New and Selected Poems
Page 11
They fasten together. They seem to be eating each other.
But they are not eating each other.
They do not know what else to do.
They have begun to dance a strange dance.
And this is the marriage of these simple creatures –
Celebrated here, in the darkness of the sun,
Without guest or God.
The Lovepet
Was it an animal was it a bird?
She stroked it. He spoke to it softly.
She made her voice its happy forest.
He brought it out with sugarlump smiles.
Soon it was licking their kisses.
She gave it the strings of her voice which it swallowed
He gave it the blood of his face it grew eager
She gave it the liquorice of her mouth it began to thrive
He opened the aniseed of his future
And it bit and gulped, grew vicious, snatched
The focus of his eyes
She gave it the steadiness of her hand
He gave it the strength of his spine it ate everything
It began to cry what could they give it
They gave it their calendars it bolted their diaries
They gave it their sleep it gobbled their dreams
Even while they slept
It ate their bodyskin and the muscle beneath
They gave it vows its teeth clashed its starvation
Through every word they uttered
It found snakes under the floor it ate them
It found a spider horror
In their palms and ate it
They gave it double smiles and blank silence
It chewed holes in their carpets
They gave it logic
It ate the colour of their hair
They gave it every argument that would come
They gave it shouting and yelling they meant it
It ate the faces of their children
They gave it their photograph albums they gave it their records
It ate the colour of the sun
They gave it a thousand letters they gave it money
It ate their future complete it waited for them
Staring and starving
They gave it screams it had gone too far
It ate into their brains
It ate the roof
It ate lonely stone it ate wind crying famine
It went furiously off
They wept they called it back it could have everything
It stripped out their nerves chewed chewed flavourless
It bit at their numb bodies they did not resist
It bit into their blank brains they hardly knew
It moved bellowing
Through a ruin of starlight and crockery
It drew slowly off they could not move
It went far away they could not speak
How Water Began to Play
Water wanted to live
It went to the sun it came weeping back
Water wanted to live
It went to the trees they burned it came weeping back
They rotted it came weeping back
Water wanted to live
It went to the flowers they crumpled it came weeping back
It wanted to live
It went to the womb it met blood
It came weeping back
It went to the womb it met knife
It came weeping back
It went to the womb it met maggot and rottenness
It came weeping back it wanted to die
It went to time it went through the stone door
It came weeping back
It went searching through all space for nothingness
It came weeping back it wanted to die
Till it had no weeping left
It lay at the bottom of all things
Utterly worn out utterly clear
Littleblood
O littleblood, hiding from the mountains in the mountains
Wounded by stars and leaking shadow
Eating the medical earth.
O littleblood, little boneless little skinless
Ploughing with a linnet’s carcase
Reaping the wind and threshing the stones.
O littleblood, drumming in a cow’s skull
Dancing with a gnat’s feet
With an elephant’s nose with a crocodile’s tail.
Grown so wise grown so terrible
Sucking death’s mouldy tits.
Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, O littleblood.
from CAVE BIRDS
The Scream
There was the sun on the wall – my childhood’s
Nursery picture. And there my gravestone
Shared my dreams, and ate and drank with me happily.
All day the hawk perfected its craftsmanship
And even through the night the miracle persisted.
Mountains lazed in their smoky camp.
Worms in the ground were doing a good job.
Flesh of bronze, stirred with a bronze thirst,
Like a newborn baby at the breast,
Slept in the sun’s mercy.
And the inane weights of iron
That come suddenly crashing into people, out of nowhere,
Only made me feel brave and creaturely.
When I saw little rabbits with their heads crushed on roads
I knew I rode the wheel of the galaxy.
Calves’ heads all dew-bristled with blood on counters
Grinned like masks where sun and moon danced.
And my mate with his face sewn up
Where they’d opened it to take something out
Lifted a hand –
He smiled, in half-coma,
A stone temple smile.
Then I, too, opened my mouth to praise –
But a silence wedged my gullet.
Like an obsidian dagger, dry, jag-edged,
A silent lump of volcanic glass,
The scream
Vomited itself.
The Executioner
Fills up
Sun, moon, stars, he fills them up
With his hemlock –
They darken
He fills up the evening and the morning, they darken
He fills up the sea
He comes in under the blind filled-up heaven
Across the lightless filled-up face of water
He fills up the rivers he fills up the roads, like tentacles
He fills up the streams and the paths, like veins
The tap drips darkness darkness
Sticks to the soles of your feet
He fills up the mirror, he fills up the cup
He fills up your thoughts to the brims of your eyes
You just see he is filling the eyes of your friends
And now lifting your hand you touch at your eyes
Which he has completely filled up
You touch him
You have no idea what has happened
To what is no longer yours
It feels like the world
Before your eyes ever opened
The Knight
Has conquered. He has surrendered everything.
Now he kneels. He is offering up his victory
And unlacing his steel.
In front of him are the common wild stones of the earth –
The first and last altar
Onto which he lowers his spoils.
And that is right. He has conquered in earth’s name.
Committing these trophies
To the small madness of roots, to the mineral stasis
And to rain.
An unearthly cry goes up.
The Universes squabble over him –
Here a bone, there a rag.
His sacrifice is perfect. He reserves nothing.
Skylines tug him apart, winds drink him,
Earth itself unravels him from beneath –
His submission is flawless.
Blueflies lift off his beauty.
Beetles and ants officiate
Pestering him with instructions.
His patience grows only more vast.
His eyes darken bolder in their vigil
As the chapel crumbles.
His spine survives its religion,
The texts moulder –
The quaint courtly language
Of wingbones and talons.
And already
Nothing remains of the warrior but his weapons
And his gaze.
Blades, shafts, unstrung bows – and the skull’s beauty
Wrapped in the rags of his banner.
He is himself his banner and its rags.
While hour by hour the sun
Deepens its revelation.
A Flayed Crow in the Hall of Judgement
All darkness comes together, rounding an egg.
Darkness in which there is now nothing.
A blot has knocked me down. It clogs me.
A globe of blot, a drop of unbeing.
Nothingness came close and breathed on me – a frost
A shawl of annihilation curls me up like a shrimpish foetus.
I rise beyond height – I fall past falling.
I float on a nowhere
As mist-balls float, and as stars.
A condensation, a gleam simplification
Of all that pertained.
This cry alone struggles in its tissues.
Where am I going? What will come to me here?
Is this everlasting? Is it
Stoppage and the start of nothing?
Or am I under attention?
Do purposeful cares incubate me?
Am I the self of some spore
In this white of death blackness,
This yoke of afterlife?
What feathers shall I have? What is my weakness
Good for? Great fear
Rests on the thing I am, as a feather on a hand.
I shall not fight
Against whatever is allotted to me.
My soul skinned, and my soul-skin pinned out
A mat for my judges.
The Guide
When everything that can fall has fallen
Something rises.
And leaving here, and evading there
And that, and this, is my headway.
Where the snow glare blinded you
I start.
Where the snow mama cuddled you warm
I fly up. I lift you.
Tumbling worlds
Open my way
And you cling.
And we go
Into the wind. The flame-wind – a red wind
And a black wind. The red wind comes
To empty you. And the black wind, the longest wind
The headwind
To scour you.
Then the non-wind, a least breath,
Fills you from easy sources.
I am the needle
Magnetic
A tremor
The searcher
The finder
His Legs Ran About
Till they seemed to trip and trap
Her legs in a single tangle
His arms lifted things, felt through dark rooms, at last with their hands
Caught her arms
And lay down enwoven at last at last
His chest pushed until it came against
Her breasts at the end of everything
His navel fitted over her navel as closely as possible
Like a mirror face down flat on a mirror
And so when every part
Like a bull pressing towards its cows, not to be stayed
Like a calf seeking its mama
Like a desert staggerer, among his hallucinations
Finding the hoof-churned hole
Finally got what it needed, and grew still, and closed its eyes
Then such truth and greatness descended
As over a new grave, when the mourners have gone
And the stars come out
And the earth, bristling and raw, tiny and lost
Resumes its search
Rushing through the vast astonishment.
Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days
She gives him his eyes, she found them
Among some rubble, among some beetles
He gives her her skin
He just seemed to pull it down out of the air and lay it over her
She weeps with fearfulness and astonishment
She has found his hands for him, and fitted them freshly at the wrists
They are amazed at themselves, they go feeling all over her
He has assembled her spine, he cleaned each piece carefully
And sets them in perfect order
A superhuman puzzle but he is inspired
She leans back twisting this way and that, using it and laughing, incredulous
Now she has brought his feet, she is connecting them
So that his whole body lights up
And he has fashioned her new hips
With all fittings complete and with newly wound coils, all shiningly oiled
He is polishing every part, he himself can hardly believe it
They keep taking each other to the sun, they find they can easily
To test each new thing at each new step
And now she smooths over him the plates of his skull
So that the joints are invisible
And now he connects her throat, her breasts and the pit of her stomach
With a single wire
She gives him his teeth, tying their roots to the centrepin of his body
He sets the little circlets on her fingertips
She stitches his body here and there with steely purple silk
He oils the delicate cogs of her mouth
She inlays with deep-cut scrolls the nape of his neck
He sinks into place the inside of her thighs
So, gasping with joy, with cries of wonderment
Like two gods of mud
Sprawling in the dirt, but with infinite care
They bring each other to perfection.
The Risen
He stands, filling the doorway
In the shell of earth.
He lifts wings, he leaves the remains of something,
A mess of offal, muddled as an afterbirth.
His each wingbeat – a convict’s release.
What he carries will be plenty.
He slips behind the world’s brow
As music escapes its skull, its clock and its skyline.
Under his sudden shadow, flames cry out among thickets.
When he soars, his shape
Is a cross, eaten by light,
On the Creator’s face.
He shifts world weirdly as sunspots
Emerge as earthquakes.
A burning unconsumed,