A Pre-Raphaelite Notebook

Primroses; salutations; the miry skull

of a half-eaten ram; viscous wounds in earth

opening. What seraphs are afoot.

Gold seraph to gold worm in the pierced slime:

greetings. Advent of power-in-grace. The power

of flies distracts the working of our souls.

Earth's abundance. The God-ejected Word

resorts to flesh, procures carrion, satisfies

its white hunger. Salvation's travesty

a deathless metaphor: the stale head

sauced in original blood; the little feast

foaming with cries of rapture and despair.

The Distant Fury Of Battle

Grass resurrects to mask, to strangle,

Words glossed on stone, lopped stone-angel;

But the dead maintain their ground --

That there's no getting round --

Who in places vitally rest,

Named, anonymous; who test

Alike the endurance of yews

Laurels, moonshine, stone, all tissues;

With whom, under license and duress,

There are pacts made, if not peace.

Union with the stone-wearing dead

Claims the born leader, the prepared

Leader, the devourers and all lean men.

Some, finally, learn to begin.

Some keep to the arrangement of love

(Or similar trust) under whose auspices move

Most subjects, toward the profits of this

Combine of doves and witnesses.

Some, dug out of hot-beds, are brought bare,

Not past conceiving but past care.

God's Little Mountain

God's Little Mountain


Below, the river scrambled like a goat
Dislodging stones. The mountain stamped its foot,
Shaking, as from a trance. And I was shut
With wads of sound into a sudden quiet.

I thought the thunder had unsettled heaven;
All was so still. And yet the sky was cloven
By flame that left the air cold and engraven.
I waited for the word that was not given,

Pent up into a region of pure force,
Made subject to the pressure of the stars;
I saw the angels lifted like pale straws;
I could not stand before those winnowing eyes

And fell, until I found the world again.
Now I lack grace to tell what I have seen;
For though the head frames words the tongue has none.
And who will prove the surgeon to this stone?

Genesis

I

Against the burly air I strode

Crying the miracles of God.

And first I brought the sea to bear

Upon the dead weight of the land;

And the waves flourished at my prayer,

The rivers spawned their sand,

And where the streams were salt and full

The tough pig-headed salmon strove,

Ramming the ebb, in the tide's pull,

to reach the steady hills above.

II

The second day I stood and saw

The osprey plunge with triggered claw,

Feathering blood along the shore,

To lay the living sinew bare.

And the third day I cried: 'Beware

The soft-voiced owl, the ferret's smile,

The hawk's deliberate stoop in air,

Cold eyes, and bodies hooped in steel

Forever bent upon the kill.'

III

And I renounced, on the fourth day,

This fierce and unregenerate clay,

Building as a huge myth for man,

The watery Leviathan,

And made the long-winged albatross

Scour the ashes of the sea

Where Capricorn and Zero cross,

A brooding immortality --

Such as the charmed phoenix has

In the unwithering tree.

IV

The phoenix burns as cold as frost;

And, like a legendary ghost,

The phantom-bird goes wild and lost,

Upon a pointless ocean tossed.

So, the fifth day, I turned again

To flesh and blood and the blood's pain.

V

On the sixth day, as I rode

In haste about the works of God,

With spurs I plucked the horse's blood.

By blood, we live, the hot, and cold,

To ravage and redeem the world:

There is no bloodless myth will hold.

And by Christ's blood are men made free

Though in close shrouds their bodies lie

Under the rough pelt of the sea;

Though Earth has rolled beneath her weight

The bones that cannot bear the light.