Telltale Signs

The Telltale Signs

You murmur the omens
in a leopard's ear, too tired
to know of sanity, too careless to care
of notions and rumors spoken in the dark.

You murmur the telltale signs never told,
always known: always the swans
examining their reflections in the lake;
always your bronze-gowned maid absorbed

with her face in your parlor mirror; the lords
whose promenade relents, suspended
like solstice in June, like the porcelain vases
in windows, eyes

tethered on their Japanese appearance.
Say you murmur 'all of this' until the waters
are as dark as the evening,
until the waters are as dark as the leopard.

II.

Say a course of sendal
wavers behind you then off you, hovering
over fields lying fallow where trees
drip tangerines.