I’ll be your mirror, the book your Imaginary
in the aftermath, in the fields of that future
less vivid where human action will be–yet–alive
to becoming the kind of revolutionary grace
we’re trying for, contra epic, contra the hell-yellow
searing––the dogs are barking now, the dogs a pack
of maximum of decibels––of the body’s openness
to sound turned into a science of infliction––months of it,
that long manufactured night, the sentence––and the deeper
this descent takes us––gold, gold, silver, sea-dark, bronze,
all warwear pearl….It’s not “The Dying Gaul” inside
their barking, it’s a rack, “a phantasmagoria [of sound]
of the historical body, [all war-loud-torn, loudest pitch ever,
the cities, the bodies gone therein] and the body-in-history,”
your body (o vessel of the “I”) through which The Overwhelm,
The Lion Who Multiplies Until All Else Is Eclipsed
eclipses you, or swallows you, or in the brutal fact of the prison
torture room you become nothing but absolute
vulnerability––“ragged” the poem wanted to say, but it’s total
this annulment of your human person, the Sphinx’s meaning, its mark.

Originally published in White Wall Review 40 (2016)