Singers sang
before all hollow histories of man,
before matriarchies span
before brusque human voices pierced these isles,
coppicing and wattling,
before a knapped flint flake lay
on the littered foreshore, cold, seal-grey,
or fire-hardened carbon emphasized
a wooden point.
After an evening and night of rain
apple buds are pushing from red sepals,
and the pear deployed
thin leaves uncurled,
still a little twisted
untidily around
each closed blossom cluster, waiting.
Sun threads cracks in cloud-plates
past its potent face.
And the blackbird sings over all,
from somewhere hidden,
(maybe in the junipers)
master ventriloquist,
throwing his voice into my pen,
sharp semantic scalpels,
slicing dark somatic doors.
He seems to have reams to say today,
though twitter tweets into his silences,
and pigeons puffed and pointedly
bawl their mantras over him,
his culture of complexity prevails.
It was the blackbird blinked his eye
when first Apollo and then
Orpheus conjured their songs
in the half-tamed wilderness -
Scaramouche whistles for his dog;
and I hear those great guitars
from outdoor Sixties' gigs.
He sings of war and peace,
of tank tracks churning,
and a sudden scream -
Or is it more my dream,
snatches booming in a propped-up head,
the spider-play of a hand
wrapping its netted sweets?
..
YOU ARE READING
Bare Shouldered
Poetry"The difference of high Sensations with and without knowledge appears to me this - in the latter case we are falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep and being blown up again without wings and with all [the] horror of a bare shouldered Creature...
