The raven
The repair came
with cholera and dysentery and manuals of labour
crowbars and the psalms of wild angels
gravediggers digging its eye,
machines gave birth to machines
the soul became a lantern
a wiggish parliament
the singing of a fly,
the wisdom books buried by the wisdom
by the couriers of Byzantia
and the slave houses of Rome
the shrapnel of blind hallelujahs and gold cherubim
bloodletting a luminous form,
a frostbitten hand cleaving
the ceremony of illusion.
The scales were measured
the moths flew into Lenin square
at Nicaea a raving glance
stole the miracle of love from the miracle
and erected the garrison
the blue wedding of red scarves,
an unspeakable crying in the belly of the bete noire
illuminating the ragmaker
the long night of the name-giver
and on a gurney the Lordsong of silence
lifting her veils.
The sea became a river
the fruit died on the trees of the Republic
windless branches winding its clocks,
brave and braver lies
the stump speech of Gethsemane
the blind giving alms
a bridge hung on a sailor's moon
the twines of hunger twisting hail marys
one candle burning
the night watch of the blessed in rags.
Blind and blinder night
ruled its weather
the last hill surrendered
newsreels of the self,
the frock of the cantus firmi,
another night of the sick moaning
unbearable ballad mongers
traitors, capitulators,
swimming in the sewers, in the ear canals,
Punishing the dream, spanning the heart
a black spire of swans,
time before time
when the infinite swirled,
infinity with its fleece burning
hundreds of zeros turning and turning
the infinite into the almighty
the dung of the hereafter,
in the cackle of a lion justice was born.
Into the ruined night of Maladore and Caliban
the same word eloped
at Guernica and Masada,
shoemakers binding the footprints
of a blind King,
the name in shackles
lovers starved by the name
in the pawnshops of myth and the sickbed of beauty
the Almighty sheathed in its own blood.
And I was dying all along
with my little prayer
the endless body who spun the lanterns
night after night like a dredle
sick and sicker
praising the learning
Ovid coughing the Black Sea
in Africaville with the city fathers
the honeybucket of empire
the Kapellmeister,
the mistral shovelling skin
into the Fuehrer's opera.
And now the long wall and sea of reeds parted
the small door of Humility,
Lilith with her ragbolt of light
the Shulamite with her sailor's song
customers of the night
who for the sake of the infant Christ and the philosopher Kant
walk the streets for the keys of our love.
One friend dying with Orwellian self-loathing
and another with throat song in his eye,
as an undecipherable madness blesses the word
salutes the statues of sleeping sheaves
that fill the heart's deaf canon,
by a great raven's wings
where Barabbas stood before Rome
and Noah awakened from the wine
the flood of me drowning
long before anyone remembers
when the poems were still naked
and we were unclothed.