Gaudete (17 page)

She rides the earth

On an ass, on a lion.

She rides the heavens

On a great white bull.

She is an apple.

Whoever plucks her

Nails his heart

To the leafless tree.

The huntsmen, on top of their swaying horse-towers,

Faces raw as butcher’s blocks, are angry.

They have lost their fox.

They have lost most of their hounds.

I can’t help.

The one I hunt

The one

I shall rend to pieces

Whose blood I shall dab on your cheek

Is under my coat.

A primrose petal’s edge

Cuts the vision like laser.

And the eye of a hare

Strips the interrogator naked

Of all but some skin of terror –

A starry frost.

Who is this?

She reveals herself, and is veiled.

Somebody

Something grips by the nape

And bangs the brow, as against a wall

Against the untouchable veils

Of the hole which is bottomless

Till blood drips from the mouth.

Waving goodbye, from your banked hospital bed,

Waving, weeping, smiling, flushed

It happened

You knocked the world off, like a flower-vase.

It was the third time. And it smashed.

I turned

I bowed

In the morgue I kissed

Your temple’s refrigerated glazed

As rained-on graveyard marble, my

Lips queasy, heart non-existent

And straightened

Into sun-darkness

Like a pillar over Athens

Defunct

In the glaring metropolis of cameras.

I said goodbye to earth

I stepped into the wind

Which entered the tunnel of fire

Beneath the mountain of water

I arrived at light

Where I was shadowless

I saw the snowflake crucified

Upon the nails of nothing

I heard the atoms praying

To enter his kingdom

To be broken like bread

On a dark sill, and to bleed.

The swallow – rebuilding –

Collects the lot

From the sow’s wallow.

But what I did only shifted the dust about.

And what crossed my mind

Crossed into outer space.

And for all rumours of me read obituary.

What there truly remains of me

Is that very thing – my absence.

So how will you gather me?

I saw my keeper

Sitting in the sun –

If you can catch that, you are the falcon of falcons.

The night wind, muscled with rain,

Is going to tug out

The trees like corks –

Just as in the dream –

A voice quaking lit heaven

The stone tower flies.

A night

To scamper naked

To the dry den

Where one who would have devoured me is driven off

By a wolf.

The viper fell from the sun

Jerked and lay in the road’s dust,

Started horribly to move, as I watched it.

A radiant goose dropped from a fire-quake heaven,

Slammed on to earth beside me

So hard, it bounced me off my feet.

Something dazzling crashed on the hill field,

Elk-antlered, golden-limbed, a glowing mass

That started to get up.

I stirred, like a discarded foetus,

Already grey-haired,

In a blowing of bright particles.

A hand out of a hot cloud

Held me its thumb to suck.

Lifted me to the dug that grew

Out of the brow of a lioness.

A doctor extracted

From my blood its tusk

Excavated

The mountain-root from my body

Excised

The seven-seas’ spring from under my eye-tooth

Emptied my skull

Of clouds and stars

Pounded up what was left

Dried it and lit it and read by its flame

A story to his child

About a God

Who ripped his mother’s womb

And entered it, with a sword and a torch

To find a father.