dummy

It is not yet dawn on the Isle of Campisi.

Elsewhere, Trojan women are torching the Aeneian fleet
and Penelope is still weaving
her tapestry. The horror of novelty, she says,
is that it is always so new.

In another part of Campisi, it is already noon.
Guests have arrived
without their luggage, and the eyes
in the upstairs window will not start.

Get the captain.
The captain, whose battery is dead.
It might be late,
late in Campisi, and they have banned the resetting of clocks.

He should have come in a boat.
Yesterday. Or Friday of last week.
The sorrow of that motor ‘Delay’ like pure sound—
humming, out of nowhere.
Trick from behind, Campisi without rain.

And elsewhere,
outside Campisi, a teleological experiment is underway

Centuries of long girls in their freedom
plaid skirts and gleaming stockings
on stoops      old buildings,
twitching in sunlight,
heels beside dry books

Men behind tinted windows      with their eyes
stuck to each terror in the glass      faces
glazed on afternoons of repeated rain,

expressions      for drizzle in the street
continuing in rivulets by a fence,

convictions in stepping through cracks
and answering doors with the door key.

They would have been told that a necklace-maker
stepped out from Campisi and into the night.
They would have been told that he did.
Some trouble with a clasp he made…

The geography would never add up.