Imagine that the fast life of a bird
sang in the branches of the cold,
cast-off antlers of a stag
and lit the points of bone
figuratively with fire.
Worn, those antlers were
an outer counterweight,
extravagant in air and poised
against a branching need
drumming in the red inside
the arteries or antlers of the heart.
That was the balance that allowed
the stag’s head’s limber rise,
and might have been the gift
the temporary, reed-boned bird
sang air about: abundance,
rank beyond the need. The horns
appear before the eye to be
more permanent than songs
that branch out lightly on the air
or root into the chest
as singing’s negative, the breath,
that touches at the branching veins
at depth:
but when the leaping rut
slept growing in the hollow of the hind,
the candelabra that the head
dazzled the wedding with
guttered to rubbish and was lost.
That perch for calls and bird-
song was a call itself,
and fell to grace the wilds
correctly, since an itch,
under the rootholds of the horns,
whitens with mushroom want
in cellars of the antlers’ nerve
just off the brain,
and wants to make its many points again.
Once cast, they are the dead and fall
duly as a sound falls in the cool
of smoking days, when air sags
with the damp and song
swirls in the hollows: this
is so the works can start again,
untrammeled by the done, downed
wonders, and be upstart news
to publicize the crocus of next spring.
The stag had something on his mind
beside his wants, and it
is more than curious, the way
the horns are worn at ease
by cranial fulcrum, since the likes of them,
the lighter songs or battle-cries of birds,
hum in the chambers of the nose
just off the brain,
so that the chambered mute, the brain,
silent in wants and plans,
vibrates in closest sympathy
with what is not its own
and plays as best it can.
Those were the works,
the prides and hat-trees of the head
that climbed out of the brain
to show its matter: earth, and how a beast
who wears a potted plant, all thorns,
is mostly desert, with a glory
unsustained. O it
is useless in a fight
won by the head and heels,
not nicety, not war-cries worn
in silence to be seen. The hinds,
cropping the perimeter of war,
sooner accept the runnel one
who has not fronded his desire
with public works. Call and be gone,
bird: the one who wears the horns
can bear the singer too, mindlessly singing all
the bird-brained airs of spring,
but has to cast the tuning forks
that let the eye see song,
and winter with this loss.
The bone as singing-post
is capital enough in arms
to hold the nation of your sound
in singing’s fief: the brain’s
savage receptionist, the ear,
beating a drum outside its closest door,
joins with the civil eye’s
electrical distance from the brain
in witnessing the poles of prongs and sounds
arcing across their earthworks of desire:
the sounds and tines
must be some excess of the flesh
that wants beyond efficiency
in time, but cannot find
much permanence outside it: getting or not aside,
it must branch out in works
that cap itself, for some
imaginary reason out of mind.
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