ST. GEORGE’S DAY ( April 23) (dream stream)
Emblazoned,
A green field.
Light rampant,
Golden-haired,
Erect.
Last night’s stars, last night’s meteors, showers of light as we plummet dark towards the spin of centre, the galactic hum.
Last night’s shooting stars
see them scattered sparkling
on the green grass of morning.
St. George’s Day bright with a sword edge in the wind. Little lambs sleeping warm in the sun. Guardian’s day, the land’s day. We who are, who are we, a part and portion, a flock hovering, gliding down to feed. Our field, bordered and named, bred of us, born and bearing us, dirt and soil grasped, the smell of it, the smell of bone and memory, the deepest smell. The redolent sound reverberates from in to out. Sound beyond, sound within. Nothing that does not vibrate and sing hymns to itself and its innocent exuberant expansion.
Awoken with sounds taking form,
star whispers filling echoing corners.
Placing sounds and syllables.
Taking time and running it
still to watch.
Lanced, vanquished, absorbed, armour to armour, name to name, sound to sound, the neigh of horse, jingle of rein, rasp of scaled iron claw on rock, hiss of expelled flame. The conflict of vowel and consonent. Pinned, wings upraised, the word is formed, dragon-mind gives up and yields to sword-tongue, shield palette. They are not two nor many, those actions, these seconds, these words. They are the stretched thin ever-now, the elongated serpentine, elementally configured, evolution of instance.
He rears up, he severs skin, subdues, subjugates, becomes monster. Not two but one. Bound together as icon, sound and form. Primal hunter hunted, eater eaten, seer seen. Send out from each eye a spear of mind, ineluctably, inevitably hooked, united, absorbed, absolved of difference, a flow of electrons. Eye to eye, saint and demon, exchange sky and earth, fire and tears. One, redundant without the other. Standing waves, crest and trough, a rippled ecstatic hum, white noise of endlessness, gong of falling away.
I shall sink into sound now,
sink into sound, name the names,
place the branched syllables,
string myself naked for nine days,
sacrifice, sacred act,
forget and recall the way the tongue
touches tooth exploding instruction,
an exhalation of daylight,
sparks, stars, a spittle of,
a shaft of,
a spear of.
Purring back and becoming the wriggle of the living heart, forged and cast, caparisoned in echoes. Sound shelled within sound. An eggshell heaven tumbling with birdsong. It savours the roundness of the day. Exhales cloud, tumbling, scudding. A roar that might be sea, might be forest, might be time itself, enfolding shield, vanquished and glorious, golden and slain in the morning.
The giant from whom the world is formed. The jester has slain the king. He takes a golden bow, winks, farts and dissappears. High minded flatulence of patriotism, set to against demons and heretics, the giants of the wilderness. The old names abide, whispered.
A little right
and a wealth of wrong.
To image is to fix.
To fix is to miss the point.
The heart of itself is severed and expires.
A parable of all things, as well as a description, as well as a poem, as well as a mimicked riddle. High on his horse, self-appointed and righteous, the knight rides out to do good. He will go native before nightfall. Seduced by the rainbow sinews of maidens. Then we shall see pierced flanks in the spring, hilltops yearning for a splice of passionate light. We shall see a might entering in and an entering out, a trouncing, a gasping pant of travail. It shall scatter the roosts, it shall raise the heads of deer in the trees. A mighty union there shall be. No battle but a dance, a molecular dance, strings knotted, syllables severed from dictated meaning, wrapped only into its own involution.
Saint and dragon lover,
each echoing sighs,
the fire of tangled nerve
shooting out to the horizon’s edge.
A green shield lies the field.
A sparrowhawk hesitates,
turns and dives.
Silence inside silence.
Sound itself,
a swallow in new skies,
expanding.
****
(the images are from a series of sketches I have been making to turn into silver pendants. Dragon energies are a fascinatingly robust archetype of earth/solar/cosmic sentience and as such are a fertlie ground for internal explorations in matters of consciousness and deep ecology)
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