FLOOR  PLAN JOURNAL

 

              Helots

 

When witchinghour engines’d rattle our
prefab quondam houses, searchlights in the
lotic dark before the sharpening woods’
enisling shiver in response the stars
prepense, we knew we’d wake an hour early,
reaped corn scintillae in the dawn above
the leaves’ hegira from wherever you
might look, streetlights against a sun uncapsized,
the summer’s cacoethes gone a sudden.
You’d come to me before your cachalots
arrived to drive you to highschool and give
the needs they’d soon replenish (ever cuffed
our sleeves) as quoins dehisced and dams undammed
in Helot’s Ensile (replaced a lustrum
down by Hell’s Islands much the worse). I’d see
the train in your eyes and you in mine and
we’d only touch where a thousand angels stood
dumb to how great the leaves sounded as
they involuted, how whispers must soon rattle.