Travellers Depart Quilon, India, in the Early 1300s, ahead of the Black Death

After their cinnamon and pepper

dinner, foreigner tradesmen follow

echoes of chattering monkeys

beyond Quilon’s twelve thousand bridges.

The route proves quicker on elephants

than sailing by sea. The flat road

furrows between mountain-filled horizons.

Green-gummed tarabagan marmots

like guiding lights along the worn path

foam from noses and mouths, unless

they’re dead from eating transparent worms.

Butterflies sniff for pollen, fly, and spiral.

A few tradesman sing lala lala deeda

while others smoke pipes and chase

butterflies. They exhale their last smoke.

The survivors hold their breaths for 45 years.

In Genoa, an astronomer discovers

Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn

aligning before gray clouds

erase the sky. An historian notes this

and the tradesmen arrivals. Day after day

he counts the accumulating dead. Fearing

god’s wrath, he bathes in mud. The transparent

worms resurrect visible, and soon his demise.

No one could account for all the dead.

For thirteen years, the strain persisted

where the tradesmen could not –

Hangchow, and its twelve great gates

proved penetrable to the invisible.

***

For over twenty years, Tom Holmes is the founding editor and curator of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics. Holmes is also the author of five full-length collections of poetry, including The Book of Incurable Dreams (Xavier Review Press) and The Cave, which won The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award for 2013, as well as four chapbooks. He teaches at Nashville State Community College (Clarksville). His writings about wine, poetry book reviews, and poetry can be found at his blog, The Line Break: thelinebreak.wordpress.com. Follow him on Twitter: @TheLineBreak