do not ask
how, pale
as I, under the pine
ginestra blossoms
into the dark thicket
of your chemical rhythms

when
on the raw shore, as if
smoke had darkened
the green walls of the pines
you said bore the snow,

that you said were symbols
of the enduring,
your face was heirophantic,

you wrote
a living O
on me, entered the drift
of the dead in me

and edged
their liberty with the cinders of Byzantium—
rumbling under the slashing
eagle's wing that masks

those crimson men with faces
and those crimson men with none