XI. L’ouvrière [de la onziéme heure]

XI. L’ouvrière [de la onziéme heure] 

Appearing at the eleventh hour, another innumerate of Mont-Valérien’s
Replenished canteens of those who would immure her (1558); their lime
Mortar amended slips gathered for angel’s water—Three gibbets adjusted
Calvary there—Autoglyphs of Jesuit New World Assumption schools whose infinite
Regress, chosen by de Gaulle (1942), is the two-barred cross in brickwork—
For all genocides uttered by a dice roll; she is uncalled, and declares herself, Esther—

Pronounced from a night window, starred Adiyaman; Hamedan—The latter, Esther’s
Concealment by the adopted delivered on dreams of cataracts—Fortress Mont-Valérien’s
21st of February listings, of birth dates, the current century’s bonded brickwork—
Eleven years, Aragon’s red poster (1955) is already fossilized buffer, burnt chalk lines; withered lime
Glazed vehicles for the ceremony’s bloodstain; orbits for which our terrestrial year is no adequate measure adjusted
For the sine of latitude, a wire’s reinstating force—There, a pendulum fixed to distant masses of this infinite

Universe—The Panthéon’s custody of what’s left of two Manouchians, the displaced and outlawed for infinite
Remembrance in lyrics; Auden’s strophic yesterdays and to-morrows of Spain (1937)—Esther’s
Appointment is bittersweet; the suppliant exhibited—Another age’s civic involvement adjusts
Dregs of Vichy regime Communists, and those remaindered by Vel d’Hiv (1942) to haunt the streets, then Mont-Valérien—
There were twenty-three of them when the guns flowered, as on lapels, on low-profile brickwork
Signs before which policemen ask the passengers to uncover their hair—Slaked lime

Of scrupled squadrons; a Manouchian woman conveyed on her birthday (10 May 1944) to a lime
Washed cell in Stuttgart for beheading—When a leading left foot lifts off the curbstone into the infinite
Red Sea shelf breaking a ground of photo medallions (1943)—Fixed blades of surgeonfish, of budding brickwork,
Queneau’s entropic Les Ziaux (1943), occupied with Élie Lascaux’s Limousin fern allies—Esther’s
Tribe of leftist swordsmen and archers wrong-footing opponents; she is inscrolled with mineral salts adjusted
To captivity, the banquet’s redoubt—Resistant lives, a hair’s breadth in a chapel at Mont Valérien—

Their legends cycled off after a tombola of Auden’s birth, 21 February, where Mont-Valérien’s

Repaired terrorists confer an even deeper discount of the Armenian, Algerian genocides—Lime

Strewn on the bodies, the airbase tarmac of diplomatic agreements and retail relations, of adjusted

Factions of nation states—No, history to the defeated is a deception; the king wiped his mouth an infinite

Expanse of six years—For Esther, for those permanently encamped as refugees, in the impotent fusillades of mire-worked 

Settlements—After a long night, here is a diaspora’s new partitions, reversed privations—Esther’s

Homeland, a runaway pulsar’s hindrance of light filaments on your bare shoulders—Esther

Spells his name until the root her of tongue ached; a miscarriage her variant of abasement to an Agagite—Mont-Valérien’s       

Indicter, who slit his throat after the Dreyfus forgery (1898), whose largest 16-star brickwork

Fortification became the builders’ conscience, the vault—How did I not know the script, permeable as lime mortar,

Shifted as I made my way up here—The list only lengthens, the flat ephemeral pamphlet adjusts

Data on customers, with birthday coincidence after the 13th of Adar—Your penumbra of sun exposure, infinite

To my understanding, is a Queneau base sonnet for infinite combinations—Esther unhinged her voice
After the price, adjusted for inflation, had been paid, as for Mont-Valérien, Pyongyang’s assumption of emigrants—

With brickwork at our backs, starred lichen, the night fuming the last shared cigarette of intense black limes—