Altarwise by Owl-light

Altarwise by owl-light in the halfway house

The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;

Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam

And, from his fork, a dog among the faries,

The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,

Bit out the mandrake with to-morrow’s scream.

Then, penny-eyed, that gentleman of wounds,

Old cock from nowheres and the heaven’s egg,

With bones unbuttoned to the half-way winds,

Hatched from the windy salvage on one leg,

Scraped at my cradle in a walking word

That night of time under the Christward shelter:

I am the long world’s gentleman, he said,

And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.

II

Death is all metaphors, shape in one history;

The child that sucketh long is shooting up,

The planet-ducted pelican of circles

Weans on an artery the gender’s strip;

Child of the short spark in a shapeless country

Soon sets alight a long stick from the cradle;

The horizontal cross-bones of Abaddon,

You by the cavern over the black stairs,

Rung bone and blade, the verticals of Adam,

And, manned by midnight, Jacob to the stars.

Hairs of your head, then said the hollow agent,

Are but the roots of the nettles and of feathers

Over these groundworks, thrusting through a pavement

And hemlock-headed in the wood of weathers.

III

First there was the lamb on knocking knees

And three dead seasons on a climbing grave

That Adam’s wether in the flock of horns,

Butt of the tree-tailed worm that mounted Eve,

Horned down with skullfoot and the skull of toes

On thunderous pavements in the garden time;

Rip of the vaults, I took my marrow-ladle

Out of the wrinkled undertaker’s van,

And Rip Van Winkle from a timeless cradle,

Dipped me breast-deep in the descended bone;

The black ram, shuffling of the year, old winter,

Alone alive among his mutton fold,

We rung our weathering changes on the ladder,

Said the antipodes, and twice spring chimed.

IV

What is the metre of the dictionary?

The size of genesis? the short spark’s gender?

Shade without shape? the shape of Pharaoh’s echo?

(My shape of age nagging the wounded whisper).

Which sixth of wind blew out the burning gentry?

(Questions are hunchbacks to the poker marrow).

What of a bamboo man among your acres?

Corset the boneyards for a crooked boy?

Button your bodice on a hump of splinters,

My camel’s eyes will needle through the shroud.

Love’s reflection of the mushroom features,

Stills snapped by night in the bread-sided field,

Once close-up smiling in the wall of pictures,

Arc-lamped thrown back upon the cutting flood.

And from the windy West came two-gunned Gabriel,

From Jesu’s sleeve trumped up the king of spots,

The sheath-decked jacks, queen with a shuffled heart;

Said the fake gentleman in suit of spades,

Black-tongued and tipsy from salvation’s bottle.

Rose my Byzantine Adam in the night.

For loss of blood I fell on Ishmael’s plain,

Under the milky mushrooms slew my hunger,

A climbing sea of Asia had me down

And Jonah’s Moby snatched me by the hair,

Cross-stroked salt Adam to the frozen angel

Pin-legged on pole-hills with a black medusa

By waste seas where the white bear quoted Virgil

And sirens singing from our Lady’s sea-straw.

VI

Cartoon of slashes on the tide-traced crater,

He in a book of water tallow-eyed

By lava’s light split through the oyster vowels

And burned sea-silence on a wick of words.

Pluck, cock, my sea eye, said medusa’s scripture,

Lop, love, my fork tongue, said the pin-hilled nettle;

And love plucked out the stinging siren’s eye,

Old cock from nowheres lopped the minstrel tongue

Till tallow I blew from the wax’s tower

The fats of midnight when the salt was singing;

Adam, time’s joker, on a witch of cardboard

Spelt out the seven seas, an evil index,

The bagpipe-breasted ladies in the deadweed

Blew out the blood gauze through the wound of manwax.

VII

Now stamp the lord’s prayer on a grain of rice,

The bible-leaved of all the written woods

Strip to this tree: a rocking alphabet,

Genesis in the root, the scarecrow word,

And one light’s language in the book of trees;

Doom on deniers at the wind turned statement.

Time’s tune my ladies with the teats of music,

The scaled sea-sawers, fix in a naked sponge

Who sucks the bell-voiced Adam out of magic,

Time, milk, and magic, from the world beginning.

Time is the tune my ladies lend their heartbreak,

From bald pavilions and the house of bread

Time tracks the sound of shape on man and cloud,

On rose and icicle, the ringing handprint.

VIII

This was the crucifixion on the mountain,

Time’s nerve in vinegar, the gallow grave

As tarred with blood as the bright thorns I wept;

The world’s my wound, God’s Mary in her grief,

Bent like three trees and bird-papped through her shift,

With pins for teardrops is the long wound’s woman.

This was the sky, Jack Christ, each minstrel angle

Drove in the heaven-driven of the nails

Till the three-colored rainbow from my nipples

From pole to pole leapt round the snail-waked world.

I by the tree of thieves, all glory’s sawbones,

Unsex the skeleton this mountain minute,

And by this blowclock witness of the sun

Suffer the heaven’s children through my heartbeat.

IX

From the oracular archives and parchment,

Prophets and fibre kings in oil and letter,

The lamped calligrapher, the queen and splints,

Buckle to lint and cloth their natron footsteps,

Draw on the glove of prints, dead Cairo’s henna

Pour like a halo on the caps and serpents.

This was the resurrection in the desert,

Death from a bandage, rants the mask of scholars

Gold on such features, and the linen spirit

Weds my long gentlemen to dusts and furies

With priest and pharaoh bed my gentle wound,

World in the sand on the triangular landscape,

With stones of odyssey for ash and garland

And rivers of the dead around my neck.

Let the tale’s sailor from a Christian voyage

Atlaswise hold half-way off the dummy bay

Time’s ship-racked gospel on the globe I balance:

So shall winged harbours through the rockbirds’ eyes

Spot the blown word, and on the seas I image

December’s thorn screwed in a brow of holly.

Let the first Peter from a rainbow’s quayrail

Ask the tall fish swept from the bible east,

What rhubarb man peeled in her foam-blue channel

Has sown a flying garden round that sea-ghost?

Green as beginning, let the garden diving

Soar, with its two bark towers, to that Day

When the worm builds with the gold straws of venom

My nest of mercies in the rude, red tree.