1. DISINTERMENT OF SFANOMOË

Nothing has been said
The empty hand is open
Negation is determination
The twin who dies first holds a mirror

How many generations pass away
Casting stones at a stone
Venus in cancer
Chained among the anthropophagi

Petra genetrix
Rock-bound spring that fed the brothers with nectar
The world removed reveals the stone

Broken ratiocination that murders to dissect
Living flesh buried within the tomb of signs
In the beginning was the deed

Self-devouring mantis
Hanged and gutted in your spangled mind
The world falls apart into facts
The facts fall apart


2. ONLY CASTLES BURNING

The arch never sleeps
Who of us would not be glad to lift the veil?
Built of nothing but solitary thought,
a structure rises precipitously upward

Thersites born again as ape or egg
The golden mind of Gracchus turned to lead
In the shadow of a great ring
This ain’t a dream anymore, it’s the real thing

Horse dung in white wine
Blood with the odor of violets
The secret Wotan taught his son
Did one wear a watch in the tomb?

In the distance, an old phoenix rises
Can entropy be decreased?
The hunter paused, the wolf in chase
It’s only castles burning


3. THE CRYSTALS DISINTEGRATE

You cannot invent the shape of a stone
You seek it like a dream, you become its prey
Artificial barbarian attains aphasia
White ants have destroyed his chess-playing machine

Cutting in pieces the brain of a jaguar
Holofernes’ head transformed into a tray of fruit
The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned

Discord resolves discord
Thorn removes thorn
The crystals disintegrate
and a vegetation springs forth


4. ZWEISIEDLER

(Instrumental)


5. FAUSTA IN THE THIRD HEAVEN

Your father, your brother, Crispus, now this
Oh Fausta, are you in the third heaven?
In the body or not? Eusebius knows

Were you there on that hill
When the virgin-born king became Quirinus?
Now Remus the brother in Christ returns

As Zeus raped Leda, Christ rapes the world
Beneath the temple of mirrors, a flower is hidden

DidI see you smiling
In the ruins of the Serapeum?
In hoc signo vinces
We know the lion by its claw

After the council of Nicaea,
Constantine boiled Fausta alive
In Rembrandt’s Rape of Proserpina,
there is a sky behind the sky


6. KILLING A SWORD

Everything visible is empty
A ruin which represents another ruin
Vermilion like the throat of dawn
I am particularly interested in forgeries

Come, lash back with tail, endure thy own scourging
From utter abhorrence of love
I measured the shadow cast by the mirror
That old and evil plumage happily brought to earth

Seawater and vomit
Fresh blood dabbling the face of the ground
Crying the neck
Killing a sword


7. SEMA

(Instrumental)


8. PHILOCTETES

I guess I’ll call it sickness gone
You remember - my ankle’s stinking wound
The two-portaled cave and dichroic cup
The work of a sorry craftsman

As Milton descended
Perpendicular, swift as thought,
Negation’s serpent flew
Time’s arrow loosed from a silver bow

Foully cast upon this solitude
To live without deliverance
Bewildered by each want as it rises
In this sick estate on Lemnos’ cape

I put myself into hiding
Like the corpse of a beast
The shadow of a vapor
In this narrow house, free from desire

There are three Heracles - the god, the shade,
the stranger from Colonia Commodiana
Who in this mirror is calling
To commit an old bow to new war

To harrow Ilion
Within the hylic void
Within October’s horse
Within the weaver’s womb

But now my friends you’re here
Like sunlight following sleep
As did Kronos’ children
All that proceeds returns

The coming night unweaves the work of day
Ten years of pain, ten years of homecoming
The underearth is past, the horizon future
The sea like a mirror shaking


9. MERE

(Instrumental)


10. HESPERUS IS PHOSPHORUS

Frame
Tapestry
Frame

Colonnade
Bas-relief
Colonnade

Casket
Cameo
Casket

Peace
War

Truth
Lies

Dionysus