Fish Hooks
A surcoat of leaves, the panoply of branches
spreading like boils, like rat infested storehouses
plagues and poxes and Khans, the skewers
of wooden fences pricking Seljuks to anger
as New Rome falters like smoke in wind,
tracing the zephyrs, conforming to the shape
the political engagement of turbidity,
a swirl of dust spun up like yarn from the hoof taps
of a thousand stampeding horsemen.
Over the plain, in the teeth of white capped hills
some horde, some golden envoy, some Tatar king
spies the walls of Muscovy lingering, low, pegged
to the soft ridge of a rolling highland, no domes,
no baptism, no Methodius, only the wooden piles for
ritual sacrifice — wine for men and flesh for women
an Animistic hypothesis, tilting quintains of
impending revelation, the spinning jabbers, the fish hooks
of an international conspiracy.
