XLI. An Army of Yellow Horses

In the ladder gyre of the Age of Eichenblon's Crater:

One scanty quarrel wakens an army of yellow horses
While the flat ghosts of thirty slain captives unfold
Between the furrowed skin of orphaned wealth.
One known detail of a buried inmate's lost promise
Illuminates the harmony between earth and sheaf.

The tradition of giving shelter to the fugitive
Aids the aged deity followed by unarmed guardians.
False alliances will guide the hidden rescuers
Along a journey of avoidance and encounter.

Alone in a boat without oars, a swimmer
Carries to his ship a round portion of felt
Chased with the fourth eye of chaos repeated.

XL. The Cinct Generations

In the gyre eclipsed of the Age of the Good Remainder:

Technological obsessions rule the cinct generations
While four times turns the cycle of Nousparltut.
When elections filled with distortion and fanaticism
Bring fatal strategies as incessant as monsoon rains,
A natal chart is drawn for a second birth in winter.

Grassroot forces hide three counterspies within the house
Marked by a golden thorn under spirituous water
And by the instalment of pierced casements uplifted
Over laments of oceangoing brides written in drawn wire.

The three are unreliably known, and laughingly,
As the Invertebrate, the Witness, and the Libertine,
In a common language of unlicensed supplicants.

XXXIX. In orchards rough-handled by hope

In the hooded gyre of the Age of Eichenblon's Crater:

Descendants of Azargalatzin, known as the Pryoglau,
Court, love and marry like the native bees
Who overwinter in hollow stems of bamboo,
And house their families behind walls of mud
In orchards rough-handled by the hopes of spring.

A compass wall separates the northernmost hotels
From the city divided into schools and embassies,
Where nomenclature and mansions are never remade.
A boundary tower is a major landmark of atonement.

A nation of faith is slow to regenerate after plague and fire;
Treaties are secret and documents of science are censored.
A polyglot violation of sentiment and status brings upheaval.

XXXVIII. The bandaged cardinal

In the third gyre of the Age of the Nascent Vaunthald:

Poisoned battalions ride as if on the ocean, awed by cold,
Suffering optical storms of transparent shadows
Magnified by the fierce temper of galling suns.
This sleep of opiates stretches its illusion on all sides,
No distant landmark breaks the monotony of its fragile glory.

The bandaged cardinal, born in the delicate ruin of a
Narrow six-story mansion, a bitter man with little regard
For marbled halls, abandons his beggarly church
And succors the remote expedition to the Byalkakeyl Zone.

A new vital energy is found in this itinerant branch
Of an ancient dissolute family. With rigor and purpose
A disquieted soul proves its genuine worth.

XXXVII. A flooded city falls diminished

In the ladder gyre of the Age of the Glass Council:

Where kings once toiled as goldsmiths and soldiers,
Where merchant princes financed poets and popes,
A flooded city falls diminished, its stout walls of honor
Shadowed by wet decadance, an ambitious mausoleum
Under trees with violet-eyed blooms and lush dark fruit.

Seven immodest artists challenged seven bullish judges
In laborous directions, two double-edged swords
At right angles to each structure of the foreordained body.
But they could not gain new force from the ceremonies.

Lost is the wealth of precision built by scholars
Who wrote their own fame, decided their own destiny.
Genius cannot collaborate with hierarchy.

XXXVI. A plague of austere years

In the seventh gyre of the Age of the Immersed Desolation:

When a summer wind brings a plague of austere years
To snowy boderlands, ten thousand cypress boughs
Will freeze upon glass pedestals. This formidable threshold
To patrimonial fortunes of haughty merchants, unbound
By constitutional restraint, is overturned and cleansed.

The pale-faced enemy, who sold pies in the cast-down streets,
Sits on a broken turret stone, smoke rising from his clothes
Crusted with a red plaster of thick blood and wood ashes.
His sharp head is uplifted, his hair drips with black ribbons.

In the absence of liberality, all winds chasten bitter shelters
For the intact soul: houses gone, chimneys fallen amid
White wings of paper and floating particles of thin ice.

XXXV. The Boar's enlightenment

In the clauted (cleated?) gyre of the Age of the Sinquel Memorial:

Ringing sparks rise at the strike of a sharp wheel
Against a charred crucifix sheathed in square iron,
Wrapt in the mystery of the swift-coming collapse.
A future shaped around nine days of storming fire,
Final proof absorbed in burned stones still steaming.

A barefooted visitor with red eyes, crouched shoulders
And coy palms disembarks from an enclosed courtyard
In a maze of shrines. At 36 years of age, this lone Boar,
Unfit for the purpose, is briefly allowed to hold dominion.

Unable to avoid unyielding strain after a sleepless year,
A necessary act haunts the Boar's enlightenment
As revelation continues in pages in the fourth part.

XXXIV. An obsidian burl

In the ladder gyre of the Age of Broeudhe-bas:

Grimm's lawyer gains the heir to a corpse of hardened ash—
His first voyage of spiritual apocalypse will be undertaken upon
The tipping point of ten thousand tons of monastery burnt black;
His psalms of revelatory verse, lacking pain and fevered speech,
Grinned without color, discount his claim to lyrics of fire.

Brittle monstrosities surface in data from scientific journals,
From skeletal pages fragile, faintly yellow and nearly
Transparent.
Asymmetrical bodies, earthen and nightmarish, emerge from
Paper folded
In unquiet thirds, rashly unearthed from extinct sediments.

Disrupted small light begins to swirl within an obsidian burl
Separated from the good and secretly buried under soil
Once the ruins of a winter empire in the valley of the sun.
    

XXXIII. Three Silences

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.
    

XXX. The king's niece

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.