
Of whiskey. In the moonlight, Demetrio bumps into Luceth as if suddenly
Recognizing his existence for the first time, his smile adroitly crooked,
This straw-haired man, and both of them appraise, all glinting eyes.

The captain of the far battlements is not used to new faces, new eyes,
Visitors of any kind, really, and who is star anise of a woman in the tower,
Bearing sticky tamarind buns and still-steaming tea, a little crooked
Edifice of tiny porcelain  cups with just a rim of crackled gold, this tea
That gamely he disperses amongst his officers? But if her appearance suddenly
Changes anything, they are already old friends, laughing at the drop

Of common names, sharing confidences. Past the steep drop
Of the frost-wrong stones jutting out, the Commander on his skis eyes
The rest of the Wayward Regiment and signals go, flying forth suddenly
Over the icy plain leading to the other face of the peak, dragging each provisioned tower
On wooden skis, camp supplies for the unseen flank of the Winter Palace: tea,
Oranges, gunpowder, thick woollen blankets, patience, crooked

Lances, , grey scarves , to blend into the jagged, crooked
Base of the mountain. The Captain and Laure, sitting on the threadbare rug, drop
Pretences as the whiskey kicks in and he asks her slurping the dregs of the tea,
How she likes her men, and both are thinking of the Prince, as she eyes
The narrow slit window, she says and winks, “On their knees,” and from the tower
You certainly would not notice tonight if the snow moved suddenly

Or if a few mountainous rocks in their immortal positions suddenly
Shifted into tents, donkeys, an armoury masked in a frozen waterfall, but in the crooked
Lantern-light of the battlement, they’re all fast friends, in the indifferent tower,
As the Commander snaps off his wooden skis, contemplates the cinnabar drop
Of the official seal of the Principate of the Southern Provinces, a nine-fold tower
On the letter; he has done well, done nothing too noticeable.  He too sips his tea.

The palace is still asleep. Well, except for Luceth and Demetrio, whose new tea
Is all drunk up off each other’s lingering lips, and Demetrio sings clear and full suddenly
For him a ghazal, all the variations of his long-breathing lungs, as if his eyes
Weren’t sufficiently virtuoso in their attentions, and soon their tights are a crooked
Pile of bright wool and ribbons on the floor, abandoned as they drop,
And Laure leaves with the clattering tray from the battlement tower.

If you turn your eyes, for a second, to the craquelure rim of each teacup,
Carefully pulled finished, fired in some tower of the Five Great Kilns,
Suddenly a contrast is evident; the smooth uprun of the porcelain cup,
The rim a crooked and unexpected texture of metallic-leafed glaze,
As if waiting for everything to change; the kettle’s steaming drop.



XX.    [The Hermit’s Hut]

Prospero had been told that, before he abandoned the teeming
World, The Hermit knew things about the Before that were rare.
Prospero cannot imagine abandoning such a world; he dons a coat
Of tawny umber tipped with foxfur, takes his morning coffee short
Ristretto, and forces himself to trudge three hours up the winding path
In the snowbanks to the Hermit’s hut, perched on carved chestnut-wood

Chicken feet in the middle of an aspen grove, the kind of wood,
That as it ages only looks more like skin. The hut is teeming
With  smoke, patchouli incense he can smell all the way from the path,
Various chemical experiments. He loudly clears his throat, and with a rare
Aspirant note, calls the Hermit to attention. The long-bearded, comically short
Man looks up, takes the Relic, and searches the coat

Of strange, barbed, hooked, and pointed tools on the desk. The coat
Of the Relic is itself metal, oblong, rectangular, not pliable wood,
But as Prospero yelps in objection, the Hermit with a grunted short
Affirmation simply pops it off, leaving the black glass with lines teeming
In fracture on the table. Inside is a green biscuit-board, jade-like in rare
Purity and appended with rectangular pronged black beetles, on wire path

Caught and petrified. He wonders at the little straight byways, the grid path,
Of the Relic’s verdant-flat innards. The Hermit looks at Prospero like he’s short a coat
Or two of paint in the brain pan, gestures with frustration, and makes him stand by a rare
Apparatus, a crank linked to copper wire, elusive electricity wound from wood,
Being unused to physical labour Prospero is slow, his arms teeming
With a variety of cramps and complaints, but given a number of turns that short

Could not possibly describe, the Hermit licks his finger, says in a short
Clipped voice “Go!” and the current shoots through the biscuit path,
Up the mysterious dull-gold lines that run across the surface teeming,
Marked with wire on the wafer like some provincial highway. With coat
Of searing light the fractured mirror is alive, and Prospero turns to chestnut wood
Himself in shock, and the Hermit has to shout at him to crank again, but oh rare

And marvellous thing that is no longer as onyx or jet! A living thing, more rare,
Perhaps and more precious? But of what importance is a roadway coat
Of wire-lines on a jade wafer? Is this itself an aspen grove, a little wood
Between the worlds? Prospero tries to ask the Hermit, but is chucked out to the path,
Shoved unceremoniously out on the porch with Relic in his palm grasping his coat,
And the black mirror dead again, the Hermit preferring silence to excitement teeming.

Prospero remembers shaping the bonsai’s wood trunk with wire,
Until it is a rare and miniature thing, teeming in its own short landscaped pot,;
Maybe this is one such thing, where the map is the path, but not the territory?
The idea of electricity is a coat like a new snowfall, a new moon’s crescent,                    All glowing wire in a blown glass bulb.



XXI.    [The Hunt]
They are preparing in the copse of trees stripped bare-bark stippling
Against the sky for winter, the horses in eagerness chomping bits of brass;
The Tyrant is for once happy. He has engaged both dogs and a falcon.
The Lover claps from the balcony and waves him off. Martin shifts
Uneasily on his mount; Simona, practiced, sits easily and deft
On hers. Demetrio is partially trapped in a wound-up bevy of pheasant nets.

Luceth twists him out, puts a feather in his hair, and leaning inward nets
A peck of affection, but they’re running fast, hooves astride stippling
The snowy ground with muddy imprint. The Tyrant claims he sees a deft
And wily stag, or at least some shadow of a horn. The Assassin knows the brass
Tips of his arrows are basically useless anyway but says nothing, shifts
The wineskins about. Something moves behind the branches, the falcon

In its red hood blinded, on the gloved hand twitches, the falcon
Who this morning has gone hungry so that he more readily nets
A kill in his talons. The Assassin sympathizes with the bird, and the action shifts
Again to a far cluster of oaks. The Prince picks his nails idly, stippling
His oiled cuticles with little flecks of bored blood. Hunting was never his brass
Ring, his occupational adornment, but anyway he likes the felted, sharply deft

Cut of the hunting jacket, deep phthalo blue-- a blue in its use of copper deft
And subtle in its making. Demetrio tells Luceth that he is scared of the falcon.
 Luceth says he is his brown-eyed bird, bracelets like feathers with brass
Adorned and gold. The dogs bay and pageboys swoop in with fine-spun nets,
But there is nothing in the low brush. The Tyrants breathes heavy, stippling
The air with his frustration, but they can only shoot what moves, what shifts,

Suddenly there in the oak wood a spotted deer on one hoof shifts,
Running, and the archers loose knocked arrows, from bowstrings strung deft,
And pulled back far to ears. It falls, the iron-smell wounds stippling,
The earth.Dogs are held back, but it turned out to be useless, the falcon,
Still in its hood sightless. The greedy-eyed Tyrant sees his felled prey, nets
His price in cervine flesh. Later he will send it to the kitchens, and on a brass

Platter at the eventual dinner, East will serve up the slightly burnished brass
Of a larger deer, nearly identical, but still, the atmosphere palpably shifts,
And a temporary calm descends. Simona trifles with her seed-pearl nets,
Covering the pinned-back braids of her hair, Martin is at least at one thing deft--
He downs a wineskin, and the bored Assassin is herself a tressed and gloved falcon,
As the Prince in the rear of the returning train feels the gloaming stippling

His back with rays. The nets of the clouds begin to cover the brass-pink of the fast-
Declining sun, stippling it with shadow. Feeling deft the Tyrant sings.
Shifts into the and low and jovial pitch of a lay, echoing in the ruddy branches,
And back later in the mews, compensated with a dead vole,
Even the falcon is momentarily happy.




XXII.    [The Apiaries]


In the Middle Meadow the beekeeper, her woollen skirts rustling,
Goes to check on her charges wintering over, in tall houses
Made from halved logs of trees, thatched, where they shiver
Around their queen for heat. Tonight, East will crack the casks, spigots
Open to prepare the honey for the feast, but today she visits the bees
To give ritual thanks for their offerings. They finagled wildflowers,

Secreted their essence into comb, and it tastes like wildflowers
Still, fresh remembering the season when in their basket-faced rustling
The Beekeeper’s hesitant apprentices smoked the wakened bees
With pine-straw, in net suits, such thieves, marauders into the honey houses
Of hexagonal chambers, intimacies baffled open, little golden rivulets, spigots;
Even the bees pay taxes, even the bees look at the levies and shiver.

The Beekeeper says Old Li had barely left, in the granary, a single shiver
Of grained wheat, Fawkins’ daughter mends the wide-opening wildflowers
Of holes in socks and sweaters with burnt orange thread. The spigots
Of the Palace kitchen run with malts and liqueurs, but here the rustling
Tea leaves steep reused thrice, and fingering the carved jade droplet she houses
In her front pocket corded, a drop in the ocean of the change, East notes the bees

Have not augmented their system--consider even the levies on the bees,
Are careful to leave at least a third for the winter, a third for shiver
Of frost’s taking season. Later she goes up to the attic that houses
The old concubines and eunuchs with three jars of honey, wildflowers
As liquid memory, we all have that exuberant high summer rustling
In us. The eunuch with the grey-flecked black hair spigots

His crinkling eyes with grateful tears. East knows that the spigots
Of power are far less easy to turn, but honey, the levy of the bees,
For a second quiets the tumult, and in their worn slippers rustling
Each a teaspoonful, the Fourth and Fifth Attics’ residents shiver
With pleasure, real and recalled, and even the tattered wildflowers
The wind knocks through, purple loosestrife, larkspur, the seed-heavy houses

Of drooping spent poppies, petals as holey as peasant houses,
Baby's breath, bergenia, when the honey drips from the spigots,
No one can tell the state of the final, swept-through waning wildflowers,
Made alchemical transference into golden sweet by the bees.
East turns the jade droplet in her gloved hand, the shiver
Of anticipation for the feast runs down the long hallways rustling.

The wildflowers are under the snow near the bark-clad houses of the apiaries,
The rustling of the courtiers’ bows tied in grosgrain and brown velvet ribbon,
Rises, as in the kitchens, all bowls, stoves, spigots are in full tilt.
For the bees it is the quiet season, alone in the dark hives
Their levies paid, their duties done, all that is left is to wait
For the spring, and, when the cold nights come, to shiver.
 

XXIII.    [The Banquet, New Year]

From Samarkand, golden peaches, and the spice of every far argosy,
Caravan, mule, and even that the occasional robber, silver-daggered and masked,
Could finagle or buy. And at each place set of the long mahogany table,
A bitter southern tangerine rests, halfway between hate and Hesperides,
And sitting at the head with the Tyrant, her hair powdered in golden flecks,
The Lover bites into one to make a point, lips pursing all pouted up

And Laure in cerulean velvet, who knows the grove where they come up
Sweet near the southwestern sea, takes a bite as if the tart argosy
Of the fruit had never even unfurled the acerbity of its triangular flecks,
Its citric sails against the vast chopping sea, and her hair, lacquer-masked
Down with aquamarine, she flashes a smile, all gilded Hesperides,
As if to say, “what could possibly bother me at this table?”

East slices the crisp-skinned duck, the anticipation at the table
Tangible as the thick rassolnik in ovoid bowls, with its lemon floats up
From the barley and cucumber like the sun remembering the Hesperides,
Counting down from the winter’s long solstice, vaulting its fiery argosy
Up again into the heavens. They stay up all night, unwrapping masked
Gifts in burnt umber ribbon, the zithers flash with the finger flecks

Of the quick players. Chopping the round petals of dahlias into flecks
At equal pace, is Demetrio doing a saber-dance, spinning as the table
Claps to remind the earth to awaken, even as it is with rime masked,
And frost and snow, spinning into the equinox. The Prince holds up
His gift for Laure, a droplet pendant of Paxto lapis, and the argosy
Of East’s mind immediately drops oars in haste, considers the Hesperides

Are gardens yes, but also stars, coincidence? Alliance? These Hesperides
Keep their secrets still as he joins it around her neck, as their cups with flecks
Of cherry in the tokaji rise to toast, the Tyrant’s own noble rot sets argosy
Off from the port of nerves in his gouted leg, but the tributaries of the table
All run with laughter still, as the year’s wheel turns, like a millwheel coming up
In a clear mountain stream, all amongst the cress and lotus masked.

And the dawn begins to stretch her roseate fingers in glassy gloves masked
Through the windowpanes, her chariot come in from the Hesperides,
But what paradise could you ask more of this? This banquet wrapped up
All in fine damasks and taffetas, and now for wakening, pistachio flecks
On green ice-cream made with sticky mastic, and rising at the table
The Tyrant intones “To a sweeter New Year!” and hope’s own argosy

Sails into the rafters, but up on the far side of the peak, masked wool grey
Against the whirling snow, the waiting Commander, his own argosy of sharp-edged
Hopes sails on too, like the blades of his skates, figure-eighting a Hesperides
Into the black ice of the lake, as the same flecks of snow,
Blowing in to the Palace through the thrown-open balconies, charming,
Easy, coat the long expanse of the morning’s New Year table.


XXIV.     [The Library]

Three days later, in the library, Prospero swears the cymbals
Are still clashing behind his eyes, but leans over the long narrow
Desk to study the Before text he saw for but a moment flashing,
Lit up on the Relic. The scholars frown at him for bringing in a little cup
Of espresso, but they say that each of them have four treasures:
A long, compressed ink stick, a watering ink-stone, paper and a horsehair brush—

Why not espresso? It is a thing touched with flame, with steam’s own brush!
 Anyway the scholars are not amused, and subtle as cymbals,
They send their youngest, greenest apprentice to appraise his treasures.
Koralev is a shy boy even in his russet stockings, but the glancing narrow
Window into the Before draws his wonder out, fills the brimming cup
Of his need to consider otherwise as they debate whether the flashing

Letters mark pitch, sound, signify, or both? Insight like a firework flashing
 A ladder up the night sky hits. Koralev’s trembling fingers brush
An ancient book’s crumbling spine, as pretending to clear the cup
Of Prospero’s espresso, the Assassin sees the dual eggshell cymbals
Of the book’s two covers, and unable to resist, grabs the narrow
Stem in the ink, and in writing rights the ancient letters’ treasures,

Shows this mushroom-haired boy,  whose eager-travelling eye treasures
Other heavens that so mimic her own, how to make the new lines flashing
That re-animate the Before letters’ text. The old characters, tall and narrow
As a dandelion floret, come to her as if the wind blows them off her brush.
Suddenly, she startles, remembers her place again, as if warning cymbals
Crashed, and retreats hastily to the kitchen with Prospero’s cup.

But Koralev is a clever apprentice, and does not empty memory’s cup
So easily. For weeks he will seek her again, since he too treasures
The promises of speech and history, the way the orchestra’s cymbals
Echo after the long building up, the whole intertwined symphony flashing
Of past-present conjunctions, counterpoint, intermezzo. Now this one little brush
With the Relic has shown them into the Before a winding path, narrow,

Tremulous, invariably steep, but a path nonetheless, these letters narrow
Like spindly new-planted beeches, and so unlike their own characters, which cup
So many meanings at once. He makes Prospero take his tongue and brush
It to the roof of his mouth, the palate vaulting, and say “ahhh” “heehh”, treasures
Of syllabic retrieval, that only together like signal banners covalent flashing
Mean anything at all, and then come forth the trumpets, the cymbals--

This is what it’s like to feel time’s brush, to feel your narrow-curtained world
Unfurling, all grand janissaries marching in with cymbals announcing
What you thought were dearest treasures are now up for contention.
History, in her gauzy muslin dressing clothes,
Stands in front of the mirror, turning, tuning, all percussive crash-flashing.



XXV.    [The Harem]

Laure returns to the Harem, to the steam-coddled pond watery
Under glass with unhurrying carp of many persimmon-tiled scales,
And lilies where you could balance a glass on each large pad flat.
With Lucida, she is playing in the warm water. It could have been years
Ago to now, snap, a quick curtain, but when she cups with her hands
Lucida’s small breasts, the other turns back to Laure and makes remonstrances:

“Don’t tease me with what I can’t have,”--it’s all awash here with remonstrances
This enclosed environ, its hothouse flowers well entrapped, will get only watery
Promises from occasional lovers, know what it is to be passed between idle hands.
Trimalchio holds with delight a small brown-pointed cat in the air’s invisible scales—
This is a rare love, entire, that can be his and his alone, who spends her years
Eating favored hand-flaked salmon off a little silver dish, set down flat

On the steamy terrazzo. Laure’s footprints follow Lucida’s flat
Little puddles into her chambers, whereas mopping remonstrances
They slip on their customary chartreuse velvet slippers, even years
Later to her still familiar. She holds up a sandalwood viol, watery-
Eyed and pleads with Lucida as she bows up the five-toned scales,
To go back to the Academy of the Pear Garden, her delicate hands

Could be busy with lutes and zithers, and Laure presses in those hands,
A void of contract, rendering her unkept here as of the spring. The long ripples flat
Across the pond pass measure. When they were slips of girls singing scales
And sleeve-dancing, spinning, could they have imagined these remonstrances
From the world’s wobbling returns? At least the Tyrant hasn’t made his watery
Excuses here in a while, but tonight he will make his first jaunt in years,

Taking Lucida in Laure’s absence, as if between them the years
Spindling ribbon could never fully disentangle, and with angered hands,
The Lover alone in her shut-tight chamber twists and twists the thin watery
Red silk of a kerchief, sprays too much musked perfume. The shallow flat
Breaths of the Prince as he sleeps do Laure little comfort, each a volley of remonstrances
For long ago leaving South’s Harem door, renouncing the weighted brass scales

Of one fleshly accounting for another, always those inviolate scales,
When everything else remains wholly violable. Those many years
Ago in the courtyard of the Academy of the Pear Tree, when remonstrances
Of strict dancing masters were their biggest fear, how Laure promised, hands
In peaked and earnest prayer, that she and Lucida would go and master the flat
Expanse of the court’s parterre, together. But even the sealing wax goes watery

In a hard rain, and there are never enough remonstrances to even the scales
For saving yourself. If memory goes watery-dilute with years,
Neither love nor regret know anything but the obdurate sharp hands
Of the mountain’s old peaks tumbling in, and some, some just get left there,
Behind on the downward plains, exposed in the wind-tumbled open of the flat.



XXVI.    [The Throne Room, Another Messenger]

He runs in on foot, the soles of his boots worn down
To sporadic nubs, still clumped with snow, panting, rushed,
Speaks in raspy runs, still his heart’s dilate vessels pattering:
The Tyrant’s Southwestern Garrison has gone missing, absent,
Seeming dispersed into the night, and when interrogated with hot coals
It seems the bursar revealed nothing, a man so normally fastidious

He knew the location of each individual barrel, so fastidious
As to be above usual suspicion. Broiling, the Tyrant shoots down
The throne apse-steps furious-quick, like they’re red-hot coals,
And the room erupts in shouting. East will in her notes refrain from rushed
Conclusions, the Assassin dusting the table acts as if no absent
Thing is new, and South turns to the Prince in his robes pattering

Pacing the length of the chamber, asks pointedly if the pattering
Hooves of all these missing horses, their hair in war-knots fastidious
Is something he might know about. Frowning darkly the Prince shoots down
This aspersion; did he not handle for the ill-suited crown, put down
The last rebellion in the Northwest entirely?  Shift half-buttoned, having rushed
In, Prospero notes that the Dowager Empress, when putting her cigarettes to the coals,

Would often admit the younger was the more competent of her sons, all bright coals
And fusillade, where the Tyrant was lignan paste and the thunks of lathed-pattering
Slow ivory. It’s true of late that record-keeping has become haphazard, perhaps rushed
To meet the new slate of orders and taxes, perhaps it is simply an un-fastidious
Accident of the ledger? The Tyrant murmurs darkly, orders the pages to take down
The names of every missing soldier, that he will punish severely the absent.

The Prince nods in agreement, but just then Laure makes herself, too, absent
From the room, the seal of the Ninefold Tower in her pocket, blazing like lit coals
Into the trajectory of the future, and the letter she sends by halting donkey secret down
To the far side of the peak, to the Commander in his holding pattern pattering
Loops in the hard-packed snow: wait, check the spark of your flints fastidious,
The sharp array of every pointed crossbow bolt, wait, do not be unduly rushed

Into action before the signal. Nor is the Assassin a creature rushed
Either as she carefully emerges from curtain backs, and absent
Any direct order, keeps her dagger in its sheath; death is fastidious
Above all things. The Wayward Garrison will tonight keep low its coals,
Stoke no visible fires, because the eyes from the balconies over-pattering
Might suddenly see, and their grappling hooks are ready set-down.

Versed in his classics, the Commander can himself recite the maxim that fastidious
Armies are never rushed early into taking a well-prepared enemy down,
Because in being presumed absent, they could be anywhere, everywhere,
Ubiquitous and unnoticeable as coals, and so he stills his troops in the encampment,
And the Tyrant is the one up at night fidgeting,
His hands on the arms of the throne, pattering up the near- black zitan
Carvings, pattering down, glaring into the shadows, always now pattering.

XXVII.    [The Cardgame]

East and South would prefer chess, but neither being willing to admit,
The Chamberlains all meet weekly for a game of ordinary  cards.
They play for house stakes; cleanups, setups, rug beatings, curtains to draw,
Various other duties of staff. The deck’s Palace Standard, suits in neat sets
Of red and blue. The common four: Hearts, Staves, Stags, Flames.
North complains as usual that he has too many stockings in a stack

Of unkempt courtier laundry. West only swigs warm sake and slaps the stack
Of cards (“Shuffle”) which South does, with long deft fingers that admit
No accusations of cheating, even from East, who is usually in flames
Over something he’s attempted by the end of the night. He deals the cards,
North makes an obvious face at his mismatch, no full sets,
But West is nursing an excellent three-rose Jack-Queen-Emperor draw.

East keeps her face hidden behind the fan of cards. You couldn’t draw
A smile or a frown from South anyway, but he’s a blank, the stack
Of rings on his left hand entirely unmoving, as when he sets
A particular concubine to seduce an unpleasant visitor, he won’t admit
Anything, give an inch. East silently thanks the Fates, though in cards
She will steadfastly swear she has no Gods, for her lack of Flames.

West folds. Mismatched roses, which ironically the Gardener, flames
Up his obsession with every winter to West’s great annoyance. A sake draw,
A long gulp that trickles down the back of West’s throat, then South lays the cards
For the dealer. Three of Staves, Ace of Hearts. East draws from the stack,
Completing her Queen-Emperor dyad and off-hand ready to admit
This is uncomfortably close to the Prince, who has the ladies maids in sets

Giggling, and, as South adds grudgingly, the Eunuchs. But when he sets
His cards down, East feels less friendly. Threes, all of them like dancing flames
When they curl up around a log, in all four suits. He wins, they all admit,
West will supervise the cleaning of the lily pond, get some pages to draw
Up the algae and feed the threateningly gigantic fish. He shuffles the stack,
Comments “those monsters can’t be koi,” and deals again the cards.

South decides to tell them about Laure. Some things, over cards
Are more admissible. If the court swoons for the Prince, it surely sets
The even hardened hearts of concubines, for Laure to return, stack
Up little presents, nurture old forgotten loves. East, fanning the flames,
Asks if South is worried he’s losing control of his domain, but with one draw
He wins another hand and silences whatever he was willing to admit.

It’s not just decks of cards that stack neatly up; the scenario
All admit, sets the four Palace wings constant tittering, Hearts and Stags indeed.
North stamps down the brazier flames with his thick black boots.
South and East each amiably draw a velvet curtain.
They all part, four ways, into the night.


XXVIII.    [The Workshops]

The trawlers bring them in, from the ports of Mokha through Muza, the edges
Of the deserts, the City of the Six Banyans, where all monks practice trade,
Tree roots hanging down from humid sky, reaching lower in the inverse
For the loam of the earth, propping up the whole web’s routed canopy,
In winter the pearl divers sit on the shores and sing and the resin
Is scraped from milky poppies with a spatula sharper than tongues--

The survey of the Palace workshops down beside the peak, where the tongues
Of springs running converge at once into turbulent eddies, all edges
And whorls, spare no treasure’s acquisition, extraction, manufacture is the resin
Of Empire. So, South and East lead the annual tally of each trade.
Ledgers sticking out of their leather folders, each a veritable canopy
Of paper, with noted debits, credits, interest, qualities, and dubious facets inverse.

South appraises hundreds of celadon bowls, stacked up tottering inverse,
And runs her hands across the glaze. East assesses meaty tongues,
Of deer and beef, ignoring the storehouse that purports with a canopy
Of profuse description to possess that of a dragon, now stolen from the edges
Of its sharp mouth with the aid of a tread-water bead, to be given in trade
Only for slabs of agate azure. But when it all boils down, the lingering resin

Seems to both to be the same: accounts they thought were paid still sop resin
Of accruing debt from the throne’s sapping tree, despite receipts in the inverse,
Saying they were paid long ago. South with East proceeds to trade
A rare mutual glance—this is new, troubling, and they fear wagging tongues
More than unbalanced ledgers, so they sign and seal the lined edges
Of the workshop receipt-books, make their orders anyway, a whole canopy

Of fruits for the breakfast table, melons and quince, a whole canopy
From that dark tree that grows and grows below the crust a rooted- resin
Of debt and lingering repayment. South contemplates the bound edges
Of the claws of the rock crabs scuttling a tank’s grimy water inverse
To the sea. The court always needs more, the infinite lapping tongues,
At the salt lick of such exquisite things, all miniver and jade-set trade

In low tables and chaise longues with ball-claw feet, import’s high trade
In which South and East least wish to be upbraided. So the canopy
Of the tow-cart becomes swollen to the stitches with goods, the tongues
Of the seams protruding out of each, near-bursting with cinnamon and myrrh’s resin,
But in the City of the Banyans, the monk-traders like to say that the promise of the inverse
Is always the undertow of riches, and at the far-flung Empire’s fraying edges

The tongues of the pearl divers clack that this year the trade has been sparse,
That the edges of the tide brought in a strange strangling weed, that the canopy
Of fishing nets, and the resin of rare ambergris that means bounty,
Have begun to cough up instead beached leviathans, low clouds,
The tide drawing out and out further, always in anticipation inverse.



XXIX.    [The Blizzard]

White-out sky. The snow keeps coming and coming down,
An eternal salvo outside the windows. They draw the curtains,
And board up any fracture or fragile lucid pane, an excess of caution.
At the battlements and the High Gallery, the wind is sideways blown,
And the banks are already piling on the balconies all crystalline powder.
It’s anyone’s guess if there is still, as the night comes, a rising moon,

But the sun of furnaces flare faculae in the kitchens, and the moon
Of each scullery maid’s pale face is flushed with simmering down
Spun sugar, caramel drip-dainties, cups of drinking chocolate from powder
Cacao hastily brought up from the storeroom. The looming curtains
Of the night seem solid and with the excess electricity all out blown,
Candles are instantly procured, and in an abundance of caution

Given wicks in double addition, since blizzards are not inclined to caution,
The braziers on their stubby legs are each a little ambient moon,
In the long murky hallways, where shuffling the servants set out the blown
Sugar straws and sweet cups, and the Assassin sleeps still in goose down,
But elsewhere, some other agent waits patiently in the curtains,
Outside the room of Laure, slipping back the dome of a ring to reveal a powder,

Near as white as snow or talcum, but not as fine, this mendacious powder,
A secretly procured nitrile cyanide. Having been into the cup tipped with caution.
It is not long before the Prince comes visiting her, throws back the curtains
Shouting “poison, poison!”  But the only one really watching was the moon,
And she doesn’t speak, as he drags Laure’s body all prostrate curvature down
The parquet floor, on the walnut inlay, fingers and lips already blue, veins blown

Spidering open, cold. All the snow pummelling against the windows blown
In high mourning he screams, with her face perfect still, set all pearl-powder,
And the red paint on her cold-greying fingertips flashes as the hail comes down
Now on the rooftiles, barraging. The encircling guards out of quick caution,
Restrain the Prince from himself, wailing, clawing at the absent moon
Of her lost visage, her pulse not thrumming in, he tears down the curtains

Off their long brass rails, those claret curtains, his murderous brother’s curtains,
And with all the outward landscape into sideways similarity sallow white-blown,
His rage is as radiant as his grief. Cursing the sky, the stars, the faceless moon,
As Laure’s black hair pools around her inert parted lips, her chin, that invidious powder
Having already taken her. He draws his ceremonial blade from its holster, with caution
Now some lost afterthought, vows to hunt the Tyrant all the hallways down,

But by the silent moon, the Tyrant swears it was not his doing, and the shredded curtains
Surround her all down tubules like calla lilies or spreading azaleas, and the blown snow,
Beats and beats on the balconies, and in the morning,
When it lays still and uniform, waist-deep, entrapping,
She was so animate, so alive, that they still wait for her,
As if it was all some nightmare’s squall of warning, some false caution.


XXX.    [The Mortuary]

She lies on the slab of cooled marble, herself marmoreal, dead stone,
Stitched down from the sternum, her delicate collarbones
Made evidentiary. The coroner, a tall, reedy man who had seen everything
In the Wars in the Northwest minces no words, with his fingers pinches
A tiny mote in the air and says “all it takes is a small dose.”
And indeed, says South this is not the Tyrant’s way, he wanted her, to acquire

Her presence again in the harem. The Prince flinches at “acquire,”
But still the reasoning partly sticks. In the hallway crouching on the stone
Floors of the basement, the Assassin has to agree, truly the dose
Was amateur, the failure rate too high, and five floors above under the collarbones
Of the beamed Throne Room, the Lover, again and again nervously pinches
Her black kerchief, twists it behind her obligatory black dress. Everything,

Seems still, waiting, even the Tyrant with breath baited, since everything
Hung in the Prince’s attitudinal balance. Now the Prince seems to acquire
A composure, nods as South assures him, as the reality of it pinches
Him there all raw white as the snow,-- they will seek out the culprit, leave no stone
Unturned.  And in the under basement’s forking hallway collarbones,
The Prince goes right, then South, left, but outside waiting with a dose

Of reality, the Assassin simply looks at the Prince, the differing dose
Between medicine and poison being minimal, and nods, says everything
He already suspected. And she lifts from her own swaddled collarbones
The pendant, obsidian droplet, and he nods again, and the scale will acquire
Against both Tyrant and Lover a disconsolate and heavy-weighted stone,
As if Justice with her two long fingers the fabric of her blindfold pinches

Back the moment she feels the shift. A seal, the two letter halves pinches
Together, the Prince’s own mark of the Ninefold Tower, runs the cracked dose
Of the battlements down the back path again to the Commander, everything
Ready to unleash when he sees the pennant of lapis,  will set in stone
The crossbow bolts slicing through the air, so unlike Justice, to acquire
Their targets with a deadly and instant precision, under the collarbones

Between the rib, in the heart, there he knows, oh all the collarbones
He would snap right now like the lucky wishbones of fish if these pinches
Of Fate would swerve and bring her back, but like a mortal he must acquire
This substitute, this waiting for the moment when his black dose
Of vengeance can come, for how could they not know everything?
The Tyrant and the Lover both? The Assassin disappears into the stone

Of the basement, to acquire her implements. The Prince lets his collarbones heave,
For Laure, for the stone wall of the Palace that pinches him in, waiting, waiting,
But they will get their dose, their syrupy tablespoonful
Of wrath and counterstroke, the upturned underbelly of everything.




XXXI.          [The Grave Mounds]

The Tyrant, with the courtiers in tow, takes the seemingly mollified Prince up high
In the hills, where in the spring there is heather, to Grave Mounds of their ancestors.
There is no heather now, just ice, cut in a deep, neat, cuboid hole,
Which the Gardener, himself a little weeping, has lined with peonies.
Powder blue, their buds unfurling there as they lay her corpse down.
Prospero cannot help but think of the Relic then, was it a grave?

That black face of cracked glass, so like this hole in the ice, a grave
For memory? For the past? Surely then, too, no one was so high
As to be spared death, who comes for us all, comes withering down
Through all the grass-neat lines of our desiccated ancestors,
As it comes in the brown edges of the cupped petals of peonies,
Which too, will all become ash; the hole is the world’s hole,

Whether it is cut into the spring moss or the ice, this hole
Where the Prince kneels in the mud with his trousers of Berber blue, the grave
Encircled with incense of agarwood, smoking. In the wind the peonies
Start to disassemble and cover her, their stripped-stamens high
And proud in their final tribute, and perhaps these are his ancestors,
Speaking their vows, as each spent petal settles on her body down.

And Simona lays her black-netted hair on Martin’s shoulder down,
And Luceth and Demetrio clutch each other, in Luceth’s dark glove a hole
Worn through, where Demetrio traces his pink-warm skin, since the ancestors
Of love did not vanquish death either. Indeed the presence of a grave,
They say, is what makes bedded mornings sweeter, and the high
Peaks witness Laure last, as they each in turn take another one of the peonies

And lay it on her, those nested sheathing flowers like armor, peonies,
Such armor that can protect from nothing. Then they lower down
Their mourning veils over their faces, all fine net ebony and lace high
Liquorice, each tiny weave on a bobbin made a loop, a threaded hole,
Hours expended on a single hem, this is what delicacy costs, the little grave
Of the mourning laces, which to brocades; and velvets are gentle ancestors.

And when the Prince is done, snuffs out the agarwood, the ancestors
Take her, and they all at once turn their backs from the piled peonies,
Walk down the heatherless hills away from the fresh-laid grave.
In the spring it will purple here, and grow, and kneeling down
In their simple linen dresses the local shepherdesses will gesture to the hole,
Now merely an outline covered, and pick thyme, and ringing voices high

They will sing over the hills of the grave, that time and heather’s own ancestors
Were once high-born peonies too, were once beautiful,
Down in that pitch-deep plot, powder blue,
Blossom rotting clean the hole rent in the earth.







XXXII.    [The Divination]

As an obligatory part of the investigation, the protracted shuffles
Of the sycophant Astrologer echo in the Throne Room’s vaults.
An octagonal table, fifty sticks of yarrow, still verdurous snipped;
These are what the Fates require for an inquisitory probe.
All encircle him like a black-tatted fringe in their mourning costume,
Craning over, like tarsiers from Makassar, with their little monkey fingers

On one side the Prince, on the other, the Tyrant, the Lover who fingers
Uneasily still one of her hems, and mucosal cough that shuffles
The old man’s dripping bead as he drops the sticks, chance’s costume,
And the realm of Fates, for the first time in his mediocre life, vaults
Into his rheumy eyes, real as the Palace,  Clotho waving the probe
Of life’s cool spinner, tells him straight off, they won’t say why it was snipped,

The incision of who did it, when really so many lives so easily are snipped,
Thus, says Clotho with her starry tresses, and pupils spinning nebulae who fingers,
Life’s thread to Rozhanitsa for weaving, dark Rohanitza whose darting probe
And shuttle are the smoothed-down knucklebones of unlucky men, but some she shuffles
Into the next row of time’s loom. Next the Goddess of the Morning Clouds, the vaults
Of early cheerful light, eats pomegranates, and as the reddened juice makes costume,

It’s dripping way down her lips, in around her great scissors, that which has no costume;
Handles, blades, snip. She smiles at the astrologer with pointed teeth; the snipped
Threads of other lives than Laure’s, so many littering the puffy cumulus-fog vaults
On which they stand. Whoever told you the Fates were kind? That their fingers
Were pliable to men’s many pleas? On the table the yarrow inexplicably shuffles,
Like some portent doily into perfect x’s and parallel lines, for they dared probe

The heavens for an answer, and in return the heavens in fairness, sporting, probe
Them. And there is nothing to hide the Astronomer’s shock, no flatterer’s costume,
As Rozhanitsa’s beaded apron flickers with animate eyes, the blinking lashes shuffle
Open and shut, and Clotho laughs with the deathless indifference straight snipped
From the gods, as the final stick falls, yarrow on cloth, those narrow stick-fingers
All pointing contradictory, no answer, neither yes nor no, just the vaults

Of dice always tumbling in a street-juggler’s tricksome cup. Then the vaults
Of the heavens close, and the Astronomer, again alone, shaking makes probe
At a single twig with his finger and withdraws as if burned. Now clutching their fingers
The Courtiers blanch back; what does it mean? But as if stripped of the costume
Of dignity by true divinatory intervention, the Astronomer can only let out snipped
Phrases; “Changing, unchanging, all at once, somehow both ways, it dually shuffles”.

So don’t shove your wayward fingers into the vaults of the heavens unless you expect
Between the moon’s phasing shuffles, and the sun’s unrelenting, beaming probe,
That the Fates’ easy costume of accomplice will be dropped,
That you will see them for what they truly are, feral and alone;
The unrelenting ones that your life, all the lives, have spun, woven, sudden-snipped.


XXXIII.             [The Third Ball]

The Tyrant does the only things he knows, plays his trump card,
Signs another order; in mourning they tie around their wrists a ribbon
Bow of black grosgrain, enter the ballroom in a pavane all minor key,
The viols bowing low and the lutes, as palm to palm they inward process,
Ball-toe walking in their dancing shoes. Martin to Simona together twine,
Two tall dark-clad figures like gates of wrought iron in the rain,

The Prince wears no red shoes, and if the flashes of his blue soles rain
Down on the Tyrant gratingly, he can say nothing; so go the card
Tables even cloaked in velveteen black. As the music starts to twine
Faster, Demetrio and Trimalchio let their long extended legs split-ribbon
The air in a jumping scissone, and in relief they all clap, that the process
Of returning to exuberance takes a tiny step, the little latch-key

Back to normalcy turns clockwise, but counterclockwise the other key
Nested like a mechanism in the Assassin’s straight back, cold as the rain,
Against the windows, is a dagger of old steel with a crystal hilt, the process
Of making which requires a single giant slab of quartz, sheaved like a playing card
From the ore-pits of the Northern mine, whittled down to the delicate-width ribbon
Of precisely her own small right hand; but still she waits for the long twine

Of the network to send the final go message, and sees now only the twine-
Tied-boxes of lavender macarons she is setting on the side table.
Between vases of camellias in Mountbatten pink, with black ribbon
Still affixed but the Lover’s choice clearly—though East looks out at the rain,
And wonders if  the Lover knows that colour’s name, meant like a pasteboard card
To dissolve against the bloody sea the uniforms of naval soldiers, the process

Of camouflage being not unlike that of makeup, and with this process
The Lover is certainly familiar, now feeling drunk or safe enough to twine
Her arms around the Tyrant, plant a mauve lipstick kiss. She twiddles the table card
With the Prince’s name in front of him, flaunting, which being salient key
For his storming out darkly, and South’s brow, already coated in sweat like rain
From adding oud and cedar to the fires, rises sharply too, knowing the ribbon

-Pull of consequence is always coming.  Luceth ties his own ribbon
Round Demetrio’s neck and pulls him close, wilful eager to process
Back to easy nights of love, and around his crooked smile like the rain
The pinpricks of stubble grown in brush up, all teasing twine.
 But Filomena is sitting alone; for her no besotted golden key
Will turn back the hours, reset, unplay the played hand’s card.

And the rain comes down harder now, a single fluid ribbon, drenching balconies,
The card tables have little chatter; and so at the end again they solemn process
Out again, the twine-wrapped strings of the viols now a keening B♭,
And the dropping torrents, the thunderclouds; the contrapuntal key.


XXXIV.    [The Laboratory]

Prospero, sensing a need for diversion, calls them all by engraved invitation,
To the Dowager Empress’ former laboratory, all metal tables and apparatus.
The Prince and the Tyrant both stand baffled, as Koralev the copper crank turns
And turns. Then the second the tethered Relic with the extending wire
In Prospero’s hand lights up, they understand, the sudden electricity
Of it, the way the boy reads off the Before-time letters from the glass.

They could all then, shatter in this moment, as if formed from such fragile glass,
Look at them! All those people living from the past’s lost invitation,
Gathering in their strange and simple raiment, animated by electricity
Into temporary being again. They see tall beams of the ruins in their proper apparatus,
Of boxy structures reaching up to the clouds, long identical windowed- wire
Straight lines, almost infinite in their repetition, and the sharp turns

Of dark-pebbled roads, a grid going out forever. The Prince leaning in, turns
Quickly and exclaims when he sees a metal cart, long and set with panes of glass,
Running along the rusted steel lines in the ground he has seen, like a guiding wire;
It would best the speed of every one of his postal horses, this segmented invitation
To carrying not just mail but men. And as Koralev decodes the spindly apparatus
Of the Before letters, East notes the absence in the labels with a thrilling electricity:

There is no mention of kings of men—what was the emperor back then, electricity?
They travel without permits, but without servants too; it seems that the turns
Of their lives were infinitely various. The Tyrant merely blinks at the apparatus,
Cannot see cannon or musket or crossbow, or even a single shattered glass.
He asks where their war machines were, if he can see them-- an easy invitation
To victory over his troublesome provinces. Prospero lifts the tethered wire

And intimates this is only the beginning, for there are many such animate wire
Things buried in the ice below the peaks. The Before had so much electricity
In excess, it seemed, and wonders, to which this is only a first invitation.
It pleases Prospero especially that they were not so entirely different, it turns
Out, as one of the obsidian mirror’s flickering images is a little porcelain glass
Of espresso, rendering contiguous his own steamy-companion apparatus.

East slips out of the back of the room early, sketches the apparatus
In eye-liner charcoal on her hand, hastily inscribes the sharp-wire
Characters of urgent letters to the others who took the vow, skating on the glass
Of the world about to change shape, each a tiny droplet of thrumming electricity
In a current, running, and the jade pendant drops and in her palm spins and turns,
As the Assassin smiling in the kitchens, needed for this no specially sent invitation--

No looking glass, no telescopic apparatus, to see this for what it was.
Every new old thing recovered is an invitation to her already, all that spooled wire
For the electricity that powered the Before, is also that on which
The new world, in its tottering and changeable rotation, now speeding turns.




XXXV.    [The Respite/The Rockface]

From a notch in the far battlement the lapis pennant spiralling unfurls,
An unwound sea-snail’s shell into the flapping wind, and the signal
Is quickly spied by the Garrison’s binoculared watchman’s eager eyes.
A shout, then hushed, comes up from the camp, whose grappling hooks
And crampons rush to bristling array; it is three days up and over
The Palace peak, but in Luceth’s chamber all is lazy-waking close,

Co-mingled legs, slightly twisted sheets, the smell musky close
Of lovers’ spit, sweat. Demetrio cups his chin and teasing unfurls
A line of kisses down Luceth’s back, marshalled, bristling muskets over
Turned are loaded with powder tamped down, and on the kiss’ signal
They rise each to the other, and the Commander sinks his barbed hooks
Into the sheet of the ice-wall for the climb. Cupping his chin, “oh your eyes”

Says Demetrio, “your eyes are green chrysoprase, with their fixed gaze, eyes
Each to the other.” And with their banners tied-up on their backs the men close
To the rope scale the glacier’s first edge, and a single flask knocked over
The precipice falls into the distance echoing like an explosion, as Luceth unfurls
Each of Demetrio’s long fingers, one, two, three, go, hold, the many types of signal
The palm possesses. He traces the lines of his life, and turns the hand over,

Pulls it to his chest, the round pink feldspar of his nipples, but the hard over
First stretch of the pass is fast unpliable basalt studded with tourmaline eyes,
Veins crystal seeping through the cleft rock. Other than panting exertion no further signal
Passes, and the soldiers feel the numb as they go up, the cloudline coming close,
There are no spruce or larches here, all shed their needles like Demetrio unfurls
The last button of Luceth’s under-trousers, all tiny subtle eyes and hooks,

The way they come to know each other, the way the gloved hand hooks
The rim of the first belay and the spikes for the ropes are hammered, looped over,
Tethered down into the soldiers’ waiting harnesses, into dead air unfurling,
With leathern slit-strips to block the sun, they look up, covering their eyes.
This is the intimacy of the peak, the way the rock feels knowing as you pull it close
That everything hangs in the balance. Luceth pulls Demetrio to him, the hot signal

Of touch and tongues, there is no more dangerous way to give signal,
To traverse the flesh down from the eyes, where to place the anchors and the hooks,
To come to know while still traversing the steep territory, as all the fletching’s close
Nestled in the arrows bundled-tied, and each man’s ready knife prepares over
And over to cut the rope to save the rest, each in the moment locking eyes
The right-fitted place for hand or foot, finding the crevices, as climb unfurls

Up, and Demetrio pulls close back the length of Luceth’s hair, gasps signal,
And the mountain unfurls in the vertical to the grappling hooks like body does,
Over and over, to the eager hand, finding purchase in the crux,
 The opening lips, the sloughing abseil of the tongue,
 The zig-zag clambering approach of the eyes.



XXXVI.    [The Orrery]

In the orrery, where each of the miniature spheres keeps orbit,
Above tall arched windows on the snow, and the lined globes
Of latitudes and distant ports, stand ready for some grand expedition,
That never comes, the Assassin sneaks up looking to be alone.
She takes out a tiny glass-blue metal pane, a tapping knob spun
With wired lines, and sends off into the air a message in dashes,

The reply soon comes: long long short, long long long, dashes
Too, and she pauses to consider the gravity of their spondaic-iamb orbits
Interspersed, all the intersecting lines she has in her watching spun,
Affirmed, for her too-- the signal has come, and she turns the globes
On their oiled wood axes thinking it through. But she is not alone:
East emerges, making diagonal run from the far corner in expedition

To catch her. The Assassin merely stops, for hasty expedition
Has no need here, and to prove she is an ally she never even dashes
Away, or flinches, just pulls from her neck the pendant swinging back and forth alone
From a waxed length of thin cord, the pointed obsidian droplet, in miniature orbit
As is dangles from her outstretched hand, as if like the standing globes
It is its own dark planet. East from her own pocket takes the round spun

Drop of jade, equivalent, and they appraise each other, finally having spun
Out each their secret constellations, kept unlabelled on maps of expedition,
Celestial and otherwise. On their strings, those two extended dripping globes
Like icicles or slowing rain inscribed as stones, like two long lobed dashes,
Catch the light from the high sun in the windows and the flickering orbit
Of the frozen snow. East now promises to keep it all to herself alone,

Whatever she has just seen, unsure, the message-maker itself alone
A Relic perhaps? They nod slowly at each other, each having spun
A length of agreed-upon silence. East turns to leave, swing into the heady orbit
Of her now-disarrayed thoughts, but the Assassin is all clarity, all sharp expedition
Set, the fixed stars of her future acts arrayed, no meteor, no slight-lit dashes
Of roving comets, just this one only thing, this for which she has all the globes

Of long-encircled moments waited, all the icy precipitate that globes
Down into enchanted flakes, falling all the long season, known and known alone:
The course of the quartz-hilted dagger must come. Three long dashes,
Preceded by two longs and a short means: GO. When the whirling hands have spun
Down the mantle clock, she will make the deadly cut, her blade’s expedition
Expected and ultimate, but no less thrilling for its predicted final orbit.

She dashes out of the dusty room of the tannin-stained globes,
Her orbit, no earthly orrery could track, she acts now in shadow’s discretion, alone,
Dons the mulberry-spun black jacket she brought with her for this moment,
Customary, frog-closed with velvet ties, and at her belt the knife,
Her hand at ready to slice open destiny with hastening expedition.



XXXVII.    [The Tyrant’s Bath]

Soaking in mugwort and valerian, the Tyrant is supine in his bath water,
Scattered small flowers across the steaming surface’s gently swaying plane,
The two guards posted, stand idly shifting foot to foot outside the chamber;
But she has snuck in, spent half the day to the under-spaces pinned
Of the Tyrant’s own bed, heavy with silken bufferings, and useful shadow.
Slowly the Assassin creeps out, to wall of the bedroom keeping flush,

And in slow and even steps, shoes lined with kidskin leather up flush
Against silk binding her toes exactly, in everything she is water,
Fluid-moving quick as clear rivulet up the peak in spring melt. The shadow
Of spring looms in her right hand, which promises time’s even plane
Will suddenly here break, quicken, like a cherry blossom that all tightly pinned
In bud one night erupts in pink rapture by the morning, into the bath chamber,

She comes all Akebono, in full and sudden flower, all soft-petal chamber
Music of lute and viol, her steps patter in 3/4 time so light he doesn’t even flush,
Or wake fully, until her left hand yanks back the hair in curls careful pinned
And threaded through with oils of oud and tuberose. As the Tyrant panics in the water
About to let out a scream, she takes the dagger’s salient and eternal plane,
And slices it across his neck’s throbbing aorta; so all at once the shadow

Goes out of his soul as the severed blood gushes, a red-bright shadow
Into the now tepid-tub, and the beating of the final fourth heart’s chamber
Stops. The water is rosy now, tinted cherry-blossom pink. The arterial plane
Of spray spatters out across the white porcelain tiles, bright new flush.
He sinks back down, the weight of his corpse floating slightly in the water,
And behind the chamber doors the guards are still to their spots pinned,

Chattering about the evening’s dinner; now the body is just a pinned
Butterfly-- how exquisite, how rare, an Emperor without a shadow,
For there is no more power in a dead and labelled thing, and dipping in the water
She cleans the dagger’s blade, wipes it with plush royal towel, leaving the chamber
All bloody petalled there, because there is no flush like the cherry blossom’s flush,
Like the flush of the new when the rot is disposed with, the shoots under the plane

Of the snow gathering up, making themselves ready, and the level plane
Of the bathroom’s door closes behind her silently, the lock still un-pinned.
They are very delicate, cherry blossoms, just as they open their first flush,
So easily they also fall. Near the bed she looks for the serving bell’s hanging shadow,
Knowing already her quick and careful route down the hallway from the chamber,
She rings for them. She knows she will be gone already, when they find him in the water,

Or what was him, in the that heady flush of blood in the cool plane of the snow.
In the deep of winter, when the water of the fast-trickling brooks is still pinned-in by ice,
The Assassin listens to the uproar from the shadow--
As when every cherry tree at once in April blossoms, every guard, courtier,    
Chamberlain, rushes headlong into the dead Tyrant’s bath chamber.



XXXVIII.    [The Courtiers’ Chambers]

In some there is silence,  in others wailing, all, careful, none
Too loud in their grief or affirmation. Only the Gardener, pruning
His roses in the orangery, does nothing different, only the thorns
He blunts with a careful shear. He remembers the Empress, found dead
Between peaceful bedsheets, and even then, the degree of tumult—
South runs out of the Harem and finds the Lover, packs her trunks

With gold, silks, small saleable goods, says go, quickly, take your trunks
And a quick horse to some border village. For South thinks no one else, none
Needs die tonight in addition. And the Prince knows they think the tumult
Is him, his doing, but he is as shocked as any other, until pruning
Her loose ends, the Assassin comes knocking and uses the dead
To leverage her demands. The Dowager Empress, who knew her thorns

From her roses, planned for this before her own sickness set it thorns
Deep enough vining into her. The Vow, the droplets, several stacks of maps in trunks,
All secreted away long ago. He is only a passive agent of this plan, now dead,
Which to protect the favoured son, of which was disclosed to him exactly none.
But still, it stirs in him he is now Emperor, and there are stray branches, pruning
Needs cut. But for the moment the Prince waits, for his summiting army in the tumult

Has not been at all forgotten, but is still a day away, and this tumult
For now is more than enough. Martin cowers behind Simona, the thorns
Of her hairpins stippled out to guard their closed door, as Prospero, finally pruning
His stocking collection shoves sixteen pairs under the door gap, all his trunks,
Heavy against the handle. Demetrio and Luceth, calmer, blockade none
Of their entrances, but do have at ready swords. East, leaves the dead

Tyrant barely cold to beg the Assassin to help send out messages, stick dead
Dashes and dots into letters, as she summons her very best to the tumult,
Those skilled at abacus and ledger, the balances of things, measures, none
Of whom will hesitate to serve a new Prince, who promises perhaps incremental thorns
Lessen in the future, as the Gardener’s carefully bred roses will someday smooth trunks,
Stems that grow in better smooth; and isn’t that what it’s for, pruning?

And someday an old washerwoman will look down at her fingers pruning
At the board, in that little border town, and say she was once dead
As she walked, was once the Tyrant’s treasured lover, and with their trunks
Of soiled working-wear and worn sheets they will laugh, what odd tumult,
They will think, works its ways on the minds of the old. But no crown of thorns,
Waits for South himself, whom the Prince interrogates, finding him knowing none

Of any of the laid plans, neither discovering the missing trunks, nor the pruning
Of the Lover’s staff hastily sent home, and so none further are dead—yet.
He strides through the tumult, has the rattled servants raise the lapis pennant
From the highest dome, and waits for the Commander and the Garrison,
Small dark thorns in the white flank of the snowbank, climbing.



XXXIX.    [The Banners]

Nervously, by the time the Wayward Garrison summits, they have turned
The whole palace already out in Prince’s blue. They unfurl the banners,
Play the cornets, bugles high, and most muskets keep back their shot,
When the Lover’s missing horse is found, the stable master takes a bolt
Through the heart, and the Prince, finally attends to the Tyrant, his brother,
Whom he does not take to Hills for a grave, but strips and leaves twisting

Naked on the peaks for the vultures. Let them whet their beaks, twisting
The lengths of his flesh, the Prince thinks, let it warn the quickly-turned
Northwest and the City of Perpetual Peace, which being a brother
To the opposite of its name, might be tempted to fly the old red banners
Against his claim. Before he too, might be tempted to mount and bolt,
The Prince, thinking South too clever now to keep, but a waste to be shot,

Reconsiders his designated name and knowing the far Mandarin seas shot
Through with opportunity, sends him southward far to Quang-tcheou, where the twisting
Currents of trade all meet, and could be managed well. Yet when the bolt
Drew back on all the reserves of the treasury, and all the ledgers were turned
True, it was almost bare. Just then East brought them in flying not banners,
But pendants, bracelets, rings of drops, each one of rain’s many brother

Elements, in its own insufficient, but together, the thundercloud’s brother,
And he proclaims her the new Master of the Levies, which being shot
Through with holes and errors, required many such minds with their banners
Of inkstones and grain tallies. Who can know the many forking, twisting
Ways the Great River will take, and she did dare ask the Fates, but East turned
Out to have restored both gold and granaries, and when the speeding bolt

Of time looks back on a hundred years, they will say that every bolt
Of silk and velvet, every honey jar, every stalk of now-overflowing wheat is brother
To her ledgers’, which learned from the bees and the kitchens, turned
The Assassin’s act into the beginning of a rising loaf, leavening like the sweet shot
Of tamarind glaze on sticky buns. And by command, Prospero and Koralev twisting
The Relic’s delicate winding paths of wire, and each of the letters their cryptic banners

Signal-flags from the Before, will one-day show this Prince, those same blue banners
Flying from the metal-carriages steaming down the inlaid lines like a bolt
Of electricity, faster than the post, and the Office of Lost Wonders keeps twisting
Open sealed secrets from the dark mirrors. For now the uneasy Prince his brother
Cannot forget, clings to his Throne, the Assassin beside him whispering shot
By shot the ballgame of this new world into play, the court has turned

Into all the twisting hallways of the Palace, still in winter’s snowy banners,
Still just in his grasp turned tame like a high-bred stallion, who can bolt
At any moment from the reins, and with the Brother-Tyrant gone,
It is now all the Prince’s doing to make, and so his every order hangs tense in the air,
Every speech ringing out, a bell, a falcon, a shot.



XL.    [The Final Ball]

Dressed as a spotted tiger in the final masque, the Prince plays
Stalking, in his orange, the benevolent king of all the woodland animals.
Trimalchio sings an aria in the feathers of a pheasant, trilling runs,
Off the sides of the room, ribbons of glimmering cornflower wind
Around the arms of all the chandeliers. This they can do, they always please
By nature, these creatures of the court, and still waving his fan splayed

Of peacock feathers, Prospero helps East drizzle out caramel splayed
On tall-glassed macchiatos, while in the musicians’ pit Lucida plays
Her final act; the Prince will send her to the Academy of the Pear Tree, and like all animals
Met with their sudden freedom, she is dazzled by her own leave, asks to please
Depart at the end of the season, and together they cry for Laure, say that the wind
That howls here between the peaks will always cry for her, for because the Lover runs

She had only partial vengeance. But tonight is not the night for vengeance, and runs
Not on spite, or hate curdling. So, Koralev grins as the lights he splayed
Between the delphiniums and hydrangeas sparkle with every blow of wind,
As the blades of a little mill turn a crank of copper wire, and a bright galliard plays,
While Martin swirls around Simona, and Demetrio, kneels as if to reprise the animals
Of the masque in crawling, but then pulls a ring out of his pocket, says “please,”

Shaking, and Luceth accepts crying. Months later, when the Prince seeks to please,
Stands before a map of the Empire, and points to a small province, where the tide runs
In from the coast, and the junks and frigates and little fishing boats like animals
Scared by a sudden sound cluster together, where the Prince and Laure once splayed
Out seaweed to spell their intertwined names, where love with the cockles still plays,
This is where Luceth will be named governor. It is not just love on the wind,

As East excuses herself to sit at her desk, she has an important clock to wind,
Tomorrow she prepares a new chamberlain to replace her, in all the and-yes-please
Chaos of the kitchen. The  Assassin now clad in obligatory azure, idle plays
With the hilt of the infamous dagger, which in the open dangles on the jet-black runs
Of nocturne velvet in her dress. She is a living reminder, of the network’s splayed
Out power that keeps this Prince as current Emperor, for all human animals

Know that raw power is a knife, but not all are truthful enough animals
To admit it. And the New Emperor, knowing that she is the reason the wind
Of fate blew his way in the end, treads carefully, keeps her close, splayed
At his table like an object of silver finery. She, too, is obliged now to please,
Though only so much, because a hawk is a hawk, even in tresses with long runs,
Kept, though just barely. And when the final, slow pavane lilting plays

Out their exit, their blue-shoes splayed turned-out, those graceful animals,
Know this is how the season plays too, how the Notus wind,
Starts to come in for the spring, without saying please, over the black-
Stripped branches it lights a single green leaf,
And in its secret arpeggios, it runs and runs.



XLI.    [The Departure]

And so, with the carriages, they stand waiting on the cobbles,
Every piece of furniture draped in white-sheeted epitaph,
All the ashes scraped clean from the bright-burnished braziers,
It is the little buds and stems on the trees, the bright new leaves,
The snowmelt that comes in that the end of the season heralds.
Soon they will trade airy silks and fine cottons for these furs and velvet.

Soon they will see the curling caterpillar’s green and dewy velvet
Climb the bamboo grove in the garden of the Spring Palace, the cobbles
There already thick with moss. Waiting there, the horns of the heralds
Will be draped in new blue pennants, and as if she herself is an epitaph
The Assassin will not be allowed to take absence until the serrated leaves,
Of the cherry trees are crowned with all their blossoms, like braziers

With their starry-pollen filaments lit up yellow, though not just braziers
Now—but also electricity. Into the obsidian face of the Relic like dark velvet,
The Prince-now-Emperor stares in his carriage, wondering if like the leaves
Of tea, the cracks in the glass offer some portent, or if the little square cobbles
Of its lit-up symbols allow him a new way to mean, a kind of vanquished epitaph
For the Old Fates of the Tyrant. Can you get new Fates, like you do new heralds?

Now his sleeves are miniver, but draped in his sky-blue silk, announced by heralds,
Ringing in the coronation; they will have fans and frond wavers instead of braziers,
As if too, his summer coronation is for all of winter’s turmoil, a warm and humid epitaph,
The sun’s warm gaze will comfort him, absent Laure, who will live always in velvet,
Frozen here in the moment of her burying. The horses begin to clop the cobbles,
The long train of mules and carts, and the eunuchs laughing, all take their leaves,

But the Prince looks back, to the chimneys, the balconies, and the roof’s shingled leaves,
Of the Winter Court receding behind them.  And soon the landscape heralds
Their absence, with spotted orioles taking up in the eaves, and between the cobbles
Grass and weeds, and soon the bees will make the wildflowers their braziers,
As they venture out again humming, their small striped backs furred like velvet.
And somewhere in the copse, the white hart wanders like an overgrown epitaph.

The moon, since it travels with them to every season, needs no epitaph,
But behind the pagodas and sleeping tents, and amongst dense canopies of leaves
On warm nights in the Spring Court, it rests from adoration in the sky’s pinprick velvet.
And the wheeling constellations are themselves the new season’s heralds,
As they descend the mountain peak, the stars’ pointed bright braziers
All come out-- they go far down the switchback roads past the final cobbles.

In the last of their winter sleeves, every velvet is the loom’s own trim epitaph,
And when they return here in the high, clear air, on the cobbles of stone,
The leaves stripped clean on the black branches, they will have no need of heralds.
For they will remember these nights, these hearts, these teetering and dangerous powers—all these quick and burning braziers.