Omens in the Year of the Ox Read online

I watch his slack underskin shine.

  It is not the flesh that first must fly.

  When he stoops blacking the light,

  bat-winged and magnificent,

  how I fear for him, fear

  he lacks the recklessness

  this act will ask of us. All my life

  I have lived in shadow knowing light

  does not keep. Knowing

  what falls to the son. All night

  now each night I watch

  the exquisite wax smoulder and weep.

  The Wrecking

  It falls. All week

  the high whine, ping

  of steel bolts screed

  down to shearings,

  shafts. That hotel

  gutted to its eaves

  leans, fenced-off out

  a mud-straked street

  where red dust blown

  through rust-thick air

  blooms, like fear;

  it leans, a slow

  huge whooshed insuck

  of gust and crash—

  then falls. All brick,

  mortar, glass, ash.

  Where the wet gashed

  works groan, gape wide,

  men wade the slash:

  flexed girders grind

  hard, arc-rolled steel

  rods clang; and dust

  being all, all

  is dragged to dust.

  Under that dark

  and blood-slaked sun

  dark smoke rises.

  This world too will end.

  Chorus

  Two ghosted, I guess, in, goldening maybe

  where the bells of gleaming pans wavered

  in racks above the stove. I let them talk.

  “He fears the surest work’s the least assured;

  looks to the burning of the useless, at least

  the burning off of it.” “That’s the ash of it.”

  The kitchen cantled with, what, an ambered shine,

  as if a candle burned in sunlight. Was that them?

  “He trusts us.” “No; he trusts to a singing

  which seduces; he sings his meaning.”

  “But picks apart the clockwork to while away

  the time. While none of it means a thing.”

  And if, say, one trusted nothing, least of all

  the singing? As the table’s grain coalesced

  in a honeyed light, so little seemed

  to matter. “How assured he sounds,” sighed one.

  “Sure as faith,” agreed some aggrieved

  second. I knew it wasn’t possible to live

  in faith without living too in doubt. “Assured

  again,” they whispered, “doubly so, and so

  reassured.” At which I reached for a knife

  and calmly began to carve the bread.

  Danube Relic

  As if its brown charred tip once tapped

  hard this hauled-stone

  cathedral’s crypt, once wanted out.

  Seems a saint’s relic

  scraped in soiled wrappers outweeps

  even guarded glass:

  see its slow molten dreep dap low.

  So like wax creeping.

  Was a girl’s once. And once curled

  tangles of lace

  from her living face what’s now all char

  and tallow-grease,

  black drip and blur burned centuries

  past. Latched under glass

  her shrivelled finger, survived of fire,

  graces a gilt cord,

  hangs hacked, weathered, grey-tethered and tied

  like a twist of grass

  left to dry. Papered like a wasps’ nest,

  tarred nail tapered,

  it’s said held hard her finger feels it yet—

  half hook-and-wire,

  all sawed-off strange, the hand of a girl burned

  burns like fire.

  Auto-da-Fé

  Grace is like fire, says Augustine of Hippo, extending the metaphor: burning a man must be done with skill if he is to last. Most die with merely their calves on fire. I remember a dark swale of grass, a girl lifting her shirt. Folding back her cuffs to show her scars. Cigarette burns in small white lesions on her wrists. When burning a man, one must tether faggots and twists of straw up the stake to the head. In this way he will burn in stages and not be overwhelmed. She ran her fingers through her hair and her hair in the dusk was singed by the fire of that setting sun. As a toddler Augustine had played in the courtyard while his mother bathed, the bones glowing in her ankles. Augustine says in the sunlight the hands of our mothers burn like sunlight, like they aren’t there at all. It is never what we think. She rubbed her scars and said, Fire eats and eats in order not to die. I said, We are so alike you and I.

  Bull Kelp

  The weed is dark inside and wetbrained.

  All night drifts down cold waters,

  lolls like a child’s skull in the swells

  then washes up here: unboned eelthing,

  stiff searoot, tough resined tentacle

  risen from what brackish dream.

  Drained to sand-pocked rubber, dried

  ochre, dried grey, its slack blades

  splay from a shrivelled stalk

  like the bent stump of some blunt propeller,

  mangled in bladderwrack and reeking.

  Embrangled, yes, rucked, yes, battered

  by that bright element we too wake to,

  come dawn dead kelp sprawls

  cold with the nightcold and so stiff

  its uncoiled mess, massed, won’t shift

  at a kick. Now sandfleas blink like blown sparks out;

  now hauled hard by the brunted head

  its stipe, whip-sharp, hists a wet sigh

  and the sun bells redly through its blades.

  What a thing it is. Evidence perhaps.

  Cast up thickening among us

  to bleach here in a burning air, stretched

  long, long, gleeched and ungulous

  until it, this, stewed placenta, this puddled thing

  poked with a stick or walked unwondering past

  splits its slippery gutline, peels apart in rot—

  and a knot of larvae boils in that dark and does not clot.

  Arbutus

  If grief were given shape, if grief

  were given shape would it grow like this

  in a horror of limbs, and headless—

  Abruptly up to gripped rock it

  gives, groan on ingrained

  groan, it

  writhes, waterworn and weathering

  the weather of its own wood

  while the shelf of the world shivers.

  No bark

  is born so old. No bark is born

  with blunt teeth bared and tearing red strips of itself

  in such thin streaping curls of skin, no bark

  but this, crackling under the smooth gnarl

  of its own flensing. Windlorn, windflinted,

  still like slow molasses wound on a stick

  it pours the thick thrust of itself

  hugely upward, anguished, arboreal,

  it seeks its brutal purchase, it sinks its rootmuscles in

  and will not be moved, it will be

  unmoved

  as if grief as if grief as if

  grief, engorged, grappled its roots below. No it has no

  choice. It outstrips itself as it grows.

  A Gloss on Arbutus

  I stood under it, stunned.

  Ropes of red hair in its rails.

  Its leaves, sundialed, shone.

  My skull rigged open like a sail.

  I swung under it, stunned.

  The world in its shook foil shone.

  I was an eye and was not.

  What I wanted was undone.

  The unbeautiful was fraught.

  I watched a punched branch spin.

  My wrists, sundialed, shone.

&nbs
p; When I gasped a gust rushed in.

  Then all was gloom, appalled bark, and my arms were swaying with wind.

  Raccoon in Ditch

  I

  Where seed-foaming weeds drag darkly, dusk rises;

  rises in a last crunch of sunlight off fenders flaring west—

  you watch each tiny plicked claw stutter shut.

  Asplayed, astunned, so unskinned it seems

  but gleetslicked gut: innards peeled back like a glove

  lately worn, warm yet. Blood-dazed, black ants swarm

  like a hive of darkness. What you feel is love:

  how all things that live have inner halls light knows nothing of.

  How you are also of that dark.

  II

  Dragged from what black dream running, hurtled

  to what weed-ditch. Grey fur bloodrubbed at its ribs

  and, seamsplit, that slow blue bubble of gut.

  A dead raccoon is dull and like any other

  dead goes stiff in its own thingness. Sticks can’t shift it.

  Wasps lift past it low in the pollen-stung air.

  Less than that it seems. Unzippered, a purse of fur

  poured from itself. Gorged fat on dayfire and grown

  beyond all size. Scraped up, a bucket’s worth.

  But lumbering thick-shanked, fur-thighed, once

  its banded tail dragged fatly like a bull’s phallus;

  at dusk would slouch through a clatter of cans

  what sprawls now spoiling in groil and ooze, snout

  fanged yet, lips flensed back, flecked fur frothing with ants—

  what once could drown a hound thrice its weight.

  What are they. Night-diggers, weasel-gods, furred moons:

  seen afar, they peer at us with the green eyes of children;

  come dusk their delicate hands could be human.

  III

  How you are also of that dark.

  How all things that live have inner halls light knows nothing of,

  like hives of darkness. What you feel is love

  lately worn, warm with blood. Black ants swarm;

  all gleetslicked gut, innards peeled back like a glove,

  asplayed, astunned, and so unskinned it seems

  you are not you. Tiny plicked claws stutter shut

  in a crunch and flare of sunlight; fenders fade west;

  and there, where seed-foaming weeds drag low, something

  rises. There will be no other end to the world.

  Chorus

  I drove through furred fields veiled in rain

  when road struck sea struck sky. Parked

  brooding above the windscried chop

  of a weedchoked beach, watched one

  shudder through a shut vent in the dash.

  “It’s dark in here,” it whispered, “dark

  as pitch.” “Darker,” another hissed,

  forming in the back. “Dark as meaning.”

  “Dark as love.” Others were drifting in.

  “The kelp down there’s dark inside

  and wetbrained,” said one. I sat

  outshivering the chill, jacket slack

  and thin. You have nothing to say, I said,

  your words are without meaning.

  A silence; then muttering soft as felt.

  “Who’s he speaking to?” “He’s alone.”

  You believe in nothing, I added, as the wet

  light warpled where I clutched the wheel.

  Then the air stilled; they addressed me

  directly. “It’s as you fear. Our voices are just

  vowels jarred to clattering, errors

  mucked with meaning. You know this

  and knew this. The emptiness you fear

  is speaking in you; what you hear

  is the nothing that nothing announces.”

  And then, to drive their point clear:

  “You are not haunted. Nothing is in you.”

  Reparations

  Juliet onstage in Florence sheathing a blade in her breast. How she wept, in Italian, in black weather. That was the third night. All day we had crossed museum halls, our steps echoing from that famous statue’s broken embrace to a faded canvas baring Helen’s dagger of white thigh. It seems our greatest arguments for love are all arguments against it. The sun was going down and the pigeons were inking the cobblestones of the square. There was a child wearing an accordion. He sang, We do not remember a time before we were loved. Hearts, too, are tuned to a minor key and like other instruments hang mostly silent, collecting dust. I was born on a Thursday. On a Thursday six men carved a hole in my grandfather’s chest, removed and jarred and preserved his bad heart like bruised fruit. Remember always the heart is a made thing, the child sang. In the manner of music or fire, the crowds sang back. We are shaped by human hands and what loves us consumes us.

  Bach’s Soprano

  Feeds and feeds.

  Eats air, ear, all: her white throat

  thoraxing where waxed lamps flare;

  where six thousand silver ears dial

  in darkness dreamily towards her.

  Soft faces stunned by such light.

  No shame in sitting stunned

  among the stunned, slumped in gloom.

  That hall’s high ribbed shell gleams;

  my difficult friend, I lean

  along a low felt armrest and accept,

  since it is real, my own failing

  ambition on this earth. All is

  emptied. She sings a vast engulfing intake

  of air, wrenched and vocable,

  when again the vortex takes her,

  drains her. Feeds, feeds on a fading world.

  That a thing so fragile persists,

  that a thing so fragile is heard. You

  watch the white shine of an ear in the dark

  fade. We live and are diminished.

  Orpheus Ascending

  Blood-deep in black rock: a keyhole

  blazing like the silver ear

  of a god. A door. He staggered cold

  and shaking through the cellar

  of an old villa: racks of grimy bottles

  straked in soot, char, ash; that grotto’s

  dank air

  stirred, flared

  its dust like golden krill in his weird stare

  where the black reek of brackish meat

  hazed him yet. His lungs burned

  with the dark sweetness of it, her,

  the stink of wet soil and her

  rot in his skin, harp, clothes. Dragged

  back from daylight, her ragged

  black hair

  bruised there,

  her grey sluckish flesh shuddering to air

  ten steps shy of the world— Hell

  in its green darkness was not hell;

  here the cold villa of the real hell

  flensed him, he shivered: hell

  was sighting her soft shrivelled head

  slick with a fungal rot, her bled

  lips moist,

  limbs poised,

  swaying like the blind in the lantern of his voice

  even as he turned. All of it, all

  was a kind of rot, it ate the skin—

  He straggled upstairs, through halls,

  courtyards, into the weak sun

  singing yet. Fearing what he’d wanted.

  But, too: how lovely, how haunted

  his voice

  was, is—

  when he felt her footsteps falter under his.

  Hard yellow wasps in the weeds at his hips.

  Dried grapes on stakes. Then the earth

  shuddered under, shirred, his heart slipped

  and his lips were smeared with dirt,

  the thick black mulch churning there: it seemed

  some evil thing in that earth was singing,

  singing,

  singing,

  something evil in that earth was singing.

  The Tun
nel

  Now that we have cleared the last bricks, it is time. All month we laboured in a smoky lamplight, groping wearily while our brothers slept above us in their cells. The rafters creaking overhead as they stirred. And each dawn, called to matins, how we prayed silently for fortitude, for grace: Lord guide us now in this our late trace. See the cellar boards, peeled back with care, propped across the dusty casks: even their charred nails point us earthwards. Is it the devil’s work we do? This hole holds a thick and oily shadow even lampshine cannot cut. Kneeling before it, we sometimes smell leaf-mould, sometimes honey, sometimes only a cold wind that plucks at our sleeves.

  Yesterday in chapel the chalice split in two.

  Soon now we go through.

  Midwife’s Curses

  May your sons be born

  grey, blood-slathered in thick sludge;

  may they never cry.

  ___________

  May you love only deeply

  and never die.

  ___________

  May blood glut your breasts—

  may all you eat be dust in your mouth,

  ash in the mouths of your kin.

  ___________

  May your milk be a ribbon of darkness,

  your lullabies a black wind.

  ___________