Blackbird, my blackbird

1.
Blackbird, my blackbird
your nerves can cry      no more
            against the branches
whose sap dries back into the timber and
whose roots suffer their own catastrophe
as our poor soil was ever chalky to the touch
and flint holds back the flame for others.

2.
Your nest is in the autumn
high in the drying elders
and green light
            as you fly elsewhere
   on your appropriate air
a respiration of the eye’s lost seeing
as the cold fret is merely whispers on the tide
which knows the swell moves at
another and more certain pace
below our will and wave
towards       your curlew       unblest drowning.

3.
The syntax of the eye is rent with
dissolution of the visible
            along the pain of mist
for we are in the shingle’s tug
that strips us of too much
            and back again
each time drawn further
by the tide’s relentless pull
against the temple of my blackbird’s mind.
against the temple of my blackbird’s mind.

4.
Rain is a scatter of feathers
and a shake of beak,
tock tock against a leafless branch,
spatter of echoes and laments,
against the winds you can no longer navigate
            or hardly
as the stutter tows you in its wake
above the country whiteout you can hardly see
or long for now because
too bright.

5.
Our nerves are not now in the streets we knew
steeped in another country
and besides
my blackbird is our stranger
of the mind
and round about the high Byzantine brass
and dancing crash of tambourines
are dervishes who grab her hands
and trip the cobbles as her whirling skirts
become a blur and torsion of the spirits
a flash of mottled colour on a starling’s wing,
a glimpse of other and more raucous birdsong of the air
until and suddenly it vanishes
and its diminished seconds of a song
jar against the former harmonies
and my blackbird from its eyrie
flaps her wide wings too slowly only to drop
down down behind my head
into the noise of cymbals
and the cracked mosaic shards of all that was.

6.

Now there are only fragments of an earlier notation
where the almost lost trumpets of the heart
still shed their blood in the eye’s pulse
as the wing is broken in the bone
and scuttles through the snow
leaving a red and scattered
trace of what once was.
Now there are only fragments of an earlier notation
where the almost lost trumpets of the heart
still shed their blood in the eye’s pulse
as the wing is broken in the bone
and scuttles through the snow
leaving a red and scattered
trace of what once was.

7.

Blackbird, my blackbird with your crooked wing
struggling along the dust
and cradle of our hopes:
your plaintive call so godless and unkind
can reach our ears no longer
as the skull is delicate eggshell
and later and too soon
white with its particular
caverns of bone.
Blackbird, my blackbird with your crooked wing
struggling along the dust
and cradle of our hopes:
your plaintive call so godless and unkind
can reach our ears no longer
as the skull is delicate eggshell
and later and too soon
white with its particular
caverns of bone.

8.
Rage not –
light is hard and hurts the eyes;
its glare has long stopped
dancing on the will and all the days
            and all the days
arrhythmic in their pleading
come to night.

9.

Blackbird, my blackbird 
        my sweet Icarus bird,
your painted feathers are Apollo’s now,
his searing of them heavenward
is lost towards the earth and dust,

down to the drowned and creviced glacier
of your dreams,
            old dreams just half recalled
remembrances of flight and the wing’s use
and longing for return,
the sound of other darker and angelic wings
upon the breath of loss;
their shadow hovering across the flowers
of Eden and betrayal. Their precious aegis
was expected always, is a shelter also
as my blackbird sings her last few notes
for there is gratitude
even in this last snatch of memory she can take
to where the old sweet song throated with ease
is cluttered into remnants
of her broken feathers of desire.
Singing, it falls into a cluster of old notes
that echo in the clerestories high and vacant air
against themselves,
against the naked writhing on the cross,
against god’s touch upon a patriarch’s thigh
and try to sing along the blood and gold of glass
that tell the childhood stories
that we used to know
are lost at nightfall
and the eye, fearful of the light,
the sun betrayed,
the glue alchemical against the heat
falters among the particles of dust
returning to their rest.

10.
Babel, our Babel, wrought itself to pieces
as it neared the sun and so was sundered from the word:
her voicing into a cracked mosaic
of slender imaging broken so easily
into the fragments of what was once
and is no longer, the disarticulation
of that other tower that scraped the skies
into incomprehension.

11.
And so my little blackbird broke her wing and,
tumbling across, amid, between
the rising dust and ashes
landed here
where death,
the dead,
is on our clothes and hair,
its crippled taste inhaled.
Such earth is inappropriate to be lived among;
a final christening where your name is taken from you
leaving you hidden in raucous silence
in such smoke as this.

12.
Can you imagine that?
Can you imagine words that cannot be exorcised?
Can you imagine after that, alive?
Can you imagine moving still
towards the copper shadows wrought by another sun
under the hill towards beyond?
I ask you gentle reader, gentle spirit, gentle friend,
with what words can such days as these be climbed?

This comes from my Bird of Oblivion