Music’s Empire (1997?)

On a hazy summer day
musak shook walls. When he paced,
sound allowed him not to think, or relaxed him,
engulfing embryonic thoughts
about foundations: water seeped through walls
and cracked them, pooled on concrete,
levitated carpet, dropped it in a mildew bed.
The cesspool, its rim edged by the emerald
of tender grass, had clogged, the guest-room
cum tool-shed rustled with swallows -- just as pigeons
inhabit rotundas of dying gods. Fisher-cats
vampirized the fowl. Music drowned
the attenuated crack of the house, the sound
of stars collapsing, ruptures in the sun’s corona
for which humans haven’t ears.
A hairline fracture
down the living-room wall betrayed it–
foreclosure that spackle, tape or paint
could not dam up, reverse.

But how the bees orbited the goldenrod that summer,
how meadows buzzed, the sacs of milkweed ruptured.