it glides downstream
an armada dedicated to self-annihilation
in the Sol Glorianus :
Christ whose glory fills the skies, Light from Light.
Dayspring : the time of first take on ‘the fair glory’
linking the light within with the light without.
The people who walked without light
have seen a great light.
And eaten it
with their eyes.
Day within.
How dawn
Look. Look. You see?
— how dawn
like a benign flesh-eating disease
invades the shrinking dark,
devours.
The dark shrinks, cowers
behind small objects,
huddles, hurls itself
away from tall trees, the lawn’s
a line-up of escapees.
It does no good.
Like Mr Todd.
The sun will trump you every time, Mr
Wind-Who-Would blow Todd’s coat off.
It doesn’t work that way.
Sun beams, it beams.
Dawn. Coats off.
And the dark is gone.
There. See?
Think when it began, when you
could not be sure whether
light had begun or your dream continued.
The benign infection advanced cell by cell
into the body of night, till you could not tell
if you could see
or you could not see.
But you could.
The infarction of love.
Poor dark night. It happens every time.
Mixed message
Half past dawn for us mixed mortals
and the frozen birch tree is doing as good a job
of feeding the grosbeaks as the frozen apple tree.
When they swirl away from their délices de sorbet aux pommes
(McSorbet) in the winter sun
they head for the top of the birch and snack on its catkins.
Of the five, two
have red breasts, sharply V-shaped sharp red and
they are pecking themselves, those two,
strenuously pecking their breasts…
can this really be grooming?
Isn’t that blood they’re feeding on? ’Struth!
I know it’s cold out, but.
Ah, they fly away, with the others,
as living as ever.
Flip the pages. The rose-breasted grosbeak… sure enough
a V like a dagger in the chest.
Have you heard the one about the pelican?
Mother pelican performs own breast surgery, beak like a dagger,
feeds its young
with gobs of its own blood.
Have you heard the one about the pelican chick?
An insurance chick gets laid, one egg alongside the favoured egg
and when the favoured egg hatches and thrives
the ‘insurance chick’ gets pushed out of the nest.
That’s it for the chick.
For this it came.
So which is for real?
Both are. Different iconographies.
In the Other Book it’s the iconography of fittedness —
multiple wasted experiments of how to get along in this world.
A zero sum game,
it worked for pelicans.
Pelican so loved the world
that she gave her other begotten one, to the end.
Now all that believe in Pelican
shall not see ‘Pelican’ perish but have persistent life.
In the book that’s called The Book, it’s science lesson 101
before the burning bush : ‘Turn aside.’
See why the branches are not consumed.
‘Wisdom :
attend!’
Asidedness.
The grosbeak as burning bush
step one on the marathon of self-offering
that burns and burns and is not consumed.
The iconography of cathedral glass, bronze, stone,
Latin’s Pie Pelicane, the ancient christic image.
And we : in the image, we say. Pelicans unlimited.
‘We offer and present unto thee… ourselves, our souls and bodies,
to be
