Their tangled angles do not end with me: for swallows
to twist so fast! … yet it was blue
almost to my nose, where my breath leapt
from the invisible to that visible they swept
under; a fur of white stalking east; and soon, a glow
where the majesticalest hand merely faltered. Proof follows,

or sound means nothing. It’s our eyes our mind follows
unrelenting, unimpeachable. Sound of: he swept
the asphalt of bones; he swept the porch of blue;
he with his left toe unstuck forgotten swallows
which we then felt free to finish; he, shambling, leapt
out of earshot, a comet; in that air our coal throats glowed.

This appetite for memory may be, like love’s first glow,
general, granted; and in that nebulous swallow
of what-comes-next we find our votive sky swept
of human sound but not of human motion: it follows
that within each eye is an articulate blue
from which, as is happening now, a red thought leapt

to set complexity: synthesis of that white-lipped
horizon and the one I now, yes, see. And what do I, here, hear? Fellows
jostling nearer to the speaker, wine-splits swallowed,
out of a practiced-on cello an intricate glow
like a late day at the beach with closed eyes swept
by—what?—tears? Sea-spray? A mute blue

descending on the backs of gulls, as this blue
descends (as repetition builds to a glow,
gaussian, resolving more than is) to follow
the nearness of my eyes’ one curve, to leap,
an entirety, from the butane backs of two swallows
as they in-curve and outdo us, soundless and swept

of the shagbark squalor of thought? What adze swept
clean our scholar’s thought of intent, of sound leapt
in risen (motion!) motion to perfection, to a glow
in the ear, to the intricatest possession of blue,
wholly wrung, from which this divine blue must have followed?
What sound’s sound first blue-backed these bare barn swallows?

Whatever that ever was, my mind swallowed its blue
as that blue thought leapt, convinced, into the sound I sight: upswept
by its own glow, the mind, such as it is, can only follow.