And the streets closed forever
And the body lay on the gravel
Of the abandoned world
Among abandoned utilities
Exposed to infinity forever
Crow had to start searching for something to eat.
Crow and the Birds
When the eagle soared clear through a dawn distilling of emerald
When the curlew trawled in seadusk through a chime of wineglasses
When the swallow swooped through a woman’s song in a cavern
And the swift flicked through the breath of a violet
When the owl sailed clear of tomorrow’s conscience
And the sparrow preened himself of yesterday’s promise
And the heron laboured clear of the Bessemer upglare
And the bluetit zipped clear of lace panties
And the woodpecker drummed clear of the rotovator and the rose-farm
And the peewit tumbled clear of the laundromat
While the bullfinch plumped in the apple bud
And the goldfinch bulbed in the sun
And the wryneck crooked in the moon
And the dipper peered from the dewball
Crow spraddled head-down in the beach-garbage, guzzling a dropped ice-cream.
Crow Tyrannosaurus
Creation quaked voices –
It was a cortege
Of mourning and lament
Crow could hear and he looked around fearfully.
The swift’s body fled past
Pulsating
With insects
And their anguish, all it had eaten.
The cat’s body writhed
Gagging
A tunnel
Of incoming death-struggles, sorrow on sorrow.
And the dog was a bulging filterbag
Of all the deaths it had gulped for the flesh and the bones.
It could not digest their screeching finales.
Its shapeless cry was a blort of all those voices.
Even man he was a walking
Abattoir
Of innocents –
His brain incinerating their outcry.
Crow thought ‘Alas
Alas ought I
To stop eating
And try to become the light?’
But his eye saw a grub. And his head, trapsprung, stabbed.
And he listened
And he heard
Weeping
Grubs grubs He stabbed he stabbed
Weeping
Weeping
Weeping he walked and stabbed
Thus came the eye’s
roundness
the ear’s
deafness.
Two Legends
I
Black was the without eye
Black the within tongue
Black was the heart
Black the liver, black the lungs
Unable to suck in light
Black the blood in its loud tunnel
Black the bowels packed in furnace
Black too the muscles
Striving to pull out into the light
Black the nerves, black the brain
With its tombed visions
Black also the soul, the huge stammer
Of the cry that, swelling, could not
Pronounce its sun.
II
Black is the wet otter’s head, lifted.
Black is the rock, plunging in foam.
Black is the gall lying on the bed of the blood.
Black is the earth-globe, one inch under,
An egg of blackness
Where sun and moon alternate their weathers
To hatch a crow, a black rainbow
Bent in emptiness
over emptiness
But flying
Lineage
In the beginning was Scream
Who begat Blood
Who begat Eye
Who begat Fear
Who begat Wing
Who begat Bone
Who begat Granite
Who begat Violet
Who begat Guitar
Who begat Sweat
Who begat Mary
Who begat God
Who begat Nothing
Who begat Never
Never Never Never
Who begat Crow
Screaming for Blood
Grubs, crusts
Anything
Trembling featherless elbows in the nest’s filth
Examination at the Womb-Door
Who owns these scrawny little feet? Death.
Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face? Death.
Who owns these still-working lungs? Death.
Who owns this utility coat of muscles? Death.
Who owns these unspeakable guts? Death.
Who owns these questionable brains? Death.
All this messy blood? Death.
These minimum-efficiency eyes? Death.
This wicked little tongue? Death.
This occasional wakefulness? Death.
Given, stolen, or held pending trial?
Held.
Who owns the whole rainy, stony earth? Death.
Who owns all of space? Death.
Who is stronger than hope? Death.
Who is stronger than the will? Death.
Stronger than love? Death.
Stronger than life? Death.
But who is stronger than death?
Me, evidently.
Pass, Crow.
Crow’s Fall
When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white.
He decided it glared much too whitely.
He decided to attack it and defeat it.
He got his strength flush and in full glitter.
He clawed and fluffed his rage up.
He aimed his beak direct at the sun’s centre.
He laughed himself to the centre of himself
And attacked.
At his battle cry trees grew suddenly old,
Shadows flattened.
But the sun brightened –
It brightened, and Crow returned charred black.
He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black.
‘Up there,’ he managed,
‘Where white is black and black is white, I won.’
Owl’s Song
He sang
How the swan blanched forever
How the wolf threw away its telltale heart
And the stars dropped their pretence
The air gave up appearances
Water went deliberately numb
The rock surrendered its last hope
And cold died beyond knowledge
He sang
How everything had nothing more to lose
Then sat still with fear
Seeing the clawtrack of star
Hearing the wingbeat of rock
And his own singing
Crow’s Elephant Totem Song
Once upon a time
God made this Elephant.
Then it was delicate and small
It was not freakish at all
Or melancholy
The Hyenas sang in the scrub: You are beautiful –
They showed their scorched heads and grinning expressions
Like the half-rotted stumps of amputations –
We envy your grace
Waltzing through the thorny growth
O take us with you to the Land of Peaceful
O ageless eyes of innocence and kindliness
Lift us from the furnaces
And furies of our blackened faces
Within these hells we writhe
Shut in behind the bars of our teeth
In hourly battle with a death
The size of the earth
Having the strength of the earth.
So the Hyenas ran under the Elephant’s tail
As like a lithe and rubber oval
He strolled gladly around inside his ease
But he was not God no it was not his
To correct the damned
In rage in madness then they lit their mouths
They tore out his entrails
They divided him among their several hells
To cry all his separate pieces
Swallowed and inflamed
Amidst paradings of infernal laughter.
At the Resurrection
The Elephant got himself together with correction
Deadfall feet and toothproof body and bulldozing bones
And completely altered brains
Behind aged eyes, that were wicked and wise.
So through the orange blaze and blue shadow
Of the afterlife, effortless and immense,
The Elephant goes his own way, a walking sixth sense,
And opposite and parallel
The sleepless Hyenas go
Along a leafless skyline trembling like an oven roof
With a whipped run
Their shame-flags tucked hard down
Over the gutsacks
Crammed with putrefying laughter
Blotched black with the leakage and seepings
And they sing: ‘Ours is the land
Of loveliness and beautiful
Is the putrid mouth of the leopard
And the graves of fever
Because it is all we have –’
And they vomit their laughter.
And the Elephant sings deep in the forest-maze
About a star of deathless and painless peace
But no astronomer can find where it is.
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 Prometheus On His Crag
Prometheus On His Crag
Pestered by birds roosting and defecating,
The chattering static of the wind-honed summit,
The clusterers to heaven, the sun-darkeners –
Shouted a world’s end shout.
Then the swallow folded its barbs and fell,
The dove’s bubble of fluorescence burst,
Nightingale and cuckoo
Plunged into padded forests where the woodpecker
Eyes bleached insane
Howled laughter into dead holes.
The birds became what birds have ever since been,
Scratching, probing, peering for a lost world –
A world of holy, happy notions shattered
By the shout
That brought Prometheus peace
And woke the vulture.
Prometheus On His Crag
Began to admire the vulture
It knew what it was doing
It went on doing it
Swallowing not only his liver
But managing also to digest its guilt
And hang itself again just under the sun
Like a heavenly weighing scales
Balancing the gift of life
And the cost of the gift
Without a tremor
As if both were nothing.
The Lamentable History of the Human Calf
O there was a maiden, a maiden, a maiden
And she was a knock-out.
Will you be my bride, I sighed, I cried, I was ready to die.
And she replied, what did she reply?
‘Give me your nose, for a kiss’ she sighed. ‘It’s a fair pawn!’
So I sliced off my nose
And she fed it to her puppy.
Lady, are you satisfied?
‘O give me your ears, to share my fears, in the night, in my bed, where nobody hears, my darling!’
So I sliced off my ears
And she fed them to her puppy.
‘Now let me have your legs, lest they carry you far,
O my darling, far from my side,’ she cried.
So I chopped off my legs and she gave them to her puppy.
Lady, are you happy?
‘O I want your heart, your heart, your heart, will it never be mine? Let me hold it,’ she cried.
So I sliced me wide, and I ripped out the part
And she fed it to her puppy.
Lady, are you satisfied?
‘O give me your liver, or I’ll leave you forever.
Give me your tongue, your tongue, your tongue
Lest it whisper to another.
Give me your lungs that hurt you with their sighs,’
She cried.
With tears of love, with tears of love, I hacked out those dainties
And she fed them to her puppy.
Lady, are you satisfied?
‘O give me your eyes, your rolling eyes,
That splash me with their tears, that go roving after others.
And give me your brains, that give you such pains
With doubting of my love, with doubting of my love.
And give me your arms, that all night long when you’re far from my side they’ll clasp me, clasp me’
And she cried, ‘I’ll be your bride!’
So I tore out my eyes and I gouged out my brains and I sawed off my arms and I gave them to my darling
And she fed them to her puppy.
Lady, are you satisfied?
‘No, give me your skin, that holds you in,
O pour out your blood in a bowl and let me drink it, be mine.
O slice off your flesh and I’ll nibble your bones, my darling!’
So I dragged off my skin and I brimmed it with my blood and I rolled up my flesh and I basketted my bones and I laid them at her door and she cried and she cried
Puppy, puppy, puppy.
Lady, I said, though I’m nothing but a soul, I have paid down the price, now come to be my bride.
But the puppy had grown, the puppy was a dog, was a big fat bitch, and my darling wept
‘Take my dog,’ she wept, ‘O take it.
You are only a soul, how can we now be married?
So take my dog for this dog it is my soul,
I give you my soul!’ And she gave me her dog.
Lady are you satisfied?
Now I live with a bitch an old sour bitch now I live with a bitch a bitch a bitch so I live with a bitch an old sour bitch and there was a maiden a maiden a maiden …
Swifts
Fifteenth of May. Cherry blossom. The swifts
Materialise at the tip of a long scream
Of needle. ‘Look! They’re back! Look!’ And they’re gone
On a steep
Controlled scream of skid
Round the house-end and away under the cherries. Gone.
Suddenly flickering in sky summit, three or four together,
Gnat-whisp frail, and hover-searching, and listening
For air-chills – are they too early? With a bowing
Power-thrust to left, then to right, then a flicker they
Tilt into a slide, a tremble for balance,
Then a lashing down disappearance
Behind elms.
They’ve made it again,
Which means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s
Still waking refreshed, our summer’s
Still all to come –
And here they are, here they are again
Erupting across yard stones
Shrapnel-scatter terror. Frog-gapers,
Speedway goggles, international
mobsters –
A bolas of three or four wire screams
Jockeying across each other
On their switchback wheel of death.
They swat past, hard-fletched,
Veer on the hard air, toss up over the roof,
And are gone again. Their mole-dark labouring,
Their lunatic limber scramming frenzy
And their whirling blades
Sparkle out into blue –
Not ours any more.
Rats ransacked their nests so now they shun us.
Round luckier houses now
They crowd their evening dirt-track meetings,
Racing their discords, screaming as if speed-burned,
Head-height, clipping the doorway
With their leaden velocity and their butterfly lightness,
Their too much power, their arrow-thwack into the eaves.
Every year a first-fling, nearly-flying
Misfit flopped in our yard,
Groggily somersaulting to get airborne.
He bat-crawled on his tiny useless feet, tangling his flails
Like a broken toy, and shrieking thinly
Till I tossed him up – then suddenly he flowed away under
His bowed shoulders of enormous swimming power,
Slid away along levels wobbling
On the fine wire they have reduced life to,
And crashed among the raspberries.
Then followed fiery hospital hours
In a kitchen. The moustached goblin savage
Nested in a scarf. The bright blank
Blind, like an angel, to my meat-crumbs and flies.
Then eyelids resting. Wasted clingers curled.
The inevitable balsa death.
Finally burial
For the husk
Of my little Apollo –
The charred scream
Folded in its huge power.
Mackerel Song
While others sing the mackerel’s armour
His stub scissor head and his big blurred eye
And the flimsy savagery of his onset
I sing his simple hunger.
While others sing the mackerel’s swagger
His miniature ocelot oil-green stripings
And his torpedo solidity of thump
I sing his gormless plenty.
While others sing the mackerel’s fury
The belly-tug lightning-trickle of his evasions
And the wrist-thick muscle of his last word
I sing his loyal come-back.
While others sing the mackerel’s acquaintance
The soap of phosphorus he lathers on your fingers
The midget gut and the tropical racer’s torso