An Autopsy's Durruti

(Douglas Olds, August 2023, posted on the occasion of the death in prison of Navalny. A politics of the tangible puts Putin on the table)

Who gallops with Valkyries, 

Done in by mistaken kinship, its vengeful spear, the stepfathering maw of reason that seeks its forms, 

I sing of the bullet that felled Siegfried castellano 

His measure hijacked by triremes ever re-ballasted 

Aimed to ram into shadows heaven’s gate,

with cyclamates to salt sleeping spring:

Not by talc and brain grease this destiny by rationality’s gritty kiss so

by autopsy as incantation refined and whip assigned:

This Bullet’s Durruti

Climbs the guard of flaming angels over

These walks in a telluric cauldron,

that bullet lands a bane walk, scopes it though we Durruti’s funeral cloak array, 

a cleric’s disguise wagered.

To feed the bullet song of

such hero’s procession-- 

How triumvirs grasped your cold and unmasked hand!

Anarch redivivus by these shapeshifting reports 

Do bullets that cover priests in peasant backs land?

It can only be so! Testify angels of ballistic resonance 

Who ascend to refine the guided autopsies of birthing heroes, their vaporous allegation

      good guns to gin the raven skin, those

a family tombed plots to the future circumcise 

As we autopsy our interpreted evil’s author and knight it

over and over, this redacted Autopsy until lands scripture--

to repowder Durutti into fork’s Intent, to plant its seed in backs ever more