In this moment I notice the snow falling out over Carthaginian boulevards,
and a lot of things come back to me, first in shards
and then in my empty glass; and I realize the last call came
and went like lightning, that the last train
left here hours ago, that the plows won’t be here ’til morningstar.
And now the music we’d loved and moved to no
longer is, has changed, and the lights come down like stars;
and we awake to find ourselves widowed.

I recall her in those days, a temptress of the kind
that only Carthage can conjure: just kind
enough to garner approval, just loose enough to promise,
and then you find yourself (as I did)
waking in your own bed, she in hers, after
a lovely evening when she’d sultrily excused her
self to you
and you
both left alone
to furtively return
to your own rooms alone.

All this in Carthage, cyclical city of vices, each
one conjured from a book whose spine had cracked in eons past, the sheets
of yellowed entries seen in countless times:
the steel-laced catalogue of our only
tradition. One can find in Carthage: dice
for throwing, reset, and the money
returned; mirrors tucked in every corner of the galleries
Los in fluorescence; people of sex who will give you a glance;
the bars whose tenders will give you a chance
to order cold drinks and with milligram measures deliver; and safe
in the corners enough other bodies to light up the usual. The place
known as Carthage will reel you in
and as quickly you freeze in the sins of the usual magic.

Now I awake, having intended to be
somewhere else — the snowfall on Carthage’s streets,
and an empty feeding trough my solitary glory.
I have missed nativity.

–Here is where our story, protestant, ends. But the bar door
jingles, and in come some men who look to be of a poor
repute, three Easterners gussied in gold and turbans,
rigid in number and bearing, holstering things of some sort,
shrouded in calculations.
“Last call has been called,” called the barman. They sit.
“Which way is the West?” they ask, and I tell them; it
comes easily. They thank me; and now for my first true
adventure, asking them, “Who are you?”
“We are sorcerers. Magic has failed us.” One thing leads
to another. We
reenter the ankle-deep
wilderness made of our own remaking.
Here, they say, He had come but a few days before.

He has given a star, and we hasten, hasten our pacing,
the Sixth, the Morning, of Morningstar approaching;
as we journey through lands of the falling sun, I feel within
my own heart the first of a baby’s kicks.

I find this way of tracking time so much more sensible and easy than the “30 days hath September” Julian/Gregorian Calendar – so easy, in fact, that after a bit of orientation you can keep track of this calendar alongside the Gregorian Calendar with ease; and it’s much more elegant. I’m doing so in private use while, of course, abiding by the Gregorian demands of the public square. No insult is meant to St. Gregory, nor to the monumental accomplishment of Christendom that this calendar (and what it represents) embodies; but the Gregorian Calendar is full of Italian accretions that render it topsy-turvy and horribly inelegant. My simpler calendar is a “Part 2” of sorts to the invention of my own cursive alphabet … neither of which I have any illusions about.

Basically, the year is divided into seven segments, with seven weeks each. There is an eighth segment at the end (a doxology of sorts) that has three weeks, followed by one big hinge day (which I call “the Great Amen”) – December 31 – which ends the year and kicks off the new year. The year numbering follows the Anno Domini standard. To account for the Leap Year, every four years (exactly as in the Gregorian Calendar) there is an extra day added to the second week of the second segment of the year (in which February 28 falls).

The seven “normal” segments (“temporibus” in the plural; “tempus” in the singular) are named after the first seven hours of the traditional Roman Liturgy of the Hours: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, and Vespers. The user could rename them after anything so desired, really. Matins runs from January 1st through February 18; Lauds runs until April 8th; Prime runs until May 27th; Terce runs until July 15th; Sext runs until September 2nd; None runs until October 21; and Vespers runs until December 9th.

Each of these segments has the same seven weeks, in order: Morningstar, Dawnbreak, Morning’s Bud, Sun’s Height, Workharvest, Duskfall, and Moon’s Watch.

Each of these weeks (other than the Leap Year exception noted above) has seven days, which can be enumerated as “the first of” and “the second of” (e.g. the First Day of the Dawnbreak of Lauds, 2017). Easy enough.

If one wishes to be more elegant, the days can be imagined as, for example (in order): the Dawnbreak of Lauds (1st day of the week called Dawnbreak in the tempus of Lauds), the Second of the Dawnbreak of Lauds (2nd day of the week), … the Sixth of the Dawnbreak of Lauds (6th day of the week), the Eve of Morning’s Bud (the 7th day of the week). Additionally, the last day of a tempus could be called “the Eve of [next tempus, e.g. Prime]”, and the first day of a tempus could simply take the name of the tempus (e.g. “Prime, 2015”). This is all very complicated and unnecessary, really, but for the person who learns the calendar well it adds a little elegant flourish.

The final, odd segment is named Compline (again, after the last of the traditional Roman hours). It is three weeks long, with each week named (you guessed it): The Father, The Son, The Holy Spirit. December 31st is “the Great Amen”. Then it all begins again.

Again, regarding Leap Years, an eighth day is added to the Dawnbreak of Lauds.

A visual calendar can be helpful for those who wish to use this calendar and need to get used to its sunrise and sunset. Once immersed, the user will find that this calendar has a natural rhythm to it that comes intuitively.

-a

Somewhere across the Tiber
in the Jewish district a tavern
bubbles up the olive
oil, as we do live.

Here oh truly listen to the Sybil Tibertine:
The man from Judea
will pour to the north. From Judea
will enter the City. From Judea
divinity, hordes, Via Reman.

2
Over those newer cobblestones past
Santa Croce, after the canon blast
and stone’s throw to the U-turn sits
a coffee bar wherein
a grasping sybil purrs
of what in crimsoned hair she sees
for me with dab-on nails her
augurs and interpreters.

If she could stand it, I would say we’re people here, that she
isn’t an object, that she needn’t be; her grandpa sleeved
the square and cornerstone, so she’d rather be
the object of cicada songs. It sells the coffee,
she would read and agree.

3
Who
under Ponte
Emanuelle
Due
blundered and sunk
his boat? The guppies or at least the gulls
would thank you.

Who of our mind would chide
that skipper for not being grateful?
Hide has its plans, and in humanity’s
skin of the peel of the Ancient Unpleasantness, ever we
sweat in unmaking and can’t see
the rudder amid the remaking.

How lonely the city. It’s lonely,
but here come those creaking encenturied millstones we
never did see, ever seeing, there plumbing
Jerusalem truly,

where
boat turns to marble’s shade,
home to the perchers, through excrement made
a fixture forever and ever.

4
These damn Christians,
she said to Diocletian.
Demons fleeing. Who was she,
the other she,
who put her small hand
to her servant
head?

Red on the wall, and
reverse to the quarry near Trajan’s
boast, dirt of police cones,
the pile of old cobblestones.
Orange tape enshrining;
they may gut
the cartwheels, but
we know that they all fit together. Dead
sybils divining.

5
Ink spills on Peter in Chains–
not the chains per se
(that waits for later). It’s the Statue
at three o’clock made for the Tomb
of they thirst for: the Vulgate Bane!
Debate, they say.
To these paupers unknown, while he waits,
Paul’s spirit fills
up to the brim at the sight
of the idols.
Now it’s only a matter of time
though for now he waits.

Twelve horns of light call from somewhere northwest of St. Peter’s;
outside his gates shines the City in Piazza del Populo;
twelve and two, two and twelve, always and everywhere, here
warred out, saints and the other show:
Aurea, Lucia, and others at four o’clock, all contra mundo.

As armies the mass of the Chinese pour in
armed with
cameras, through
the pores in our churches and through and through.
Somewhere shrieks off of the porphyrry circles the notes
of a self-spoken prophet’s dream: “What if the camera really do take your soul?
Oh no!”

6
The Torso blossoms fuller in its current disrepair than
the ocean of assembly-lined spaghetti straps worn from those tanned
shoulders any day. Who’d’ve thought of the marble
as fuller, the model the farcical?

Summer in Roma: the murderous pinecone striking my friend on the
head to the sound of cicadas — the real, however, more than the
old house of the pinecone stone
promising who knows what from its falling thrones.

Temptations on temptations to grow bored;
vices piled high on all dull ones, bruises from nursing whore–
all this a cry for half a moment’s pleasure and eternal freezing
in the Everlasting City,
with its endless fountains, not the least
of which the Three
where truth-borne ecstasy went bouncing, bouncing, bouncing.

7
The man of Judea came a warhorse in form
of the girl. To her was sworn
all that Fourth Kingdom. Her eye to the right and its orbit, dry mystery,
yet this we know: she
was quite small and strode braver
than the opposing city’s own soldiers;
and she in the claws
of that beast
sawed
off its decimal horns;
and her agony stood in triumphal relief.

A mystery, note — not an enigma — the mustard seed
under the altar, grist cracking
the millstone, the birds not in roost yet but flocking,
and He on the throne reposed marching. All of it
ever arriving. For Nero may sit
uncontested and sybils foretell for him Decius,
but come Diocletian, and no one can tell of our Agnes,
small in the feet, laughing, turning
the city on the Keys.

-a

My ancestor’s George? I may never know certainly, but we do know
he marched out of Nashville to help out; and I’d come to know
there as his home long after the day I’d resigned
my desire to leave his old stomping grounds. I’d
thought of marching to Boston and then spied
the Arcade on 5th and there realized
that all I’d been missing was right
here, if only I’d known
of it. Then some years later I’d come to know
Nashville as George Campbell’s home:
the fates aft the out of control, but I’m happy
with how it’s all turned out.

Yorkshire one harbor of origin, and I cheer for Leeds; I turn out
both palms to the tides below piers of my own genealogy,
behind every synapse a mystery.

Childress: the orphan or landlord? We all are;
humanity: height of the universe, scar
full of scum in the dusk light, both
at the same time, at same time the smallest and most.

Childress, orphan and landlord. Helper.
Not known but never forgotten.

-r

Sarah Childress
would marry James Polk. They said of her
“wealthy” and “pretty” and “smart”; and she turned
up as well as supportive and childless.
As her name would suggest
she ended with Marshall as son
and then Jetton, the orphan.

-r

1
The surname I’m given speaks
density;
it contains in its bosom the truth like a crystal
shard, holding
and therefore withholding
and yet so revealing to piercing eyes, mortar, or pestle
a facet of grandiose irony
of everyone’s story.

Of The Orphanage
(landlord or tenant? Unspecified.
Eventually both over either) devours all Charle-magne‘s
line in the wild distillation of my
mom and dad’s wedding.
Childhuhrs:
Carolingian tapestries making way for
the envied Red Cross, double-thick on our
heraldry only discovering afterward
the coal-faced belt-buckle, the sweat hand, and that etymological
humor.

No motto.
Our history
in lists upon unwritten lists of the valiantly second-desk glories
and chests of forgotten catastrophes.
Always
the faithful to someone or something else, always
beside the sung hero;
ever the Teslaesque, ever unpublished, the shepherd’s heart next-door to repo
man.
Always
and ever the second-chair; always
a helping hand.

-r

– Chesterton, from his Heretics

Dear “Salt-tooth”,
Frankly we for one don’t give a damn
about your preferences
as they relate to your complete ontology; we’re
each disordered
here and there,
and have the cavities to prove it.
What I care the most and first about is:
when did you become a tooth; that is
to say, how is it you have given
up on being human?
What’s your name, for starters? Surely there is more to you
than what your appetites would lean you into.
Don’t leave one sugared crate behind
and make another of the very same kind.

-r