Status Updates From Collected Poems

You who bow down at cross and altar,
Remember me and pity Him
Who took my flesh and bone for armour
And double crossed my mother’s womb.

I, born of flesh and ghost, was neither
A ghost nor man, but mortal ghost.
And I was struck down by death’s feather.

And time cast forth my mortal creature
To drift or drown upon the seas
Acquainted with the salt adventure
Of tides that never touched the shores.
I who was rich was made the richer
By sipping at the vine of days.

My throat knew thirst before the structure
Of skin and vein around the well
Where words and water make a mixture
Unfailing till the blood runs foul;
My heart knew love, my belly hunger;
I smelt the maggot in my stool.

And flesh was snipped to cross the lines
Of gallow crosses on the liver
And brambles in the wringing brains.

I who was deaf to spring in summer,
Who knew not sun nor moon by name,
Felt thud beneath my flesh’s armour,
And yet was in a molten form,
The leaden stars, the rainy hammer,
Swung by my father from his dome.

Before I knocked and flesh let enter,
With liquid hands tapped on the womb,
I who was as shapeless as the water
That shaped the Jordan near my home

And rock twin floods upon their starry laps,

Let for one moment a faith statement
See the first living light,
And your maieutic slumber drag it forth.
(maieutic = obstretic; sleep is regarded as the midwife of faith.)

The child tells, when the trembling cord is cut,
Gods shall be gods, and many deaths be death.

A goose’s quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.

When it is rain where are the gods?
Shall it be said they sprinkle water
From garden cans, or free the floods?

Shall I run to the ships
With the wind in my hair,
Or stay till the day I die
And welcome no sailor?

Beyond this island bound
By a thin sea of flesh
And a bone coast,
The land lies out of sound
And the hills out of mind.

Shall I unbolt or stay
Alone til the day I die
Unseen by stranger-eyes
In this white house?

‘The thirst is quenched, the hunger gone,
And my heart is cracked across;
My face is haggard in the glass,
My lips are withered with a kiss,
My breasts are thin.
A merry girl took me for man,
I laid her down and told her sin,
And put beside her a ram rose.

Pity Electra loveless, she whose grief
Drowns and is drowned, who utters to the stars
Her syllables, and to the gods her love;
Pity the poor unpitied who are strange with tears.

Pity the poor unpitied who are strange with tears.

Pity the living who are lost, alone;

There are no seacaves deeper than her eyes;
Day treads the trees and she the cavernous night.

The living sun laments the dying skies,
Lamenting falls.

All things are known: the stars’ advice
Calls some content to travel with the winds,
Though what the stars ask as they round
Time upon time the towers of the skies
Is heard but little till the stars go out.
I hear content, and ‘Be content’
Ring like a handbell through the corridors,
And ‘Know no answer’, and I know
No answer to the children’s cry

And green, sneers not at the old sky.
No man believes who does not wonder why.

For he has found his soul in loneliness,
Now he is one with many, one with all,
Fire and Jordan and the sad canal.
Now he has heard and read the happy word.
Still, in his hut, he broods among his birds.

The moon peers down the valley like a saint.

The hermit’s huts, and talked to ancient men.
Out of the noise into quiet I ran.