In the second gyre of the Age of the Recluded Star:

The infected hermitage looms over exiled roofs,
An island in a sea of wide chimneys crumbling,
The heated metal edge of its the ridgepole steaming
In sleet rain falling, sifted by winds, while shadows
And doubted apparitions root themselves in water.

Three silences dowered with outside properties,
Three ghosts obedient to outside laws, each carrying
All their owned disbelief: a woman protected by a shroud
Of flinching caterpillars, her right eye is blue—

Two malign green eyes carved in the upraised hands
Of a stony saint—and a child prodigy skull-split
With ink-dark blood braided into an imperial coat.

In the gyre vaunted of the Age of the Tilpimultuk Truce:

Strife in the skittish beginning of the red-masked summer—
Several hooded, whispering devils appear on the eclipse;
They stand outside doors of imminent peril yet never enter,
While odd and discordant young frogs overrun all the land,
Crying loud and full-throated, for two hundred and
Twenty hours.

A wise and subtle advocate suffers a transformation on the
Fourth day
After the first volumes of his monumental work are published
By virtue of his office. He is led by a string of sudden and
Desperate crimes
Into brotherhood with pirates, abiding day and night in
Their ships.

Within a small empty village a white-soled girl hallucinates,
Her tears astir with joy and hope, dreaming from perilous heights,
Winged as the sunbird, in circling flight above a twice-blest realm.

In the seventh gyre of the Age of the Shielded Immaltant:

The eighth man laid upon a rough table is the largest object
Within a single niche lighted by wax candles carved
With a red crescent moon and a map of midwinter stars.
This spare form is dressed in ragged and torn cloth,
The raiment of those who are slain by their own hand.

His banner is a yellow sycamore leaf torn and caught under
The wooden haft of a knife sunk deep in a gentle heart.
His feet point towards a door low in the western wall,
Towards a destination that must be reached by discovery.

His head rests on clay bricks stamped with the edge
Of finger-rings.
His legacy bequeaths the stilled heat and light of day,
In four mismatched jars, to forty-four thousand children.

In the dialected gyre of the Age of the Yequirthed Crisis:

Three sons and a daughter of a northern king,
Exiled in silence—
Nothing known of their unexplained crime and shame—
Are harassed by the fearsome army of the king’s niece,
A warrior much renowned for her great malice, cruelty of will,
And the thick veil shrouding her forehead and left eye.

Pity her, this gnawed figure of strange vibrant power
Wrapt in clouds of catastrophe half like blood,
Half like fire, forever in the shadow of her white brother,
Who died at ten years, his tongue thickened with poison.

By cause and reason of pain, and by reason of guilt,
She will endure the continuous suffering of one accursed;
Only to strangers in battle does she ever seem fortunate.

In the fourth gyre of the Age of the Sinquel Memorial:

An interpretation of a wild dream half-remembered:
The stones of the pit cast out of your stripped grave
Will be trodden under foot by your foolish beloved,
Who will emerge from middle bones and other books,
Waiting for the sky to break over lost deserts, lost islands.

Your husband’s spirit-stirring drums will speak fear
To a god in a crest of birch-trees on a gray-clouded rock.
He brings forth the roaring of the seawall taken down,
Decimating a becalmed population steadfast in its refusal.

All those who have come before will ascend soundlessly
Upon the abdomen’s third mute breath. Thus cleansed
And lightened, they fly to the Dome of Intermittency.

In the clauted (cleated?) gyre of the Age of the Good Remainder:

After feigning death, the secondary wife of the white
Moth pharaoh
Provides part of the key to unlock the wooden shrine
Of the mysterious occupant of the Dessoae tomb,
The faceless hero with a battered limestone head
Sheathed in pearls, his skull pierced with a gold arrow.

The noble face on the unstained coffin had been broken
In the notorious century following its discovery,
Needlessly mutilated by the hostile scrutiny of scholars
Seeking clues without the holy quality of mercy.

Forty minutes before an unequalled storm of rain and fire,
Earthquakes and gravity halted the discredited work;
Two upper spans of majestic high-ceilinged rooms
Were obliterated.

In the fifth gyre of the Age of the Middle Gohlguanarchy:

A bone-linked pair of poets die without heirs in year 13.
Their unrhymed words strike bronze upon a secret chamber
Beneath a vacant labyrinth: two royal monuments
Carved into the skull shape of mummified fetuses
With four miniature faces of goat, ram, boar, stag.

The penitent coward who was never a killer,
A conqueror, or a liberator, finds himself far from his goal.
He becomes the blackskin companion of a hired archaeologist
Whose knowledge of his monstrous subject is unique.

They unearth the abandoned book of a heretic coregent;
This burned and scratched object of temporal power
Seizes weak minds with dreamless sleep and early death.

In the hooded gyre of the Age of the Bunin Kings:

First introduced under obscure names and disguises,
The Fool with a narrow forehead and one subdued eye,
Cloaked within a foxskin hood with tail dangling,
Will confound the throned monarch wrapt in pease-straw,
Whose cold wounded hand grasps two fatal aspects.

At the hastened hour of the forthcoming Sun,
Malice in the blood whips the summer sea high.
With all dread ramifications of Agot’s piteous error,
Floodwaters shatter the immense vault of the quarry fortress.

The burning children of Anterrabae and Shukimanu
Walk in the master’s footsteps, house to house,
Village to village, clothed in unapproachable light.

In the itinerant gyre of the Age of the Sinquel Memorial:

The clouded child marked with royal wounds and
Grievous wonder,
Born in subdued circumstances to a wedded pair of captains
During the ice-locked border-war between winter nations,
Will unshaken bear the assault of glorious engines,
Their rude throated noises become his summer lullabies.

When twelve years older, the boy will meet with much
Injustice;
All quality, pride and circumstance becomes counterfeit.
The narrow line of ambition fails with unlucky deeds;
Faith nailed down hard to a well-worn place can yet be lost.

In solitude, with tranquil mind, fate recovers the gentle skill
Of three silent virtues felt along the heart of the man,
Immortal richness greater than the tribute of all his tribe.

In the gyre eclipsed of the Shielded Immaltant:

The congregated powers of heaven’s antique empire,
Built on eldest faith, tainted by cruelty, stained by blood,
Will make garden cities into a lampless unpeopled world
Lightened by one alone, whose fierce reproach and
Reluctant prayer
Hurls up a tinge of gray in the void world.

Thirty witnesses will return, with thirty infants,
Nameless vagrant dwellers in houseless woods
Walled with witchcraft and flower-inwoven jasper,
Green to the very door of the long absence.

Seven common names of the unextinguished fire,
Stamped onto the frame of twelve windows in one form,
Usurp the codex vigilans of the unremembered throne.