(Cranmer’s 16th century take on Paul of the Book).
You mean really? You mean do?
As a race, we have a pretty clear notion of where
one skin stops and another begins. We’re good at boundaries.
We could push the chick from the nest — we’re
the favoured chick.
My pain is not yours, and vice versa.
At least we live as if that’s what we thought.
But the pelican of Christology and legend, that’s
a horse of another feather.
Someone called it
‘absolute donation’.
What if
drawing your own blood to feed others
blood donorship in clinical quiverfuls of mystic syringes
what if sheer cliff-edge generosity
absolute donation
were the bull’s-eye of every post-communion prayer? For real?
I think we might lose our sense of skin, of whose pain is whose,
of where
the edge of the nest is.
That would be novel.
We might feel the pain of the Congo.
Or would that be asking
more than we’re up for?
Riverbreath
Before there’s light, there’s a wall of black halfway up the sky
glooming as if a distant storm-cloud
had rolled in
or been rolled out
then lodged
on top of the far shore.
Or had it made it that far? Or both far and away beyond?
Who was to know.
There was no light to see by
just black on black.
Would something crash soon, something break or burst —
down or forth or out?
Who knew.
Sleep rolled around.
Closer to dawn, a windowful of blank, etched on by naked trees :
dance still as still life, nature morte. The blank : full
so full the foghorns must sound,
the coast guard and freighter invisible in the breath of the river.
The riverbreath had begun to precipitate out at first on the
topmost branches
the fingers in this still dance
fitting the tips before lightfall with gloves as light as breath
divinable if doubtable;
but now
while the sun’s own foghorn ooooo’d its retinal signal of potential
to our intimations of sunrise and
the Imminence
began to burnish the backside of the grey,
the mist
emboldened
feathered the fingers further with fur, rime no longer doubtable
no less than
visible and risible now
on the poised dancers, whose dance is… in this
retina skittering over their limbs.
The sleep of night rolls over,
likes the feel,
rolls again
rolls the riverbreath round like cud in its mouth
intestinefuls of cud that stretch out the length of the riverrun seaward
rolling, rolling
curling like unwound cud downstream
chew-chew! le train-train of rivering dawn mist
fed by imminent sun
you think I’m joking? fanciful? I say it like I see it.
Now immanent sun’s sunning up the -rise
risible and visible
and the riverbreath coating the mirror, haa-haaaing on the
mirror of us, shoreline, and us, riverains
all the breath’s neighbours and all the breath’s men
on whom the precipitate of river falls like… a baptism
a condensation of dawn. The Sun Effect :
blessed, graced, manna’d, this white fallout, this alter-precipitate
of light with voice like a foghorn,
herald of the down train.
Tin coin of sun
having mustered the wattage to burn through the grey
is gold sovereign now at break of day
and about its business of doubling and redoubling the helix of
mist twisting downstream
towards town and gown, master of ceremonies of this
mystic parade
of evaporating banners
lord of the ephemeral
His Eminence
Lord
