Legend Recycled

The king is drawn like a sunstruck crow
to the fishergirl's creel:
his enchantment is complete,
he must possess her.
And beside the green river sabotaged by weeds,
he forces his will upon her.

The king's son, revolted,
swears never to marry.
A jongleur of herbs,
he turns his celibate hand
to the management of gardens;
dying, becomes a parakeet.

The king grows balder, less passionate.
He courts dowsers who paraphrase
webfoot forecasts for his sunburned crops.
He lives in a quiet country without hurricanes:
himself, enthroned between the kerosene streams
of dull speech and diligent policy.

The fishergirl hovers, half-translated,
between wharf and palace, and neither is home.
Every night she comes unstrung, climbs to her terrace
and vomits the grief and hate of her queenly state
in torrents of fish:
striped, silver, riddle-tailed, arrow-headed fishes

released like toxins in the dominions of air.

Speaking a Dead Language

I trespass on sentences that ash has muffled,
the lichen overgrown; then re-kindle tropes
that farmers dropped in their kitchen grates
with the husked corn and blue glass beads
when the northmen rode in on champing roans.

Hindsight is a poor cousin to revelation.
Listening to the hiss and splatter of rain,
the crackle of fire between the words,
voicing my breath in strange shapes of mouth

is like looking for you.

The north-rose flowers in every direction
on the tattered map I pull from a chest,
a hidden magnet
around which iron filings frame a crown.

I flatten the continents on a table
and read there of our love,
not lost but translated,
its cadences learned again
in other countries by other tongues.

Logbook

At night,
whose eyebright touch
seals the peak with an olive tree,
lays a table with the balance of stone?
Who folds the hills in a napkin of twilight,
catches a splash of bay
with a hook of shingled shore?

Who brings me these reeds,
missives knotted with threads of wax?

A yellow acrobat
whose fingers
tip the jug
till night
is everywhere and all over and I
am a line, the spasm of a line
grooved along a shell:

the logbook
of my ancestors.

Wolf

A wolf snarls in the sumac-stripped darkness.
Across the snow-driven prairie that is
a famine of trust, a man
steps from his cabin, cocks his rifle
in reply. His boots sink and the ice
swirls around him. The wolf
wades into his eyes.

Teach me to cleave the steel-jawed pain,
take my words, give me memories of smell:
charred pine, first-blooded fur, dying elk.
Time gets the hunter in the end,
freezes his bones among the stars
but you will never be flaunted,
a trapper's crippled exhibit:

a fanged hunger, you will survive.

Sacrifice

Poussin painted this sky. Its cannonfire blue
reminds us that the gods look down
at our wars and that their view,
unhindered by passion or pity,
makes the picture, not ours.

The gods bear witness to our still-born thrusts,
to action that never attains its heroic end
but hangs in the grudging balance
of opportunity: the mace about to fall,
the sword half-drawn, the thick-veined hand
hacked away from its wristed scabbard.

Subtle historians, the gods record our draining pulse.
The wind sucks the marrow from our arms
and a forest of needles pricks its seeds
along our neutered bones.

Was it this sky that mantled the Aztec priest
when, with obsidian knife, he bent to prise
his victim's heart from its faint calyx?
Watch it quiver, you voyeur gods,
it is your feast.

Breath inflamed, vital juices quickened,
you drink the martyr's blood that slops
from the dupe's ragged clavicle.
But will it appease your gaudy hungers,
this blood that quenches the deafened altar
and darkens to the colour of Poussin's sky?

Trailing the Horse-tamer

I.

I stumble into a widowed wood
where trees born of women
have suffered the knives of drought.

Flinty comets score points across a blacked-out sky,
their bird-of-paradise tails streaming
behind them.

From the steaming belly of the sacrificed ox
the augur pulls the looped entrails:
at their end dangles

the future of the tribe.

II.

Horse-tamer, I have followed you from the chalky cliffs
to these lakes gridlocked in ice.
I have crossed the pyramids of skulls you built,
eaten mulberries among the lean-hipped corpses
of fishermen driven south by the winter.

Now I flag. I feed my days
with the nectared resin that bears snatch
from claw-punctured maples,
warm myself in pungent furs.

Horse-tamer, ancestor, kindler of fire,
fix my bridle, tighten my saddle-girths,
sharpen the frost-bitten stumps of my language.