Risk of Skin

+++Beyond the risk of skin;
the delicate tracery of sins and veins,
a finger stigmatising doubts
+++draws forth the promised blood,
++++++granting the wound its peril to be saved.

Wound round with nerves
+++++++++++++++and figments,
ghostly,
+++and skeletal,
as is the whole mankind –
that you shall come to this
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++– diurnal course –
the sudden certainty of generation
++++++signed between the peril and survival
+++++++++as is creation always,
as are the stones and trees
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++– as are these bones –
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++here in the valley of decision –
and begin again to
somehow gain
+++handhold, foothold.

+++++++++As the bird heaves its wings
++++++++++++into a sense of its propitious time
+++++++++and lifts its burning eyes
++++++++++++from its own ashes –

++++++++++++of course,
+++++++++++++++even if they,
++++++++++++++++++too many didn’t.

Michelangelo’s Captives

Look –
they are heavy with the weight of resurrection
and the huge struggle to become
what they already are,
unfinished giants for a papal tomb
as stone entombed in stone.

The long stretch of this
our terrible republic
embraces them within the weight
of granite’s grace,
hard brooding ghosts of their captivity
after his fingers gnarled away the stone
to speak the process of new birth,
the surge and upward twist
to freedom
from the body’s burden.

Earth is the question here
and the collapse of the imagined sky –
thin layer of luminosity
that greets the chisel’s cut
between marked marble and the air it touches,
among the hollow curves and skin’s endurance,
the weary arm’s acknowledgement of loss;
and thus he had to learn another language
for his chisel’s failure;
against the hard aesthetic corpus of his love
and the solidity of weariness.

Letter among the Keats Circle Number 12: Dr Clark to Leigh Hunt

Back in the huddle of your politics
and the old country, let me tell you,
hard as the slowing marrow of my heart,
now
that his worldly task is done,
I, like a mute was tasked as busy witness
to the annealing fire of all of him possessed
into the harsh piazza of his hopes
to burn away the ills us doctors could not;
his written body open and his face in clay.
Even the paper daisies
painted overhead curled grey into the air.

The box was nothing special.
Severn’s sad heart refused to place
the Bible turned aside by him,
but letters from his sister
and from Fanny,
his name in brown ink faded,
still unopened, lay near his heart,
his eyelids world-blind
to our punctured prayers,
mumbled into the night and weather
of his gift and love.

We were a meagre few among the goats
and startled rain out of a high sky.
You know I made them place
the daisies back to roof him
as he had asked.

No more the struggles you will not be tamed on
writing a toil that he has failed
as do my practices among the English dying
and all the fragments of continuing days.

Severn tells me he went at night
to the uncatholic graveyard.
There he found a shepherd,
like Endymion, his head asleep the stone
whose broken lyre
sung deathless on the waters.