The town has grown here, angular
and white on its hill pelted
with thickets, in the passage
of a darkness; the houses, two-ranked,
peristyle of morning’s long shade
a thing of nature, made
deviously in all the black
filled hollows of its time, its
history of acts and briars.
It rose up with the first
singing and light to surprise
its dreamers. Among declivities
and groves of the inert hill,
channeled and splined by the
seasonal escapade of streams,
where its graves and garbage
choke the ravines, old shoes
in a milling of stones commemorate
the town laid waste. By morning’s
instantaneous contrivance, mottled
shade and light, the day upholds
carved orange lilies in a calm
dreamers no longer dream but know.