A FALL OF KINGS
Crow! Crow! I can hear your voice across the valley,
keening and laughing, looking for your shadow
in the sunlight.
The heart may break into pieces
but the head will still go on nattering.
It can never stop, so used
to being fed by roots and wings
from its buried pit, from its damp, deep well.
It summons up and sees what there is and what is not.
.
A dying comet streaks beauty in the slowest of motions,
upright as a ballerina melted by the music –
Posed and poised, palest and vanishing,
though here, still here, in the dawn light.
.
A voice like last night’s river
hidden in the oak valley,
down by the alders
down by the willows
in their midnight silences.
.
A voice like the morning road
across the valley side,
the streams of bright hope
rolling with ridiculous purposes,
speeding on, diminishing, diminishing.
.
Beauty as it dissolves.
As it becomes something else.
Never moving, but dragged
into other orbits.
We move and stay still,
shine and are dissolved
by the shining.
.
This is what the deep head says;
(the streaming golden head, brocaded
and folded with glory, the red-gold hair
in the golden morning).
The heart with rivers,
the heart with sunlight,
the bones that drag themselves together
from the long dream, and come together
in semblances of something already understood.
The faint, faint sighing hiss of erosion.
.
Crow! Crow!
I hear you laughing across the valley.
The wheel never ends of the horizon,
and all its doors firmly shut for now,
so we can listen and laugh and return
to dreaming a world of bright never-ending.
.
She burns still in the sky.
Return, return!
and that she can never do.
Pale and white-skinned and broken-hearted,
burning, slowly revolving all the fragments of grieving.
Time emptying out, filling up, emptying out.
The head and the heart and the white, white bones.
.
A song as we die, Crow!
Just one more glorious lament.
It is what we were born for, what we can bear,
what will break us into four,
so we become our own horizon.
Smudged out by daylight.
Reborn as stars, the stories will say.
.
And you know them all, Crow!
All the songs, all the stories, Crow!
Laughing and singing
and keening and smiling
and calling from heart to heart,
from sun to shade to sun
across the dancing swallow-crowned,
cool-aired morning valley.
Buried in the sky, deep down in the sky,
in the well of sparkling, starry waters.
Everything is nothing,
and that is perfectly
as it should be.
—
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