Sacraments of Sky and Flower

Near Dorchester

—meditation during a walk to Hardy’s cottage

The orange sun burns far into the night Above the moors where Thomas Hardy died. The landscape bears its ancestors’ remains: Gnarled animistic groves, totemic logs, Old runes engraved in stone to stave the air Aghast with human fears, self-warding boasts Governing beasts who governed over gods As brazen as the phallic man of lime. Dark twin of life, old chronicle of time, On whom the mind begot its genesis, Arising to desire the first descent, The animal, uprearing from the earth, To see the sunlight glisten in the reeds And love the stars as brothers of a dark: Upon your shadowed caves the shaman priest Chalked red the wounded deer and buffalo, His art, as his religion, of the will, Determined that the patterned universe Conform itself to that of his own mind Which raised him from the animals he drew. From sympathetic magic to the stars, The Druids turned their gaze, the brutal priests Of megalithic stone, within themselves Combining Mesopotamia and the Nile, Egyptian death and starlit Babylon, Cultures of bone and stellar measurement, Mind wounded on its stark peripheries, Necrologists evolving into seers.

From these, the Greeks, who came into the sun, Cavorting in new light between old darks, The alder trailing starlight in the stream, Would speculate upon the boundless void, Apollo’s foster children, natural sons Of light, primeval, Dionysian, For whom the flesh remained a mystery, The constant spousal agony of mind, Yet fed by blood’s oblivious ecstasy As they themselves moved backward into time. A universe, composed of elements, Dissolved in Heraclitean disarray, And mind, erect, within its windless hush, First grew afraid of what it had become, And turning back to its own origin Saw chthonic waters darken in the pond, For Rhea was the mother of them all.

Near Viareggio

16 August 1822

—il buon tempo verrà

The waves that left him bloated on the shore— The wet pale skin, the red salt-streaming hair— Washed yellow toward the shallow grave that bore Beneath its three spaced stakes what brought them there:

Trelawny, Byron, Hunt, the helpers hired To dig up flesh that lime stained indigo— Fish-eaten face and arms now furnace-fired— Wine, salt, and oil to flame logs stacked below.

And as his ashes floated high in light On west winds toward the whitest Apennines Or when his body died into its night, Soul overwhelmed by Adonais’s lines,

The unlocked Bible, Jesus freed from priests, Prometheus and his Asia come as one Spirit to sing at Demogorgon’s feasts Till Harriet’s and Mary’s pains are done,

He found perhaps that marriage he had dreamed Among them all—platonic realms above, Necessity within the things that seemed, Substantial shadows hallowed by his love.

The Old Adam

Between his fire And master’s feet Where dreams desire A bitch in heat The bloodhound sleeps.

The poker turns A crackling log That breaks and burns Till ashes clog The flue’s black screen.

Inside the glass The bourbon glows That soon will pass A throat that knows No golden mean.

A dark iron rod To prod gray flames Is all of God That he still claims, Grim embered heaps.

Years spent in thought On Genesis Have come to nought Or else to this: That death’s serene

Because the deep Beyond all cause Can never keep Jehovah’s laws Or wake from sleep.

And so he drinks His bourbon neat And ever thinks On God’s defeat By carrion.

He soon will leave This life of his And will not grieve If heaven is Oblivion.

The First Estate: A Yeoman’s Wife’s Memoir

From virgin stands these boards cut clean Two hundred years ago Though weathered hold A tale untold That I alone still know and so Can tell and make to mean.

Not far away worn headstones tilt, Their nameless faces shorn Of number, word, Now dumb, absurd, Plowed under out of time, forlorn, Claims staked in dust and silt.

And here the...