Shapes in the Salt Grass

That haunted Paradise, spectral on all sides.
The wash of a river advancing over the fields.
Steadying the hillside, a great hand of fog.

Angels fall like ashes
over a wasteland of daffodils. Nothing appears on the horizon
but a gash in the sky that looks like the sun.
A rook repeats its chips of glass
between the unknown tongues.

Perhaps the memory of an old hole
dynamited in an antique chest
before the last purposes found rest
remains, a stain in the vestibule,
a piece of starlight folded like paper
and pressed between two fingers like an end of thread.
But the mantra of remembering goes quietly flat.

Where are you, landscape that cradled me?
Are you nowhere, a frame of flat designs
in a corner of a thalamus,
a deception, a miracle, an endlessly ruminating cud,
a hovel in lilacs, a castle in flames,
a spoonful of mud, the majesty of a god?