By Nicholas Chiarella

That there are closets, there then are monsters.
Electric or Jove, bolts outside my home
blow dust back to the clouds, staccato drops
march time on sagging pains of glass. The drums
of lonely giants beat beneath my bed,
where I hide my fruits until history

concludes. Yet this rough spell of history
casts more than ashen dust. Bold, dark monsters
walk secret margins of the ocean bed,
garden whirlpools, tear coral from its home,
palimpsesting sea greens and pinks for drums
of sludge and vapor and love’s purest drops.
Distilled by basement labor, crowning drops
for the last coronation of history
fill vast vats. These giants roll out their drums
and drum-roll the waltzing march of monsters,
annalists who would sing history home
between their sad, flimsy sheets, to bunked beds

for homely necrophilia, cruel beds
where facts would lie with the sullen, dropsied
corpus of scholars in that home not home.
But the paper engines of history,
sea-staged against the magic of monsters,
can even learn to hum with giants’ drums.

The woolen tug of marches fueled by drums
of labored drops will lead us to our beds,
safe from the rumble of giants. Monsters,
even, must sometimes sleep. The pelting drops
retreat in susurrus to historic
modes of silence as Juno calls Jove home.

The subtle dust of self fills my home,
with amber lamps soothes fluorescent doldrums,
and settles all accounts of history
in the dim press of dreams. Above my bed,
a cinnamon yearning for the past drops
through the split ceiling and calls to monsters

wandered far from home, yearning for their beds.
Giants tap drums, chew dates and oranges dropped
from the hands of world-historic monsters.