VI. L'Amoureux

VI. L’Amoureux

The toughness of jade—Put to work by early civilizations for axes,
Hammers—Its bearers braced their feeble legs from being sent
Spinning, from returning with a battered steel anvil and unflaked nephrite—
Recognize what force the labor requires, how a network of ferrous iron
Imparts the green color—Abraded until it conforms to swirled molds of the sky.
That it was only the question of who should make the sacrifice—

To match what passes between subducting slab and mantle, our sacrifices
Rise most steadily above the present abyss—Points of fire, the spreading axes,
A geochemical signature becoming stronger near the volcanic front. The sky
Portends a storm—A cardinal mistake of photography is having the Sun behind, to send
Up atmospheres after receiving its facets from fucus burned to ash—Dissolved iron
Rakes in the seawater, where a fabled kingfisher foams the nest—Consider nephrite,

Where a desert wind lashes—This mote of buried ocean, is it nephrite,
Or jadeite? So much worse for the attuned eye, for so many sacrificed
Steel hacksaw blades cannot reasonably apprehend it. Perhaps the iron
Blood—Pierced at brief intervals, or collecting in two fingers of bathwater—Forms axes
Likely at the disposal of anyone, for the lack of seductive descriptions, to send
Up a rectification of its laws—Similarly, a voiced impatience cuts the sky

Just as a patient master would with jade, a bowstring, abrasives—This inner sky
Submitted as the gap  this missive filled; formerly tinged ultramarine, is nephrite
And jadeite, both of which are impervious to mallet strikes—And the send away
Message that still affects us deeply at the present time, is a consumed sacrifice—
Adjudged to be twinges of water deficit—A contaminant without which these axes
Would doubt their original function—Redeemed flecks of transition metals—Iron,

Being the major constituent—Pigments the jade, the blood, if to endow iron-
Wrought, seemingly plastic, enterprises with the sacred—Pausing before the sky’s
Muted bluster with intervening depressions, our quarrels are exampled nowhere but axes
Shattered on jade bedrock—This is a mortal embrace, reborn again from nephrite

Clenched in the upper phase diagrams of Earth’s interior, where all matter sacrifices
The cherished dreams of disintegration—Deriving strength from refusal, we send

Out flares from our respective trenches, yet these generative mysteries sent out
Consistently disown their personal antecedents—Sweeping the foliage for iron

Filings in pyroclastic mountains of jade—Regions less susceptible to these sacrifices

Are instinctively rejected—No strangers to fire, without the excessive friction of sky
Fall, these intransigent others warp between two oceanic plates, cooling to nephrite—

The bedrock of our histories has a sealed presence. You will say: the matrix absorbs all axe

Blows—These sent replies proliferate unripe flavors; the figures, if stunned by axes,
Ignore all else to strike for nephrite—A farsighted dream transits geological time with your iron

Fixing oxygen—The renal depot throngs the body; careful, not to sacrifice love for skylines.