Owl Songs
I
she was made of flowers : named
and shaped
and punished
taken from her stemmed sleep :
and slapped
to eye
petal breasted whore : buddable
and silk
: soft orifice
his to hold and husband :
nectar
swelled and stank : she split to claws
or so the story said
a long time ago
in another place
*
what skin is. organ of
music
edging self, places of rawness,
worldvoice shaking you to its
distances,
running you through invisibly
*
the broken can't be mended:
not sky smeared and stripped, not
looted
forest, not the algal river,
not cancered earth, erupted gene,
memory
extinguished,
nor starved shot scurvy fur and
feather,
nor the flamed
and thug-smashed home, nor shard
shocked
child-damage:
the faith in seed:
that green will burst the
grey
carapace of ash
cover the bone-site over
*
ash rose and rose of
stone,
lymph and haemad martyred from the
wood
undoing bone as paradise pricks
sight
-
the lovely cheek, the leaf, the
tear,
unfleshed
past wail or weal, flashed to
shadow:
rose whose secret petals close the
harm
blent for public pap into the
fearsong:
calculations of empire: tithes of
blood.
*
the loosed weed lives:
under her leaves
rot ancient languages
dragged into touch
she cannot but scorch
the sweetest seasons
alien honey
driving the shy bee
into extinction
*
she the impediment
of mind a
stutter
masked with feathers
she gulps your useless
history
and spits it out in pellets
spelled
by a speech with no words
for the perfumes congealing
on her mute lips
how harmless she looked!
but her tongue watered already
for what was missing
*
probing the iris, a laser
cuts all the way in
to the truth: a dead thing
leaking on the slab
II
What becomes conscience, shame
mating with
love
in the eye of a child driven to
hurt.
It isn't your fault you were born.
So much missed, the womb's slow
thud, the
gentle light,
muffled mother music imagined as
heaven
-
but save the blame. No
god will coddle
you
back to that dimness. The
light
grows brighter and harder,
breaking your sight, breaking it
into
pieces.
*
Symptom is all:
the king of wrong erases with a
doctrine
evidence of death.
Love broods in the
womb
flexing its fingers for the
world's warm
breast,
its cry of nails hammering the
harm.
*
matter moves as light
a Rabbi wrote in Prague
marking the golem
zapped by godword
slavish man-mock
tricked from mud
how we bettered that!
petty gods, intellect's
brazen angels
twisting strings of light
how beautiful the equation
that blasts the feeling flesh
a single hand
gestures and is ash:
o smile, o kiss, o
love,
pain would not be but this,
given and revoked, alas,
revoked and given.
*
there is nothing to understand
the flower dissolves into its
secret
the holding eye revolts
war is a mask he can gobble
everything
the earth panting beneath his
feet
where he always wanted her
*
the book the smirk and the hot
rack
the bridle of spikes the bent foot
the stone the wheel the bar the law
beat them into a tongue
with both your hands
pretend the tongue is a flame
tend it gently
*
wretched exile wrenching the
wordhoard
*
rails vanishing into cold
she played with starlessness
Yes said the face in the window
I can hear you even behind the
frost
*
eye, touchlight, bag of water,
pinhole
letting the world in
look, mind not the how: be
wavelets shunting cell
to cell
softly flaring mind
the kiss of wind, branch
morphed to arm, gods
whispering
eye blooded shut
now open
yes?
and whose the broken
speaking
yours? mine?
soultrust
violate
fingertouch
a questioning of all edges
heart numb
wingsofblood
me?
you?
me?
III
relearning how to be still,
that is the
difficulty.
blinder and more coldly clouds race
far above the pious stone, which
has nothing
to do with you.
spring is more than a melting
place in
the mind
or new kinds of blossom reckoning
futures
past your dissolving hands:
perhaps you can forgive the
longings for
solace
which damage you, the brilliant
promise
of water,
enough to endure a gentleness that
wakes
the million eyelids sleeping in
your skin
*
Here in riverless
Williamstown
cannons pout in the parks.
Black
swans
pick through mud, scooping crusts
from bags snagged on the
rubble.
Fish nuzzle
at the outlet from the power
station
where water's warm as blood.
Blue jellyfish inflate behind
barbed wire.
Once we walked the breakwater,
black basalt laid with ankle
bruising
stones
broken by convicts.
You fell
and cried.
I lifted you and carried you, my
shoes
flayed on the shards,
the hard way back from what you had
imagined - a silver beach
luminous with toyshops, or a
ship-shaped
cloud:
not, at least, this backwash
lapping,
this edgeless sky.
*
I see frost as if for the first
time
when a single frozen dewdrop was
enough
to entrance me
these days of course I am no
longer a
child
my skin would run like tears but
how to
be discrete
if love is the self's apocalypse
questioning too deeply as if I had
no
right to be present there
beneath the dress the feathers
beneath
the claws a mirror beneath the glass a sex of radiant music
beneath the music infinitesimal
galaxies
who doesn't want to vanish perhaps
it
is time to be literal
that infinite trust I used to call
a body
evaporating in the vivid air
as if the words fall burning down
as if
the sky shakes free its glorious petals
for that while between whiles
here in the light
Alison
Croggon