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 a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice…’
(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