I.
I AM, a disturbance in the air, a flutter in the heart,
Collector of shadows
Gathering darknesses,
Haunter of forgotten byways, the vast vaulted forests,
the hard fierce fastnesses,
The rocky glen,
The
bastard heath.
Clouds occlude
the sun
Life is
A Lapse of Memory.
Every Mask hides another, snarling in turn when
uncovered-
What if, beneath all these masks, lay, not a face, but a
hole?
And
the Universe came rushing in.
What if everything revealed so far was just a series of
increasingly desperate diversions?
Each one a masquerade, Enacted to safeguard a secret
too
terrible or too wonderful to bear.
(in
this reading)
As the Secret
is approached it throws out visions, as the sun, heat and radiance,
each more opulent
and grandiose
Than the last.
Here,
I am god, at the centre of all things, all things abiding in me.
Pass
By,
Cast
Cold
Eye,
horseman.
And all that comes to pass is simply and solely what I
have written-
The
Hind flees into yonder brake.
Or
What say Our
Secret is squid and
Every god and devil, each chamber of heaven or circle of
hell, but
a cloud of ink,
opaquing the waters
And every Answer ever given just
A
blackening of the blue.
Every Enlightenment, every vision vouchsafed by heaven,
and every single word
Angel ever spoke to man-
a ruse, or feint
And every saint
A species of Dupe.
And yet,
is this not triumph?
To have come close enough to the sun,
that
it burned?
II.
Purge my meaty grossness, like an airy spirit go.
The world is dreamed into being,
Is
Airy nothing,
And Life, a
Lapse of
Memory.
The Path is
The place where the buttercups
Don’t grow-
Follow path
Through field of flowers
Rabbits
Run
Away.
Stalk the sun,
From East to West
Till the great beast bleeds
on the
far
horizon,
gored on the
horns of the hills.
III
I AM the machine operator.
I and an I and another I,
Mudlarks,
Plucking treasure from The Silence,
A sword, a cup, and a jewellery box
From
Airy Nothing.
The tree holds birds to its bosom
She is the patron of that School of Music.
“he never missed a day’s work. That’s what was bred into you.
You must work for aliving.”
We carry others
with us. We hear their voices commenting on our thoughts and actions, on the
scene spread out for the senses. Looking out through our eyes. Squatters.
There’s
a squatter in The Tower,