from THE PITTANCER

1.

From out the mouth
Cuts saw a bitter gall,
Ink hidden in boiled and drained angel's sleeves.
Sitting in that now most unlikely tree.

The Rye ghost
Love & Hate
Tattooed on either hand.
Hands matured with the wood,
Polished to talon more than bless.

It is a suit
Dummy fastened
Tourist to a scarecrow's sight,
Popped to clue the quarried vision's tilt.
Fake as the poet's name carved in absence
Of the bodies scent. The true intelligence is
Graced elsewhere.

2.

The tree itself has shuddered out,
Inverting its gesture in vaulting mirrors
Beneath the pitched soil.
The roots describing the exact branches
Of that day, the very twigs configured to the moment
That he saw, woven between the wind and rain a smile
In the trembling leaves.

Today the needles and the dog shit
Have calligraphed a signature,
On that spot, over the stump sealed
By the scarring of indifference:
Time's insolent lime.
The roots have twitched
Sucking night down to beckon
& wave in another light.
Compressed by the darker groaning loam,
Squeezed into sound and the raking opposites of shadows
That flatter the illuminations of worms,
In this little land of hearing.

3.

This is where the angels dwells.
Integral with the intimate earth,
Sheltering like the dead for a while,
Buffeted by moles, stitched by ants
And embroidered by dim fungi's care.
This is where it with its retinue of phosphor
Waits
& avoids the sullen evolution of Satan's mechanical gates,
Ingeniously turning sight into loutish gum.
Voicing the moment to abrade the hour,
Spiting old lies like seeds to fulminate and cull
The rind of earth made shallow, dogmatic
As a plate of sand.



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