RELICS
Let every one answer! let those who sleep be waked! let none evade!
“Respondez! Respondez!” —Walt Whitman
In this particular circumstance of light—
August humidity drowning breath—
imagine first flight through a grove of English
walnut trees by gray moths that will never eat.
And the succor of stubble corn,
an invisibility of egrets, patience on a sandbar,
And recall Sainte-Chapelle, once Palace of Kings,
used as a storehouse for flour by the revolutionists,
the Passion of Christ and the Crown of Thorns
melted down by the mob,
tussock moth caterpillars
devouring their milkweed nursery.
You anticipate this season never ending
just as you expected the same
prior to ice cleaving to rock face,
before ice cleaved from rock face.
Moths will not gather in daylight
nor butterflies color our nights.
Those are a robot’s future calamities.
I’ll settle for the couch not speaking
of what it knows:
that Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat is anchored
along the wall of Rue Férou. That the language
of beavers can be fathomed only underwater.
Now that divine right has regained its medieval cachet,
now that kidnapped infants are held in tender care facilities—
like summer camp—
except for the cages and barbed wire,
the muffled roar heard is the sound
of a hurricane losing intensity
after landfall. And after that,
silence, then the rain.
Howard Faerstein’s newest collection, Googootz and Other Poems, published by Press 53, came out in 2018. His first book, Dreaming of the Rain in Brooklyn, was published in 2013. His work can be found in numerous journals including Great River Review, Nimrod, CutThroat, Rattle, upstreet, Mudfish and online in Gris-Gris, Peacock Journal, and Connotation. He is Associate Poetry Editor of CutThroat, A Journal of the Arts. After living in Brooklyn for fifty years, he now lives in Florence, Massachusetts.