Reading The Illiad The sons of the sons of the sons go on fighting the sons of the sons of other sons or even the same sons and it is forever and it is now in these lines with their long vowels we will only hear in echoes in the names we learned as children for cartoonish gods and tender parts of our own anatomy—a rubbery tug in back of the ankle— but still the language surviving improbably down these thousands of years to this early spring morning with some of its trees slipping new leaves through light wind and the bare locust still black and unmoving as the Styx, as the river of absence. And the killing surviving within that unmoving river of language we enter at any point to find the filthy darkness cowling across an almost anonymous pair of eyes, the bronze armor leadening to earth as though death entered us first as speech, as though it were given to us at birth with these signs we cluster out of the air or trace so carefully over ruled lines. So that it lives in us as a precision or practice, with the clouded exactness of memory, and we grow toward it as if the river should flow to its source, or as when a tree, some giant fir, falls on a mountainside after a blizzard has fastened over its branches—the wind grinds it until the great roots start to shiver—and the snow once weighting the branches resurrects in a cloud that seconds the storm, that bodies the air. Sleep Disorder The edges filling in like a city that’s sinking, a city that’s been lost to its own element and has found another, less hospitable but not out of the question. And when the doctor shone the spectrum directly into my eye I could see the capillaries forking lightning about the retina, shredding up the blood sky. For days the images reversing themselves back there had been puckering away from the center like spacetime sinkholing …
