Analytics Consent

We use analytics to understand better how people are using this site.

Permit Google Analytics?

Yes No
Skip to main content
Read page text
page 16
to the breeze. We sing our hymns to the candle-flame and sink, all of us, refugees, into moth-silent night. * The mind, mornings, waits scraggy as the heron’s nest high in the ruffled treetops; the boy in me wants to be an old-timer riding a palomino across high sierras, inhaling orange dust with vultures circling on the wheels of air above, wants to be the suave and grease-haired still-young and disillusioned toreador sipping chilled Marqués de Cáceres rosé wine on a Toledo terrace. * You I think of as a bird, of a white so pure you skim to invisibility; you are the high-pitched buzz of the hover-fly, bog cotton in sunlight and a gusting wind, a wavering of white butterflies struggling towards flight; you are the Portuguese man o’ war, the sea raft wafting on the surface of the ocean, you are primordial waters, as if the words might come ex nihilo, a wind blowing across the deep, making a covenant with being. * 14
page 17
Something of Yeshua/Jesus has left its caul in my flesh, my skull is riven with a blood-feud darkness like the painfilled leftover reek in an ancient beehive cell. Child years were a haze of fragrances: frankincense, myrrh, the perfumes of papa God’s bazaars; the thurible, with its chains, its censer, its incense boat was a charmed Aladdin’s lamp. I must be contented now with homeliness from those deckled years – with peace before high windows, wet sunlight coming through in shards like hollyhock and soft-pink rose, Chagall-blue lupin; I find acceptance these days amongst benevolent spectres who have stepped beside me; and am contented with the beloved lately dead who drift away from my mourning into the saffron-bright, woodbine-scented morning of their all-knowing. * Sometimes the words caught steady brightness though more often they languished in an under-the-stairs dust-dark. Braced for the extraordinary I held belief in sunlight and sacrament, in white sheets strung along blue skipping-rope, hoisted high in sea-shore winds; I prayed for an outpouring, coram Deo, the keen presence 15

Page Text

View plaintext

to the breeze. We sing our hymns to the candle-flame and sink, all of us, refugees, into moth-silent night. * The mind, mornings, waits scraggy as the heron’s nest high in the ruffled treetops; the boy in me wants to be an old-timer riding a palomino across high sierras, inhaling orange dust with vultures circling on the wheels of air above, wants to be the suave and grease-haired still-young and disillusioned toreador sipping chilled Marqués de Cáceres rosé wine on a Toledo terrace. * You I think of as a bird, of a white so pure you skim to invisibility; you are the high-pitched buzz of the hover-fly, bog cotton in sunlight and a gusting wind, a wavering of white butterflies struggling towards flight; you are the Portuguese man o’ war, the sea raft wafting on the surface of the ocean, you are primordial waters, as if the words might come ex nihilo, a wind blowing across the deep, making a covenant with being. *

14

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content